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      What Voters Want That Trump Seems to Have

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      So about that poll. You know the one: the Times/Siena poll showing Donald Trump with an edge over President Biden in five out of six swing states, and suggesting a softening of support for Mr. Biden among Black, Latino and young voters.The results have been met in Democratic and other anti-MAGA circles with horror, disbelief and panic. How could they not be? Whatever disappointment voters have with Mr. Biden, the idea that any of his 2020 backers would give his predecessor another shot at destroying democracy feels like pure lunacy.It is best to take horse-race polling this far out from Election Day with a boatload of salt. There are too many moving pieces. Too much that could happen. Too much of the public is not paying attention.But some of the data points to the unusual dynamics at play with a defeated president challenging the guy that America dumped him for. It isn’t just that Mr. Biden has weakness among less engaged voters, or that some respondents weren’t embracing Mr. Trump so much as rejecting Mr. Biden. What struck me is that despite his own raging unpopularity, Mr. Trump is positioned to serve as the repository for protest votes, nostalgia votes and change votes, a weird but potentially potent mash-up of support that could make up for a multitude of weaknesses. He could wind up beating Mr. Biden almost by default.A re-election campaign is fundamentally a referendum on the incumbent. And for all his accomplishments, Mr. Biden is presiding over a rough time. Inflation is still taking its bite out of people’s paychecks. The nation is still in a twitchy, sour mood post-pandemic. People are worried about crime and homelessness and the surge of migrants at the southern border. They are still dealing with the toll Covid took on their kids. And the broader mental health crisis. And the opioid scourge. And the two wars in which America is playing a supporting role. Of course a big chunk of the electorate sees the country as headed in the wrong direction.When Americans are feeling pessimistic, the president gets blamed. The degree to which Mr. Biden’s policies have helped or hurt does not much matter, especially on the economy. He owns it. And here’s the thing: You can’t argue with voters’ feelings. Even if you win the debate on points, you’re not going to convince people that they or the nation is actually doing swell. Trying, in fact, often just makes you look like a condescending, out-of-touch jerk.In such gloomy times, many voters start itching for change, for someone to come in and shake things up. This commonly means giving the out party a chance. Think Barack Obama in 2008, after eight enervating years of George W. and Dick Cheney.This time, instead of a fresh face, the Republican Party looks poised to offer a familiar one. This has its downsides. Mr. Trump’s defects are excruciatingly well known — and ever more so as the multiple cases against him wend their way through the courts. But no one denies that he likes to shake things up. And just as Mr. Biden sold himself in 2020 as a break from the chaos of Trumpism, Mr. Trump can now position himself as the change candidate. To borrow a cliché from Mr. Biden, Americans won’t be comparing Mr. Trump to the Almighty but to the alternative. And for many voters, the alternative in 2024 is a Biden status quo they consider unpalatable.It does not help Mr. Biden that he comes across as doddering and frail. This opens him up to one of Republicans’ favorite charges against Democrats: weakness. And political smears resonate more when they fit within an existing framework.At an even more basic level, Mr. Trump doesn’t have to promise positive change so much as the chance to stiff-arm the current leadership. Plenty of protest voters may not be looking to punish Mr. Biden for a particular action, or inaction, so much as for their inchoate disenchantment with the way things are. The economy should be better. Life should be better. The people in charge should be doing better.Some protest voters will turn out to support anyone running against the object of their distaste. This is what plenty of people did with Mr. Trump in 2016 to express their lack of love for Hillary Clinton. Others, especially inconstant voters, may simply decide to sit out the race. If this happens disproportionately among groups who went for Mr. Biden in 2020, such as young and nonwhite voters, it works to Mr. Trump’s benefit. This is the low-turnout specter keeping Democrats up at night.Then there is the nostalgia factor. Political nostalgia is a real and powerful thing. People are wired to romanticize the way things used to be and, by extension, the leaders at the time. Usually, voters dissatisfied with a president do not have the opening for such a direct do over. Rarely does a president who loses re-election attempt a comeback, and only one, Grover Cleveland, has ever done so successfully. But this election, rather than exchanging the incumbent for an unknown quantity, voters can choose to go back to a devil they know, who hails from a pre-Covid age of golden elevators and cheap mortgages.Now factor in thermostatic voting, the fancy name for a kind of generic buyers’ remorse you see as voters frequently veer toward the opposite party from the one they backed in the previous election. Virginia, for instance, picks its governor the year after a presidential election, and its voters typically go with the candidate whose party did not win the White House. You also see this nationally in midterm elections, in which voters often punish the president’s team.Mr. Trump has the added advantage of the economy having been humming before the pandemic upended his last year in office. Inflation was practically nonexistent. Unemployment was low. The nation wasn’t neck deep in scary, sticky wars. Sure, he was a supertoxic aspiring autocrat who tried to subvert democracy by overturning a free and fair election and who is now facing dozens of criminal charges, not to mention a civil suit for fraud. But if, come fall of 2024, he asks voters that most basic of political questions, “Weren’t you better off when I was president?” an awful lot may answer, “Hell, yeah.”Twelve months is several eternities in politics. And none of this is to downplay Mr. Trump’s glaring flaws — or his manifest unfitness for office. But there are some political fundamentals working in his favor that go beyond his specific pros and cons. Anyone who isn’t at least a little afraid isn’t paying attention.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Get to Know the Influential Conservative Intellectuals Who Help Explain G.O.P. Extremism

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      It’s easy to become inured to the extremism that has suffused the Republican Party in recent years. Donald Trump, the dominating front-runner for the party’s presidential nomination, spends days in court, in a judicial system he regularly disparages, charged with a long list of offenses and facing several trials.In the House, Republicans recently chose a new speaker, Representative Mike Johnson, who not only endorsed the attempted overturning of the 2020 election but also helped to devise the rationale behind it.We shouldn’t grow complacent about just how dangerous it all is — and how much more dangerous it could become. The efforts to overturn the 2020 election failed. We’re told that’s because the institutions held. But it’s more accurate to say that most of the individuals holding powerful positions within those institutions — the White House, the Pentagon, the courts, election officials in Georgia and other states — sided with the Constitution over Mr. Trump’s desire to remain in power.But what if key individuals decide differently the next time they are faced with this kind of choice? What if they have come to believe that the country is in such dire straits — has reached a state of apocalyptic decadence — that democracy is a luxury we can no longer afford?A coalition of intellectual catastrophists on the American right