From Gallup:
Max Boot is succinct concerning current consequences:
Roughly a quarter of Republicans endorse QAnon’s lunatic beliefs, a third say that coronavirus vaccines are definitely or probably being used by the government to implant microchips, and a majority back the “big lie” that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Many on the right will believe anything, no matter how loony and illogical, that comports with their political proclivities.
The Republican rejection of science makes it extremely difficult, verging on impossible, to deal with two of the biggest crises we currently face: global warming and the coronavirus pandemic.
Right. This is a measure of how much the Republican Party has come under the influence of the fantasy-prone: not religion per se, but those who think they’re literally talking to God, or, worse, that their pastor, priest, or generic cleric is talking to God – because that lends themselves prestige in their own eyes. When one cannot even prove that the Divine exists, the next step, talking to the Divine, marks you as fantasy-prone.
But there’s something worth remembering: the Republicans of 1975 are literally not the Republicans of 2021. As simple demography, the 1975 Republicans have passed away from age or accident, or moved their asses out of the party. They’ve been replaced by those of the far right. This is what happens when a party moves right-ward at an accelerating pace, as has the Republicans since the end of the Cold War.
And that implies that repairing the Republicans may have very limited success.
