The GOP crisis is America's crisis

As train wrecks stop to gawk at the House GOP caucus, Josh Marshall has a sobering reminder:

"Civic democracy operates through an organized competition between different stakeholders in society. It requires a consensus to litigate disagreements through a prescribed set of rules. The breakdown of those rules creates an opening for strongmen who traffic in raw power and sell their ability to impose order. It is both the cause and result of the species of civic and moral degeneracy we see as the mother’s milk of Trumpism.

"Chaos and strongmanism aren’t opposites but two sides of the same coin. One needs and breeds the other. As big a comedy as the House GOP Speaker debacle is, it illustrates the same basic challenges and choices we face as a society and perhaps more broadly abroad: distributed power, agreed upon rules on the one hand or chaos and domination on the other. That’s the civic democracy and authoritarianism question and it’s playing out before us in the House GOP caucus dark comedy."

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