is trying to convince people of just that — giving the next generation of Republican officeholders, senior advisers, judges and appointees explicit permission and encouragement to believe that the country is on the verge of collapse. Some catastrophists take it a step further and suggest that officials might contemplate overthrowing liberal democracy in favor of revolutionary regime change or even imposing a right-wing dictatorship on the country.The list of people making these arguments includes former officials in the Trump administration, some of whom are likely to be considered for top jobs in the event of a Trump restoration in 2024. It includes respected scholars at prestigious universities and influential think tanks. The ideas about the threat of an all-powerful totalitarian left and the dismal state of the country — even the most outlandish of them — are taken seriously by conservative politicians as well as prominent influencers on the right.That makes this a crucial time to familiarize ourselves with and begin formulating a response to these ideas. If Mr. Trump manages to win the presidency again in 2024, many of these intellectual catastrophists could be ready and willing to justify deeds that could well bring American liberal democracy to its knees.The Claremont CatastrophistsProbably the best-known faction of catastrophists and the one with the most direct connection to Republican politics is led by Michael Anton and others with ties to the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank in California. Mr. Anton’s notorious Claremont Review of Books essay in September 2016 called the contest between Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton “The Flight 93 Election.” Mr. Anton, who would go on to serve as a National Security Council official in the Trump administration, insisted the choice facing Republicans, like the passengers on the jet hijacked by terrorists intent on self-immolation in a suicide attack on the White House or the Capitol on Sept. 11, was to “charge the cockpit or you die.” (For a few months in 2000 and 2001, Mr. Anton was my boss in the communications office of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and we have engaged in spirited debates over the years.)Mr. Anton’s “Flight 93” essay originally appeared on a website with modest traffic, but two days later Rush Limbaugh was reading it aloud in its entirety on his radio show. The essay set the tone of life-or-death struggle (and related imagery) that is common among catastrophists.After leaving the Trump White House, Mr. Anton updated and amplified the argument in a 2021 book, “The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return.”America faced a choice: Either Mr. Trump would prevail in his bid for re-election or America was doomed.John Eastman, a conservative lawyer also at the Claremont Institute, agreed. That is why, after Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Mr. Eastman set about taking the lead in convincing Mr. Trump that there was a way for him to remain in power, if only Vice President Mike Pence treated his ceremonial role in certifying election results as a vastly broader power to delay certification.Despite legal troubles related to the efforts to overturn the election, Mr. Eastman’s attitude hasn’t changed. In a conversation this summer with Thomas Klingenstein, a leading funder of the Claremont Institute, Mr. Eastman explained why he thought such unprecedented moves were justified.The prospect of Mr. Biden’s becoming president constituted an “existential threat,” Mr. Eastman said, to the survivability of the country. Would we “completely repudiate every one of our founding principles” and allow ourselves to be “eradicated”? Those were the stakes, as he viewed them.Once a thinker begins to conceive of politics as a pitched battle between the righteous and those who seek the country’s outright annihilation, extraordinary possibilities open up.That’s how, in May 2021, Mr. Anton came to conduct a two-hour podcast with a far-right Silicon Valley tech guru and self-described “monarchist,” Curtis Yarvin, in which the two agreed that the American “regime” is today most accurately described as a “theocratic oligarchy.” In that arrangement, an elite class of progressive “priests” ensconced in executive branch agencies, the universities, elite media and other leading institutions of civil society promulgate and enforce a distorted and self-serving version of reality that illegitimately justifies their rule.In this conversation, Mr. Anton and Mr. Yarvin swapped ideas about how this theocratic oligarchy might be overthrown. It culminated in Mr. Yarvin sketching a scenario in which a would-be dictator he alternatively describes as “Caesar” and “Trump” defies the laws and norms of democratic transition and uses a “Trump app” to direct throngs of his supporters on the streets of the nation’s capital to do his bidding, insulating the would-be dictator from harm and the consequences of his democracy-defying acts.A year ago, Mr. Anton revisited the topic of “the perils and possibilities of Caesarism” on “The Matthew Peterson Show” with several other intellectual catastrophists with ties to the Claremont Institute. (Another panelist on the online show, Charles Haywood, a wealthy former businessman, used the term “Red Caesar,” referring to the color associated with the G.O.P., in a 2021 blog post about Mr. Anton’s second book.)On the Peterson show, Mr. Anton described Caesarism as one-man rule that emerges “after the decay of a republican order, when it can no longer function.” (He also said that he would lament the United States coming to these circumstances because he would prefer the country to embrace the principles of “1787 forever.” But if that is no longer possible, he said, the rule of a Caesar can be a necessary method to restore order.)The Christian Reverse RevolutionariesThose on the right primarily concerned about the fate of traditionalist Christian morals and worship in the United States insist that we already live in a regime that oppresses and brutalizes religious believers and conservatives. And they make those charges in a theologically inflected idiom that’s meant to address and amplify the right’s intense worries about persecution by progressives.Among the most extreme catastrophists writing in this vein is Stephen Wolfe, whose book “The Case for Christian Nationalism” calls for a “just revolution” against America’s “gynocracy” (rule by women) that emasculates men, persuading them to affirm “feminine virtues, such as empathy, fairness and equality.” In its place, Mr. Wolfe proposes the installation of a “Christian prince,” or a form of “theocratic Caesarism.”Other authors aspire to greater nuance by calling the dictatorship weighing down on religious believers soft totalitarianism, usually under the rule of social-justice progressivism. These writers often draw direct parallels between the fate of devout Christians in the contemporary United States and the struggles of Eastern Europeans who sought to practice their faith but were harshly persecuted by Soviet tyranny. Establishing the validity of that parallel is the main point of the most recent book by the writer Rod Dreher, “Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.” (The title is drawn from the writings of the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.)But Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame offers the most elaborate and intellectually sophisticated response in his recent book, “Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future.” (Mr. Deneen and I worked together professionally at several points over the past two decades, and Mr. Dreher and I have been friends for even longer.)Mr. Deneen’s previous book, “Why Liberalism Failed,” was praised by writers across the political spectrum, including former President Barack Obama, for helping readers understand the appeal of the harder-edged populist conservatism that took control of the Republican Party in 2016. “Regime Change” is a much darker book that goes well beyond diagnosing America’s ills to propose what sounds, in certain passages, like