The MAGA Republican Party is horrifically bad. Weimer Republic Nazi party bad. Cambodian Communist party bad. Iranian government of 1979 bad. George Wallace bad. Less sane than the John Birch society. More criminal and less moral than Al Capone. Proven to be absolutely incapable of governing competently.
While the Democratic Party in the United States is a big tent party, MAGA has left a Democratic Party which was already straining to find common ground for its immensely ideologically diverse coalition ripping at the seams, which has produced a lot of unproductive infighting.
This is not good for America. A country with only one viable political party capable of governing is not a healthy democracy.
In the British Commonwealth, there is a concept called a "loyal opposition". A loyal opposite disagrees on lots of important policy issues with the party or coalition that it opposes, but in not an existential threat to the government it is seeking office in, and shares fundamental process and normative values with the party it opposes that are ultimately more important that its policy disagreements with the other party or coalition that it opposes.
Our current election laws, as a practical matter, lock the U.S. into a system with two dominant political parties in any one political jurisdiction at one time. But that doesn't mean that it isn't possible to have a different pair of political parties in one state from another state, and it doesn't mean that it isn't possible for one of those two dominant political parties to be replaced with a different dominant political party.
This has happened several times in U.S. history, most recently when the Republican Party replaced the Whigs, which collapsed around 1860. It has happened in other countries, like Canada, with similar electoral rules, too.
The U.S. is engaged in an experiment along those lines this year in the Nebraska Senate race, in a deep red state that no Democratic Party candidate had any chance of winning, but which is a state that is also not happy with the way MAGA Republicans are running our country. The Democratic Party declined to field a U.S. Senate candidate in that race to clear the way for a center-right independent candidate, Dan Osborn, to run against a GOP nominee who would toe the MAGA line.
If he is elected in November, he surely won't be a reliable party line vote for the Democratic Party, but he will also be willing to stand up to the insanity of Trump 2.0 when it goes beyond favoring partisan policy preferences to undermining the previously shared foundations of our political system. He won't embrace blatant corruption. He won't support gross incompetence. He won't be a friend of Putin. He won't agree that pedophiles and fraudsters should be protected. He won't try to undermine the rule of law. He won't lie about things that are obvious lies to everyone who hears them. He will understand that there were no air bases in the Revolutionary War. He will understand that the U.S. did not have diplomatic relations with the classical Roman Empire. He will not try to impose tariffs on islands inhabited entirely by penguins. He won't fall asleep in the middle of important meetings. He won't support the violent overthrow of free and fair U.S. election results. He won't completely disregard science. He will provide people with conservative political views who aren't evil or stupid, and don't want the United States to become a failed dictatorship an alternative that they can stomach.
Will he win?
Who knows? The polls are all over the place in this race (according to the New York Times):
But the vast majority of candidates running for statewide office without being either major party's nominee has no chance of winning at all and would face a complete blow out. But he's been within the statistical margin of error of the Republican or winning in four of the seven general election polls conducted in the race. The only poll conducted since May (about three weeks ago) put him in a tie with the Republican, when the Republican was favored by 16 percentage points in one poll at the end of May.
Maybe other deep red states can follow suit. Maybe if enough people like him start winning elections, they can band together and form a new political party that is conservative without sharing the worse vices of MAGA Republicans.
Nebraska might be a special case. Its unicameral state legislature is nominally non-partisan, and that might influence the political attitudes that voters have towards independent candidates.
But it is also possible that a lot of red state voters, despite being poisoned by anti-Democratic party rhetoric so deeply that they can't bring themselves to support a Democrat, and holding only moderate views, would support a center-right party not unlike the one that the GOP used to be, over the far-right party that the GOP has become.
Indeed, the mere existence of a credible threat to their re-election from the center instead of the left could be enough to give the GOP in red states like Nebraska to moderate its positions in a way that they didn't need to when it was certain that a Democrat couldn't win in their state, no matter how despicable the candidate running for the GOP.
