The Republican party now hosts a movement denying Democrats any legitimate claim to power.

Evidence

A related source of misunderstanding is the comforting yet unfounded presumption that America’s two-party system has survived intact the rise of the religious right as a political force. The conventional wisdom holds that the differences between America’s two parties, now as before, amount to differences over questions of domestic and foreign policy, and that politics is just the art of give-and-take between the two collections of interests and perspectives they represent. Yet the fundamental difference today is that one party is now beholden to a movement that does not appear to have much respect for representative democracy. Forty years ago, when both sides of certain cultural issues could be found in either party, it made sense to speak of the religious right as a social movement that cut across the partisan divide. Today it makes more sense to regard the Republican party as a host vehicle for a radical movement that denies that the other party has any legitimate claim to political power. — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers, 39

Categorization

• SEED: Angles: chart how the religious right transformed from a cross-partisan social movement (ca. 1980) into a party-hostile orthodoxy — a media-history piece tracing that forty-year pivot.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader library on democratic erosion and how parties become vehicles for anti-pluralist movements, echoing Base Nation themes about consent breakdown. — connects to: Conspiracist delegitimation rejects the normal cycle of alternating party power — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 208

Broader Connections

• Conspiracist delegitimation rejects the normal cycle of alternating party power #expands (0.85) — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 208