a radical cure.The book opens with a tableau of a decaying country with declining economic prospects, blighted cities, collapsing birthrates, drug addiction and widespread suicidal despair. The source of these maladies, Mr. Deneen claims, is liberalism, which until recently has dominated both political parties in the United States, imposing an ideology of individual rights and historical progress on the country from above. This ideology, he says, denigrates tradition, faith, authority and community.Growing numbers of Americans supposedly reject this outlook, demanding a postliberal government and social, cultural and economic order — basically, hard-right policies on religious and moral issues and hard left on economics. But the forces of liberalism are entrenched on the center left and center right, using every power at their disposal to prevent regime change.Mr. Deneen is inconsistent in laying out how postliberal voters should achieve the overthrow of this progressive tyranny. In some passages, he advocates a “peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class” and proposes modest reforms to replace it. They include relocating executive branch departments of the federal government to cities around the country and the establishment of nationwide vocational programs.But in other passages, Mr. Deneen goes much further, describing the separation of church and state as a “totalitarian undertaking” that must be reversed so that American public life can be fully integrated with conservative forms of Christianity. He even affirmatively quotes a passage from Machiavelli in which he talks of the need to use “extralegal and almost bestial” forms of resistance, including “mobs running through the streets,” in order to topple the powers that be.Despite that shift in content and tone, Mr. Deneen has been embraced by many New Right conservatives and G.O.P. politicians like Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio. Senator Marco Rubio’s former chief of staff has called him “one of the important people thinking about why we are in the moment we are in right now.”Mr. Deneen and other discontented intellectuals of the religious right can perhaps be most accurately described as political reactionaries looking to undertake a revolutionary act in reverse.The Bronze Age Pervert and the Nietzschean FringeFarther out on the right’s political and philosophical extremes there’s Costin Alamariu, the person generally understood to be writing under the pseudonym Bronze Age Pervert.He self-published a book in 2018, “Bronze Age Mindset,” which follows Friedrich Nietzsche and other authors beloved by the European far right in proclaiming that Western civilization itself is on the verge of collapse, its greatest achievements far in the past, its present a “garbage world” in an advanced state of decay.All around us, Mr. Alamariu declares, greatness and beauty are under assault. Who are its enemies? Women, for one. (“It took 100 years of women in public life for them to almost totally destroy a civilization.”) Then there’s belief in democratic equality. (“I believe that democracy is the final cause of all the political problems I describe.”)But blame must most of all be laid at the feet of the creature Mr. Alamariu calls the “bugman,” a term he uses to describe a majority of human beings alive today. This insectlike infestation venerates mediocrity and is “motivated by a titanic hatred of the well-turned-out and beautiful.”Mr. Alamariu proposes breeding great men of strength who model themselves on pirates, disregarding laws and norms, plundering and taking anything they want and ultimately installing themselves as absolute rulers over the rest of us. Mr. Trump, Mr. Alamariu believes, has pointed us in the right direction. But the former president is only the beginning, he writes. “Now imagine a man of Trump’s charisma, but who is not merely beholden to the generals, but one of them, and able to rule and intimidate them as well as seduce the many. … Caesars and Napoleons are sure to follow.”In a recent essay, Mr. Alamariu wrote: “I believe in fascism or ‘something worse’ …. I believe in rule by a military caste of men who would be able to guide society toward a morality of eugenics.”It’s hard to know how seriously to take all of this. Mr. Alamariu, who has a Ph.D. in political science from Yale, writes in such a cartoonish way and laces his outrageous pronouncements with so much irony and humor, not to mention deliberate spelling and syntax errors, that he often seems to be playing a joke on his reader.But that doesn’t mean influential figures on the right aren’t taking him seriously. Nate Hochman, who was let go by the presidential campaign of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida after sharing on social media a video containing a Nazi symbol, told The New York Times that “every junior staffer in the Trump administration read ‘Bronze Age Mindset.’”Mr. Alamariu’s recently self-published doctoral dissertation reached No. 23 on Amazon sitewide in mid-September. Among those on the right treating the author as a friend, ally or interlocutor worthy of respectful engagement are the prominent activist Christopher Rufo, the author Richard Hanania and the economist-blogger Tyler Cowen.Combating the CatastrophistsSome will undoubtedly suggest we shouldn’t be unduly alarmed about such trends. These are just a handful of obscure writers talking to one another, very far removed from the concerns of Republican officeholders and rank-and-file voters.But such complacency follows from a misunderstanding of the role of intellectuals in radical political movements. These writers are giving Republican elites permission and encouragement to do things that just a few years ago would have been considered unthinkable.In a second term, Mr. Trump’s ambition is to fire tens of thousands of career civil servants throughout the federal bureaucracy and replace them with loyalists. He also reportedly plans to staff the executive branch with more aggressive right-wing lawyers. These would surely be people unwaveringly devoted to the president and his agenda as well as the danger the Democratic Party supposedly poses to the survival of the United States.These writers also exercise a powerful influence on media personalities with large audiences. Tucker Carlson has interviewed Curtis Yarvin and declared that with regard to the 2024 election, “everything is at stake. What wouldn’t they do? What haven’t they done? How will you prepare yourself?” Other right-wing influencers with large followings assert more bluntly that if conservatives lose in 2024, they will be hunted down and murdered by the regime.It’s important that we respond to such statements by pointing out there is literally no evidence to support them. Other intellectual catastrophists are likewise wrong to suggest the country is ruled by a progressive tyranny, and we can know this because people on the right increasingly say such things while facing no legal consequences at all.Yes, our politics is increasingly turbulent. Yet the country endured far worse turmoil just over a half-century ago — political assassinations, huge protests, riots, hundreds of bombings, often carried out by left-wing terrorists — without dispensing with democracy or looking to a Caesar as a savior.The question, then, is why the intellectual catastrophists have gotten to this point — and why others on the right are listening to them. The answer, I think, is an intense dislike of what America has become, combined with panic about the right’s ability to win sufficient power in the democratic arena to force a decisive change.None of which is meant to imply that liberalism is flawless or that it doesn’t deserve criticism. But the proper arena in which to take advantage of liberalism’s protean character — its historical flexibility in response to cultural, social and economic changes over time — remains ordinary democratic politics, in which clashing parties compete for support and accept the outcome of free and fair elections.Those on different sides of these conflicts need to be willing to accept the possibility of losing. That’s the democratic deal: No election is ever the final election.In refusing to accept that deal, many of the right’s most prominent writers are ceasing to behave like citizens, who must be willing to share rule with others, in favor of thinking and acting like commissars eager to serve a strongman.There may be little the rest of us can do about it besides resisting the temptation to respond in kind. In that refusal, we give the lie to claims that the liberal center has tyrannical aims of its own — and demonstrate that the right’s intellectual catastrophists are really just anticipatory sore losers.Damon Linker writes the Substack newsletter “Notes From the Middleground.” He is a senior lecturer in the department of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Maduro podría perder las elecciones de Venezuela en 2024

