The Impostors

The Emmy-award winning producer of MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show exposes the Republican Party as a gang of impostors who have abandoned their duty to govern, gravely endangering American democracy.

American voters innocently assume the two major political parties are equally mature and responsible governing entities. In the past decade, however, the Republican Party has undergone an astonishing metamorphosis, one so baffling and total that few have fully reckoned with the reality and its consequences.

The Republicans, simply put, have quit governing. As MSNBC's Steve Benen brilliantly charts in his groundbreaking book, the GOP has become a "post-policy party." Their purpose is power. All else is performance. Astonishingly, they are winning--at the cost of eroding American democracy.

Once the "party of ideas," the Republican Party has walked away from the hard but necessary work of policymaking. It is disdainful of expertise and hostile toward evidence and arithmetic. It is tethered to few, if any, meaningful policy preferences. It does not know, and does not care, about how competing proposals should be crafted, scrutinized, or implemented. This policy nihilism dominated the party's posture throughout Barack Obama's presidency, which in turn opened the door to Donald Trump--who would cement the GOP's post-policy status in ways that were difficult to even imagine a few years earlier.

The implications of this approach to modern governance are all-encompassing. Voters routinely elect Republicans to powerful offices, expecting GOP policymakers to have the technocratic wherewithal to identify problems, weigh alternative solutions, forge coalitions, accept compromises, and apply some level of governmental competence, if not expertise. The party has consistently proven those hopes misguided.

The result is an untenable political model that's undermining the American policymaking process and failing to serve the public's interests. The vital challenge facing the civil polity is coming to terms with the party's collapse as a governing entity and considering what the party can do find its policymaking footing anew.