Republicans -- not Democrats -- are the party controlled by extremists

Opinion by Max Boot

Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute has gotten a lot of attention — most of it critical and even satirical — for her Post op-ed about why she might be “forced” to vote for President Trump.

In brief, her case is that the Democratic Party, whose presidential nominee has a record of centrism and compromise going back nearly 50 years, is controlled by the “extreme left.” But the Republican Party, whose nominee is Donald Trump, is not controlled by the extreme right. She concedes that there are “horrible nasties” on the right. She even acknowledges: “These execrable gun-toting racists have received too much tacit encouragement from Trump.” “But,” she blithely asserts, “they do not represent the mainstream of the Republican Party or guide the choices of the vast mass of Republican members of Congress.”

Wait. What? Pletka admits that the president encourages “gun-toting racists,” but somehow his views “do not represent the mainstream” of the party that he leads? How can the views of a candidate supported by 92 percent of Republicans not represent the party? Even if that were true, it would be an argument for voting for Republican congressional candidates rather than for Trump. But it’s not true: Several in-depth studies have shown that the primary reason Trump won in 2016 was because of his appeals to racial, rather than economic, anxiety.

Not all Trump supporters are racists, to be sure, but even those who are not appear to be indifferent to the president’s blatant racism. Either way, the entire Republican Party has become complicit in a presidency that depends on crude appeals to the fears of White voters. Trump warns that if he loses “America’s suburbs will be OVERRUN with Low Income Projects,” champions Confederate monuments, calls Black Lives Matter a “symbol of hate,” denies the existence of “White privilege,” and tells congresswomen of color to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/17/republicans-not-democrats-are-party-controlled-by-extremists/