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      Nicolás Maduro lleva 10 años en el poder en Venezuela. En esa década, ha supervisado un periodo de colapso económico, corrupción, un aumento importante de la pobreza, la destrucción medioambiental y la represión estatal de los disidentes y la prensa. Esto ha provocado un éxodo de más de 7 millones de venezolanos.Ahora Venezuela se encuentra en una encrucijada que definirá su próxima década y tendrá consecuencias cruciales para el mundo. Venezuela celebrará sus elecciones presidenciales en 2024, unas elecciones que Maduro podría perder, siempre que la oposición participe unida, la comunidad internacional siga implicada y los ciudadanos se sientan inspirados para movilizarse.Recientemente, dos acontecimientos importantes revelaron una oportunidad única de cara a las elecciones: primero, la participación masiva en las primarias de la oposición del 22 de octubre, que otorgaron a María Corina Machado, exdiputada de Venezuela, un sólido primer lugar como la candidata unitaria. Segundo, el régimen no impidió judicialmente ni con violencia que se celebraran estas elecciones. Fue una de las concesiones que hizo en un acuerdo con Washington y la oposición a cambio de que Estados Unidos suavizara las sanciones impuestas durante el mandato de Trump a las industrias del petróleo y el gas.El éxito de las primarias de la oposición podría haber sorprendido a Maduro, y estamos siendo testigos de un mayor hostigamiento contra los organizadores de las elecciones y declaraciones de funcionarios que niegan la posibilidad de levantar la inhabilitación impuesta a varios líderes políticos de la oposición, incluida Machado, de presentarse a las elecciones del próximo año.A pesar de la alentadora participación en las primarias y los avances en las negociaciones, hay una narrativa pesimista —tanto en el extranjero como en Venezuela— de que Maduro se aferrará inevitablemente al poder. He visto y he experimentado lo equivocado que es ese punto de vista. En realidad, las elecciones presidenciales del próximo año brindan la mejor oportunidad hasta la fecha para derrotar al chavismo —el movimiento de inspiración socialista iniciado por Hugo Chávez en el que milita Maduro— desde que llegó al poder hace más de dos décadas.Llevo desde 2013 trabajando como organizador comunitario en los barrios en sectores populares de Venezuela, antes bastiones del chavismo. He trabajado con líderes de la comunidad, la mayoría de los cuales eran chavistas cuando empezamos. He visto con mis propios ojos que, en lugares donde Chávez obtenía antes el 90 por ciento de los votos en las elecciones nacionales, ahora la inmensa mayoría desea un cambio. Hace poco, una exintegrante de la estructura política del partido gobernante, cuyo nombre no desea revelar por temor a las repercusiones, me dijo que Maduro y sus secuaces ya no son una opción para muchos venezolanos: “Ya no quiero nada con ellos ni la comunidad tampoco”. Añadió que “mientras ellos comen como unos reyes”, en los barrios comían muy mal.Para aprovechar esta oportunidad inusual, tienen que ocurrir tres elementos. El primero es que la oposición debe mantenerse unida en las urnas y en defender los votos. El segundo es que la comunidad internacional debe seguir presionando por mejores condiciones electorales y exigir respeto a los derechos humanos en Venezuela. También deben contribuir a bajar los costos de una posible salida de Maduro y su estructura. Y la tercera es que los políticos y los líderes de toda Venezuela deben volver a centrar el discurso en un mensaje lleno de esperanza, en vez de ceder a la tentación de alimentar aún más la polarización.El régimen de Maduro es consciente del riesgo que corre en las elecciones presidenciales del próximo año. Su objetivo es convencer a la gente de que el cambio es imposible, y de que a los venezolanos les irá mejor si se quedan en casa en lugar de ir a votar. La oposición de Venezuela debe contrarrestar esas tácticas con un firme llamado a la participación.También debe enfrentarse a un dilema más fundamental que es común a todos los sistemas electorales autoritarios: participar en unas elecciones que no serán libres y limpias, o boicotearlas.En las últimas elecciones presidenciales, en 2018, parte de la oposición, incluida Machado, boicoteó las elecciones. Como miembro de un partido político de la oposición —Primero Justicia—, yo también decidí no votar. Pero, ahora, tras casi seis años más de consolidación autoritaria, creo que nuestra estrategia fue errada. Pedirle a la gente que se quede en casa en lugar de movilizarse es caer en la trampa de Maduro.Para ser claros, las elecciones presidenciales de 2024 no serán un momento de celebración de la democracia; aún no se dan las condiciones para unas elecciones libres y limpias, y, francamente, puede que nunca se den. No obstante, si la oposición participa y los venezolanos votan en masa, Maduro puede perder.Algunos se preguntan si el régimen permitirá siquiera que se cuenten los votos el año que viene. Mi respuesta es que Maduro necesita hacerlo. Enfrentada a una monumental crisis social y económica, la élite chavista tiene que ofrecerles a los venezolanos un relato que les otorgue legitimidad interna, y eso, en Venezuela, solo puede venir de unas elecciones. Al igual que otros regímenes autoritarios del mundo, su mayor gancho publicitario es afirmar que cuentan con el respaldo del pueblo. Pero lo cierto es que su base sigue menguando drásticamente: hoy, el índice de aprobación de Maduro es del 29 por ciento, según una investigación de Consultores 21, con sede en Caracas.Una victoria arrolladora de la oposición es la mejor protección contra las trampas. Hay un ejemplo reciente de ello en Venezuela. Hace un año, en unas elecciones regionales en Barinas, el estado en el que nació Chávez, el partido gobernante perdió con un margen considerable, a pesar de utilizar toda su artillería de trampas. Aunque se trató de unas elecciones regionales y no estaba en juego el poder presidencial, la experiencia en el estado, unida a los acontecimientos del 22 de octubre, dan una lección sobre lo que debemos hacer para recuperar la democracia en 2024.El punto de partida es que la oposición debe adoptar una estrategia realista, que sea consciente de la desigualdad de condiciones en un sistema autoritario, y que ponga en primer plano la participación del pueblo venezolano. En Barinas, el partido en el poder intentó empujar a la oposición a boicotear las elecciones invalidando ilegalmente los resultados y prohibiendo a varios candidatos que se presentaran. Sin embargo, la oposición permaneció unida y mantuvo su compromiso de participar, a pesar de las injusticias.Para reforzar la unidad ahora, los partidos de la oposición deben priorizar el desarrollo de un mecanismo para tomar decisiones en conjunto que permita alcanzar consensos en una coalición diversa. Los dos pilares de esa unidad deberían ser la lucha por los derechos políticos de todos los líderes —sobre todo los de Machado tras su victoria— y el compromiso firme de participar en las elecciones del año que viene. En el mejor escenario, el gobierno de Maduro levantaría todas las inhabilitaciones antes de las elecciones como parte de las negociaciones. Pero, aunque eso no sucediera, participar y lograr una victoria aplastante en unas elecciones viciadas es