Political parties do not lose their souls or their identities all at once. Usually, it is a gradual process of compromises that make sense in the moment, but which have a cumulative effect — like a frog being gradually boiled.

No one should celebrate the boiling of the frog. This is not a problem of one political party; the concessions being made by the party in power also makes our politics as a whole dumber, crueler, more isolated from reality and more extreme. In a post-truth, post-ethical world, what do have left to discuss or debate? Democracy requires certain shared understandings of truth and at least a minimal level of respect for moral standards and norms. But we are discovering that none of that can be taken for granted, and at least one political party is no longer interested or capable of defending those values.

http://time.com/5351087/republicans-donald-trump-values/

But the price of the GOP’s bargain with Trump, however, has continued to rise. Republicans in Congress now not only have to swallow Trump’s erratic narcissism, but also his assaults on the very core principles that supposedly define their politics: fiscal conservatism, free trade, the global world order, our allies, truth and the rule of law.

http://time.com/5351087/republicans-donald-trump-values/

Hence, what’s happened in America is that 70% of people who still believe in a public interest, in public goods, in public institutions, are held hostage, by a deeply imbalanced and obsolete electoral system, which weights land over population, to 30% of “Republicans” who’ve ended up believing in the very opposite of true republicanism — in the absence and destruction of a public interest, only in pure self-interest. That is why America’s Congress is now paralyzed — precisely because the “Republicans” in it believe in the opposite of true republicanism, too. Not in a public interest, but that there isn’t, and shouldn’t be, such a thing at all, and if there is, it must be knocked over, stifled, suffocated, strangled. So how then can there be a “public affair” of democratically governing a public interest — which is all a republic is?

If you are told that capitalism is the sole ordering force a society needs, then there’s no need for a public interest. Capitalism only wants our self-interest — and it tells us that any expression of a joint or shared interest is “inefficient”, “unproductive”, friction in the gears of the profit-making machine. All the kinds of public interest, institutions, goods — whether they’re unions, cooperatives, laws, regulations, norms, shared values, public healthcare and education and finance systems — are things that get in the way of churning out more profit.