Values drag Honestly, the headline summarizes well a column that tells us little we don’t already know, but let’s run with that: The Republican Party Has Devolved Into a Racket. But you knew that. Professors Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman make their case that “the G.O.P. has lost a collective commitment to solving the nation’s problems and become purposeless.” But you knew that too. Trump, his Big Lie co-defendants, and Mitt Romney’s assessment of his Senate Republican colleagues marks a party “aimless … beyond the struggle for power and the demonization of its enemies.” The pair include a walk down memory lane from the 1970s until the party was consumed with conspiracism and its “long provenance on the American right, reaching back to McCarthyism and the John Birch Society.” “For Republicans, the only election results they respect are the ones that they win… I guess “heads I win, tails you lose” is the GOP approach to electoral democracy in America in 2023. My @MSNBC opening monologue tonight on GOP election denialism:pic.twitter.com/tFPlSCQDht — Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) September 18, 2023 The development of political parties was a mixed blessing, the pair admit. They help channel “individual ambition into collective public purposes.” Their structures provided another set of guardrails that on the right have broken down: Parties organize political conflict — what the political theorists Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum term “the discipline of regulated rivalry” — but they also offer projects with visions, however blinkered and partial, for how societies should handle…