el mejor camino que tenemos para avanzar en la democratización.La oposición también necesita un compromiso más firme de otros países latinoamericanos, de Estados Unidos y de Europa con las negociaciones. El régimen de Maduro ha demostrado que hará concesiones en materia de elecciones y derechos humanos si recibe los incentivos adecuados. Necesitamos líderes demócratas con disposición a asumir riesgos y a predicar con el ejemplo en su defensa de la democracia, que exijan la libertad de todos los presos políticos, y mejoras en las condiciones para las elecciones del año que viene. Además, necesitamos que la comunidad internacional acelere la entrega de las ayudas que tanto necesitan los más vulnerables de la sociedad. La oposición y el partido en el poder llegaron a un acuerdo hace un año para que los fondos públicos congelados en el extranjero a causa de las sanciones se transfieran a la ONU con fines humanitarios. Hasta la fecha, esos fondos no han sido implementados.Por último, la oposición tiene que ofrecer una verdadera alternativa a la división promovida por el establishment de Maduro. Inspirar a la gente a participar requiere unir al país en torno a un nuevo relato. El mensaje tradicional de la oposición, entre la polarización con el chavismo y la nostalgia de un pasado que no volverá, está condenado al fracaso.Un nuevo relato para Venezuela debería inspirar a los jóvenes, centrarse en ayudar a las personas en sus dificultades diarias (con servicios públicos, educación y acceso a anticonceptivos) y desarrollar una economía más diversificada que genere empleos bien remunerados para reducir la desigualdad. El nuevo mensaje debería aspirar también a sanar una de nuestras heridas más profundas: la separación de las familias debido a la migración masiva. La reunificación de nuestro país puede convertirse en una motivación personal y emocional para que cada venezolano participe y obre el cambio. Reunir a la familia venezolana es algo por lo que vale la pena luchar.Roberto Patiño, activista venezolano y antiguo dirigente del movimiento estudiantil, es fundador de Alimenta la Solidaridad y Mi Convive, que trabajan en las comunidades vulnerables de Venezuela, y miembro de la junta directiva del partido político Primero Justicia. More

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      I’ve Seen It: Maduro Could Lose Venezuela’s Presidential Election

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      Nicolás Maduro has been in power for 10 years in Venezuela. In that decade, he has overseen a period of economic collapse, corruption, a sharp increase in poverty, environmental devastation and state repression of dissidents and the press. This has led to an exodus of more than seven million Venezuelans.Now Venezuela stands at a crossroads, and its choices will define the next decade and carry significant consequences for the world. Venezuela will hold its presidential election in 2024 — one that Mr. Maduro can lose, as long as the opposition stays united in participating, the international community remains involved and citizens are inspired to mobilize.Recently, two significant events opened a unique window ahead of the election. First, a massive turnout for the opposition’s primary on Oct. 22 gave María Corina Machado, a former member of Venezuela’s legislature, a strong mandate as the unity candidate. Second, the regime didn’t block this election from happening — one of the concessions that it made in a deal with Washington and the opposition in exchange for U.S. relaxation of Trump-era sanctions on the oil and gas industries.The success of the opposition primary might have surprised Mr. Maduro; we are now seeing increased harassment against the election organizers and statements by officials denying the lifting of the ban on several opposition political leaders — including Ms. Machado — from running in next year’s elections.Despite encouraging participation in the primaries and advancements in negotiations, there is a pervasive narrative — both abroad and in Venezuela — that Mr. Maduro will inevitably hang on to power. I have seen and experienced how flawed that perspective is. In fact, the presidential election next year offers the best opportunity yet to defeat Chavismo, the socialist-inspired movement begun by Hugo Chávez that Mr. Maduro embraces, since it came to power over two decades ago.Since 2013, I have worked as a community organizer in marginalized neighborhoods, known as barrios in Venezuela, which used to be Chavismo’s strongholds. I worked with community leaders, most of whom were Chavistas when we started. I have seen firsthand how places where Mr. Chávez used to get 90 percent of the votes in national elections now overwhelmingly support the opposition. Recently, a former ranking member of the ruling party’s political structure, who didn’t want to be named for fear of repercussions, told me that Mr. Maduro and his cronies are no longer an option for many Venezuelans: “I don’t want anything to do with them, and neither does the community.” She added, “While they dine like royalty, we eat garbage because of inflation.”To seize this rare opportunity, three things need to happen. First, the opposition must stay united in the ballot and defend the vote. Second, the international community must continue to push for freer elections and human rights in Venezuela while lowering the stakes for Mr. Maduro’s exit from power. And third, politicians and leaders throughout Venezuela must refocus the narrative to a hope-filled message, rather than give in to the temptation to further feed crippling polarization.The Maduro regime is aware of the risk it faces in the presidential election next year. Its objective is to convince people that change is impossible and that Venezuelans are better off staying home rather than casting a vote. Venezuela’s opposition must counter those tactics with a strong call for participation.It also must face the more fundamental dilemma that common to many electoral authoritarian systems: whether to participate in an election that will not be free and fair, or to boycott it.In the last presidential election, in 2018, part of the opposition, including Ms. Machado, boycotted the vote. As a member of an opposition political party — Primero Justicia — I, too, decided not to cast a vote. But now, after nearly six more years of authoritarian consolidation, I believe that strategy was a mistake. Asking the people to stay at home is falling into Mr. Maduro’s trap.To be clear, the presidential election in 2024 will not be a celebratory moment of democracy: The conditions for free and fair elections are not there yet and, frankly, may never be. Nonetheless, if the opposition participates and Venezuelans cast their votes in large numbers, Mr. Maduro can lose.Some question whether the regime will allow votes to even be counted next year. But facing a monumental social and economic crisis, the Chavista elite will need to offer Venezuelans a story that can grant them internal legitimacy, and that can come only from elections. As with other authoritarians in the world, their biggest selling point is to claim that they have the people’s support. But the truth is that their base continues to shrink dramatically: Today Mr. Maduro’s approval rating is 29 percent, according to research from Consultores 21, a Caracas-based consulting firm.A landslide victory for the opposition is the best protection against cheating. There is a recent example of this in Venezuela. A year ago, in a regional election in Barinas, the birthplace of Mr. Chávez, the ruling party lost by a considerable margin, despite using everything in its artillery of chicanery. Even though it was a regional election and presidential power was not at stake, the experience in the state, combined with the events of the past month, offer a path to win back democracy in 2024.The starting point is that the opposition must embrace a realistic strategy that puts front and center the participation of the Venezuelan people. In Barinas, the ruling party tried to push the opposition to boycott the elections by illegally invalidating the results and barring several candidates