I’ve railed on for years concerning why the Republicans have become less and less reasonable and competent. If the sociology of the Republican Party interests you, Professor Richardson presents a somewhat different view of her own. Key quote:
In those [gerrymandered] districts, the Republican candidates were virtually guaranteed election, so they focused not on attracting voters with popular policies but on amplifying increasingly extreme talking points to excite the party’s base. That drove the party farther and farther to the right. By 2012, political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein warned that the Republican Party had “become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
Arrogance, in a word.
