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- Some of us have been pushing back against fanatical centrism for many years, arguing that today’s Republican Party is a radical force increasingly opposed to democracy. Way back in 2003 I wrote that modern conservatism is “a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system.” In 2012 Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein declared that the central problem of U.S. politics was a G.O.P. that was not just extreme but “dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
For a long time, however, making that case — pointing out that Republicans were sounding ever more authoritarian and violating more and more democratic norms — got you dismissed as shrill if not deranged. Even Trump’s rise, and the obvious parallels between Trumpism and the authoritarian movements that have gutted democracy in places like Hungary and Poland, barely dented centrist complacency. Remember, just a few months ago most of the news media treated Attorney General William Barr’s highly misleading summary of the Mueller report as credible.
But my sense, although it’s impossible to quantify, is that the events of the past several weeks have finally broken through the wall of centrist denial.