from running. However, the opposition stuck together and maintained its commitment to participate, despite injustices.To strengthen their unity now, opposition parties must prioritize creating a mechanism for consensus building in the diverse coalition. The two building blocks of that unity should be to fight for all leaders’ political rights — especially Ms. Machado’s after her victory — and to commit to participate in next year’s elections. In the best scenario, Mr. Maduro’s government would lift all bans before the elections as part of negotiations; even if that doesn’t happen, participating in and winning flawed elections is the best path we have to advance democratization.The opposition also needs a stronger commitment from other Latin American countries, the United States and Europe to help. The Maduro regime has proved it will make electoral and human rights concessions — if it receives the right incentives. We need courageous democratic leaders willing to demand the release of all political prisoners and achieve better conditions for elections next year. We also need the international community to expedite the delivery of much-needed support to society’s most vulnerable. The opposition and the ruling party reached an agreement a year ago that public funds frozen abroad because of sanctions would be transferred to the U.N. for humanitarian purposes. To date, those funds have not been deployed.Finally, the opposition needs to offer a true alternative to the divisiveness promoted by Mr. Maduro’s establishment. Inspiring the people to participate requires unifying the country around a new narrative. The traditional opposition message, trapped in polarization with Chavismo and with a nostalgic message of a past that will not return, is doomed to fail.A new narrative for Venezuela should aim to inspire the youth, focus on helping people with their daily challenges — with public services, education and access to contraception — and build a more diversified economy that generates well-paying jobs to reduce inequality. The new message should also aspire to heal one of our most profound wounds: family separation due to mass migration. Our country’s reunification can become a personal and emotional motivator for every Venezuelan to participate and to effect change. Reuniting the Venezuelan family is something worth fighting for.Roberto Patiño, a Venezuelan social activist and former leader of the student movement, is the founder of Alimenta la Solidaridad and Mi Convive, which work in vulnerable communities in Venezuela, and a board member of Primero Justicia, a political party.Source photographs by Ariana Cubillos/Associated Press and Miguel Gutierrez/EPA, via Shutterstock.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      ‘Chaos Doesn’t Scare Me. American Decline Does.’

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      Jim Jordan’s bid last week to become speaker of the House — together with the withdrawal on Tuesday of Thomas Emmer from his campaign for the same job — revealed not only how far House Republicans have moved to the right, but also how weak the intraparty forces for moderation have become.The full House, including all 212 Democrats, rejected Jordan in the first floor vote, but 90 percent of Republicans backed the election-denying Trump avatar.Minutes before Emmer withdrew from the race yesterday, Politico reported that Donald Trump told an associate, “He’s done. It’s over. I killed him.” It was, according to Politico, a reflection of Trump’s veto power among House Republicans — “that while Trump may not be able to elevate someone to the post — his earlier choice for the job, Jordan, flopped — he can ensure that a person doesn’t get it.”Lee Drutman, a political scientist and senior fellow at New America, published a piece on Oct. 20 on his Substack, “The U.S. House Has Sailed Into Dangerously Uncharted Territory. There’s No Going Back.”“Republicans have moved far to the right and polarization is at record highs,” Druckman wrote, citing a measure of ideological polarization between House Democrats and Republicans known as DWNominate which shows House Republicans moving steadily to the right, starting in 1968, reaching a level in 2022 substantially higher than at any point in time since 1880.House Democrats, in contrast, moved very slightly to the left over the same 1968-2022 period.I asked Drutman whether he thought House Republicans could move further right. He replied by email:Hard to say. We keep thinking the G.O.P. can’t move any further to the right and still win nationally, and yet, when more than 90 percent of districts are safe, and the Democratic Party is equally unpopular, and there are only two parties. the G.O.P. can win in too many places just by not being the Democrats.In 2022, Drutman continued, “the G.O.P. definitely paid a small but significant MAGA penalty. So I want to say there are limits, and that I really do hope we are close to reaching them. But I wouldn’t bank on that hope.”For those banking on hope, a closer examination of the Oct. 17 ballot I mentioned earlier, when Jordan won the votes of 200 of the 221 Republican members of the House, may dampen optimism.Not only did the Republican Caucus overwhelmingly back Jordan, but the intraparty forces that would normally press for centrist policies failed to do so.There are 18 Republicans who represent districts President Biden carried in 2020. These members, more than others, were forced to choose between voting for Jordan and facing sharp criticism in their districts, or voting against him and facing a potential primary challenger.This group voted two to one (12-6) for Jordan, deciding, in effect, that the threat of a primary challenge was more dangerous to their political futures than the fallout in their Democratic-leaning districts from voting for Jordan.Or take the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, which describes its members as “tired of the obstructionism in Washington where partisan politics is too often prioritized over governing and what is best for the country.” Jordan’s approach to legislation and policymaking embodies what the problem solvers are tired of.Despite that, the Republican members of the caucus voted decisively for Jordan, 21-8, including the co-chairman of the caucus — Brian Fitzpatrick, Republican of Pennsylvania, and Tom Kean, the son and namesake of the distinctly moderate former governor of New JerseyIn a statement posted on the Problem Solvers’ website, Kean declared that he joined the group “to help find solutions for families and businesses in New Jersey. Every day of gridlock in Washington is another day that issues impacting my constituents at home go unaddressed.”A third overlapping group, The Republican Governance Group, would, in normal times, be a bastion of opposition to Jordan. The governance group calls for “common-sense legislation on issues including health care, energy, infrastructure and work force development” and its members “represent the most marginal, swing districts, and are ranked among the most bipartisan and most effective lawmakers on Capitol Hill.”The conference declares that it “needs to lead in a time when partisan gridlock often derails progress.”How did its members vote on Jordan? More than three quarters, 32, voted to make Jordan speaker; 10 voted against him.In the middle of the weeklong Jordan-for-speaker saga, Ronald Brownstein, a senior editor at The Atlantic, wrote in “The Threat to Democracy Is Coming From Inside the U.S. House” that win or lose,Jordan’s rise, like Trump’s own commanding lead in the 2024 GOP presidential race, provides more evidence that for the first time since the Civil War, the dominant faction in one of America’s two major parties is no longer committed to the principles of democracy as the U.S. has known them.Each time the Republican Party has had an opportunity to distance itself from Trump, Brownstein continued,It has roared past the exit ramp and reaffirmed its commitment. At each moment of crisis for him, the handful of Republicans who condemned his behavior were swamped by his fervid supporters until resistance in the party crumbled.Earlier