GOP as Catiline Conspiracy

Great Vox piece on how the modern GOP has effectively evolved into an anti-democratic faction:

The Global Party Survey is a 2019 poll of nearly 2,000 experts on political parties from around the world. The survey asked respondents to rate political parties on two axes: the extent to which they are committed to basic democratic principles and their commitment to protecting rights for ethnic minorities.

This chart shows the results of the survey for all political parties in the OECD, a group of wealthy democratic states, with the two major American parties highlighted in red. The GOP is an extreme outlier compared to mainstream conservative parties in other wealthy democracies, like Canada’s CPC or Germany’s CDU. Its closest peers are almost uniformly radical right and anti-democratic parties. This includes Turkey’s AKP (a regime that is one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists), and Poland’s PiS (which has threatened dissenting judges with criminal punishment).

The verdict of these experts is clear: The Republican Party is one of the most anti-democratic political parties in the developed world.

The contours of democracy are always subject to some debate within republican democracies, and it’s not unusual for anti-democratic parties to participate in electoral democracy. But we have to grant that this is what we have with the modern GOP.