And, this isn't just about getting the GOP itself to be more moderate (or better yet, replacing the MAGA GOP with a center-right party that is capable of governing sensibly and supports some shared fundamental values that used to be shared across the political spectrum).
It is also about making the Democratic party less of a herd of cats in places where it does have a chance of electing people to public office.
There are lots of pretty conservative people who hold their noses and vote Democratic, and try to influence the Democratic party in their direction, because the MAGA GOP is an existential threat to them personally, or because the MAGA GOP is not a recipe for securing a tolerably functional government.
There are cattle ranchers and food company executives out there who recognize that a healthy food inspection system is good for business, and that high tariffs, sky high diesel and fertilizer prices, and buying tainted meat from Argentina in deals that even the Secretary of Agriculture knows nothing about, are not good for business. So, MAGA may not be right for them. But that doesn't mean that the agree with much of the Democratic Party platform, and trying to make everyone happy just isn't possible.
There are wealthy doctors out there who are economically conservative and socially moderate rather than liberal, who still have no patience for a MAGA regime that is anti-vax, that votes to shut down rural hospitals, that orders the CDC to fake data on measles deaths, and encourages people to eat beef tallow to be more healthy.
There are cold war veterans out there who don't like having a President who cozies up to Russia and North Korea and China. They aren't impressed with a President who runs such a loose ship that destroyers go a week without power in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, that sailors on aircraft carriers don't have adequate food or working toilets, that commissaries on military bases have spoiled food because their freezers don't work, that military family members and people who risked their lives to be translators for U.S. troops are being deported for no fault of their own to places where they face serious risks of harm, that service members are being ordered to commit war crimes, and that sycophants are promoted while seasoned generals and admirals are purged. Those things don't make you proud of your country.
There are probably plenty of god and country conservatives who are absolute disgusted with the way that Trump has held cage fights on the White House lawn, demolished half the White House, put his scowling image on everything like some third-world dictator, told obvious lies to their face, disrespected veterans, shown not a scintilla of understanding of the Bible, blasphemously portrayed himself as Jesus, mocked disabled people, engaged in rampant infidelity with multiple wives and mistresses, corruptly enriched himself and his family, engaged in insider trading, been convicted of crimes, raped children, paved over the White House rose garden, shown utter ignorance of basic facts in his public speeches, encouraged and promoted immoral aides, and been embarrassed by him falling asleep at important meetings and shitting his pants at public functions, even if they agree with him of many economic and social issues.
There are states like New Mexico which by all race neutral economic and social indicators looks like a red state, where a lot of people are very conservative in their political views, but where they won't support Republicans for office, because MAGA Republicans show open contempt and hate for Hispanics and Native Americans who make up a huge share of the state's voters, President Trump demonizes them, and MAGA thinks that Native Americans and partially Native American mestizos should be deported despite having ancestors who have lived there since long before their land was part of the United States.
There are plenty of Muslim voters who are as socially conservative as the average Evangelical Christian and who are economically moderate at most, who can't in good conscience vote for the GOP because Republicans consider them terrorists and want to actively persecute them, so their stuck in the big tent Democratic Party instead. Many Black Evangelical Christian voters are in a similar boat.
The far right extremism and just plain mendacity and incompetence of MAGA Republicans is probably going to get a lot of Democratic candidates who wouldn't have a chance running against a center-right GOP elected to Congress in two months, in what is likely to be a blue wave election (knock on wood). But a country with only one functional major political party isn't a healthy democracy.
If someone launched a center-right party in the U.S. called, for example, the "Conservative party", it could and should have a good shot at replacing the MAGA Republican party in the U.S. And, that may be the only solution, because the MAGA Republican party may at this point, after more than a decade under Donald Trump's thumb as a cult of personality for him, be beyond saving as an institution.
I'd rather live in a country with two viable reasonably functional political parties than one that's a lost cause and the other that's become a tent where it is very hard for everyone to fit comfortably. But until MAGA is replaced, or the election system is reformed to be a proportional representation system, this is the situation we have to live with and try to make work as best we can.