this week, Nate Cohn, a Times colleague, wrote in “Fight for Speaker Reveals Four Types of House Republicans”:Mr. Jordan fell short of winning the gavel three times. But his failed bid nonetheless revealed that the ultraconservative faction of congressional Republicans is larger in number and potentially more broadly acceptable to mainstream congressional Republicans than might have been known otherwise.An examination of the votes, Cohn continued, suggeststhat nearly half of congressional Republicans are sympathetic to Mr. Jordan and the conservative right wing, putting anti-establishment outsiders within striking distance of becoming the predominant faction in the House Republican conference. It suggests that the party’s right wing could, under circumstances not necessarily too different from those today, make a serious bid for House leadership — and win.The analyses above focus on the 90 percent of Republicans who voted for Jordan as evidence of the party’s rightward shift.There is an alternative approach: to focus on the 20-plus dissenters. This approach leads to different conclusions.An Oct. 19 Times article by my news-side colleague Catie Edmondson, for example, was headlined, “Mainstream Republicans, ‘Squishes’ No More, Dig in Against Jordan.”Focusing on the small group of Republicans who rejected Jordan, Edmondson wrote:In a remarkable reversal of roles, a group of roughly 20 veteran Republicans, including institutionalists and lawmakers in politically competitive districts, are flexing their muscles against Mr. Jordan’s candidacy. Their choice to do so has prolonged an extraordinary period of paralysis in the House, which began more than two weeks ago when the hard right deposed Kevin McCarthy as speaker. It has continued as Republicans wage an extraordinary feud over who should replace him.The next day, a Washington Post article by Jacqueline Alemany, “Concerns About Jordan’s Election Denialism Flare During Failed Bid for Speaker,” made the case that Jordan’s refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 election proved to be a significant factor in his defeat.Alemany wrote:As Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) waged his battle to become House speaker, some House Republicans were uncomfortable with the possibility of having an election denier occupying the most powerful legislative seat in the U.S. government heading into a presidential election year.I asked Matthew Green, a political scientist at Catholic University, whether it was more significant that House Republicans could not come up with enough votes to push either Steve Scalise or Jordan over the top or that both Scalise and Jordan actually received plus or minus 200 votes each? He emailed back:I think it’s more significant that neither Scalise nor Jordan could get the votes they needed to be elected Speaker. It’s a norm for lawmakers to vote for their party’s nominee for Speaker, no matter how odious they may find that person. That the G.O.P. could not keep McCarthy in power or immediately elect a replacement, even at the risk of extended paralysis of the House and major damage to the party’s reputation, signifies just how weak and divided the Republican Conference is right now.There is little doubt that the three-week-long struggle, still unresolved, to pick a new speaker is quite likely to inflict some costs on Republicans.First and foremost, if, as appears possible, the government is forced to shut down because of a failure to reach agreement on federal spending, Republicans have set themselves up to take the fall when the public decides which party is at fault.Previous government shutdowns, especially those in 1995 and 1996, backfired on Republicans, reviving Bill Clinton’s re-election prospects to the point that he won easily in November.I asked Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, about the current situation, and he emailed back: “A failure to choose a speaker before appropriations expire and the government shutdowns — that would look bad to many voters.”The Jordan campaign for speaker may turn into a liability for Republican members in districts won by Biden in 2020.After Fitzpatrick voted for Jordan, his probable Democratic challenger, Ashley Ehasz, a West Point graduate and combat veteran, declared:Brian Fitzpatrick has campaigned on his supposed commitment to reaching across the aisle and solving problems — but time and again his votes have shown who he really is. He voted to install an anti-abortion, election-denying extremist as speaker and has made his values perfectly clear.Sue Altman, executive director of the New Jersey Working Families Alliance and the probable Democratic challenger to Kean, said, after Kean voted for Jordan:Tom Kean Jr. just voted for a man who in his personal life helped cover up sexual abuse and in his political life tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election and pass a national abortion ban. This is not the Republican Party of Tom Kean Jr.’s father, and Tom Kean Jr. has done nothing but enable the most extreme elements of his own party instead of being a voice for moderation. Jim Jordan is a radical election denier who does not represent the values of this district and Tom Kean Jr. should be ashamed of his vote.I asked Michael Olson, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, about the possible costs of a Jordan vote for these 12 Republicans in Democratic-leaning seats. He replied by email:Concerns about appearing extreme should be particularly acute for these legislators. Most won by quite narrow margins. Voters do care about extremism on the margins — more extreme candidates seem to be more likely to subsequently lose — so a vote for Jordan could be a real liability in a campaign, or a vote against him a real feather in these folks’ caps as they try to establish their independent bona fides.The political calculus of these 12 Republicans is, however, complicated. Olson cited a 2023 paper, “A Good Partisan? Ideology, Loyalty and Public Evaluations of Members of Congress,” by Geoffrey Sheagley, Logan Dancey and John Henderson that reveals the difficulty of the choices facing members of Congress.Using poll data on the vote to impeach Donald Trump over the Jan. 6 insurrection, Sheagley, Dancey and Henderson write that Democrats are:More approving of a Republican representative who voted to impeach Trump. Republican respondents, however, are more approving of a conservative Republican representative and less approving of a representative who voted to impeach Trump.For a Republican deciding whether to vote for or against a Trump impeachment, the loss of support among Republican voters far outweighs the gains from Democrats: “Approval for a Republican representative who voted to impeach Trump decreases by nearly a full point on the 4-point approval scale, while support among Democrats increases by only half a point.”The political implications of this choice are, however, very different for a Republican evaluating prospects in a closed primary in which no Democrats can vote, than in the general election, when Democrats do cast ballots.I asked Dancey, a political scientist at Wesleyan, about the calculations a Republican in a Democratic district has to make and he emailed back to say that a vote against Jordan would not prove excessively costly in November:In a general election matchup where the main choice is between a Republican and a Democrat, I suspect that the vast majority of Republican voters would stick with a Republican candidate who voted against Jordan. Even if they don’t like the position the Republican took on that one vote, they won’t see the Democratic candidate as a better option.In contrast, Dancey continued,Voting for Jordan carries some risk of losing support from independents and moderate Democrats in the general election, especially since Jordan received Trump’s endorsement. Republicans running in Biden districts have incentives to create an image as a more independent-minded Republican who isn’t fully aligned with Trump.That said, Darcey wrote, “Jordan is a less high-profile figure than Trump and at this point isn’t on track to actually become speaker. As a result, I doubt this one vote will be as consequential as something like voting to impeach Trump.”Perhaps most damaging to Republicans is the perception that they are dominated by a group more determined to wreak havoc than to govern.In 2019, I looked at a small percentage of voters committed “to unleash chaos to ‘burn down’ the entire political order in the hope they gain status in the process.”The notion was salient once more on Oct. 3, when a cadre of eight Republican members of the House — led by Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida — brought down Speaker Kevin McCarthy.Gaetz evoked havoc again on Oct. 19 when he posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter:Ever seen a SWAMP actually drained? This Florida Man has. It’s not orderly. Turns out, the alligators & snakes get unruly when the comfort of their habitat is disrupted. Chaos doesn’t scare me. American decline does.I asked Kevin Arceneaux, a political scientist at Sciences Po Paris and lead author of the 2021 paper “Some People Just Want to Watch the World Burn: the Prevalence, Psychology and Politics of the ‘Need for Chaos,’ ” about the role of Gaetz and his seven allies. Arceneaux emailed back that he has no way of knowing, without conducting tests and interviews, how the eight “would answer the need for chaos survey items.”But, Arceneaux added, “their behavior is certainly consistent with the ‘burn-it-all-down’ mentality that we found associated with the need for chaos.”In addition, he continued,We also found that a drive to obtain status along with a sense that one’s group has lost social status increases one’s need for chaos. It would be interesting to study whether Freedom Caucus members are more preoccupied with concerns about status loss relative to other Republicans. If so, that would offer some circumstantial evidence that a need for chaos could at least partly explain their willingness to damage their own party.I asked Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, for his perspective on recent events in the House. He replied by email:I’ve long thought that a party’s drift to the ideological extreme would inevitably be stopped and reversed to a certain degree by big defeats that force party voters to come to terms with pragmatic reality. These days, I’m starting to believe that Republicans moving headlong to the right may just give in to the inertia of motion and continue their lunge toward extremism until they can no longer win an overall majority. I’m not convinced of this yet, but the G.O.P. has put the idea on the table.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Deep Roots of Republican Dysfunction

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      The collapse of the House Republican majority into chaos is the clearest possible evidence that the party is off the rails.Of course, the Republican Party has been off the rails for a while before now. This was true in 2010, when Tea Party extremists swept through the party’s ranks, defeating more moderate Republicans — and pretty much any other Republican with an interest in the actual work of government — and establishing a beachhead for radical obstructionism. It was true in 2012, when many Republican voters went wild for the likes of Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich in the party’s presidential primary, before settling on the more conventionally presidential Mitt Romney. But even then, Romney reached out to Donald Trump — famous, politically speaking, for his “birther” crusade against President Barack Obama — for his blessing, yet another sign that the Republican Party was not on track.The truth of the Republican Party’s deep dysfunction was obvious in 2013, when congressional Republicans shut down the government in a quixotic drive to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and it was obvious in 2016, when Republican voters nominated Trump for president. Everything that has followed, from the rise of influencer-extremist politicians like Representative Lauren Boebert to the party’s complicity in insurrectionist violence, has been a steady escalation from one transgression to another.The Republican Party is so broken that at this point, its congressional wing cannot function. The result is that this period is now the longest the House of Representatives has been in session without a speaker. And as Republican voters gear up to nominate Trump a third time for president, the rest of the party is not far behind. The only question to ask, and answer, is why.One popular answer is Donald Trump who, in this view, is directly responsible for the downward spiral of dysfunction and deviancy that defines today’s Republican Party. It’s his success as a demagogue and showman that set the stage for the worst of the behavior we’ve seen from elected Republicans.The problem, as I’ve already noted, is that most of what we identify as Republican dysfunction was already evident in the years before Trump came on the scene as a major figure in conservative politics. Even Trump’s contempt for the legitimacy of his political opponents, to the point of rejecting the outcome of a free and fair election, has clear antecedents in conservative agitation over so-called voter fraud, including efforts to raise barriers to voting for rival constituencies.Another popular answer is that we’re seeing the fruits of polarization in American political life. And it is true that within both parties, there’s been a marked and meaningful move away from the center and toward each side’s respective flank. But while the Democratic Party is, in many respects, more liberal than it has ever been, it’s also not nearly as ideologically uniform as the Republican Party. Nor does a rigid, doctrinaire liberalism serve as a litmus test among Democratic voters in Democratic Party primaries outside of a small handful of congressional districts.Joe Biden, for example, is the paradigmatic moderate Democrat and, currently, the president of the United States and leader of the Democratic Party, with ample support across the party establishment. And in Congress, there’s no liberal equivalent to the House Freedom Caucus: no group of nihilistic, obstruction-minded left-wing lawmakers. When Democrats were in the majority, the Congressional Progressive Caucus was a reliable partner of President Biden’s and a constructive force in the making of legislation. If the issue is polarization, then it seems to be driving only one of our two parties toward the abyss.Helpfully, the extent to which the Democratic Party still operates as a normal American political party can shed light on how and why the Republican Party doesn’t. Take the overall strength of Democratic moderates, who hold the levers of power within the national party. One important reason for this fact is the heterogeneity of the Democratic coalition. To piece together a majority in the Electoral College, or to gain control of the House or Senate, Democrats have to win or make inroads with a cross-section of the American public: young people, affluent suburbanites, Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans voters, as well as a sizable percentage of the white working class. To lose ground with any one of these groups is to risk defeat, whether it’s in the race for president or an off-year election for governor.A broad coalition also means a broad set of interests and demands, some of which are in tension with one another. This has at least two major implications for the internal workings of the Democratic Party. First, it makes for a kind of brokerage politics in which the most powerful Democratic politicians are often those who can best appeal to and manage the various groups and interests that make up the Democratic coalition. And second, it gives the Democratic Party a certain amount of self-regulation. Move too far in the direction of one group or one interest, and you may lose support among the others.If you take the internal dynamics of the Democratic Party and invert them, you get something like those within the Republican Party.Consider the demographics of the Republican coalition. A majority of all voters in both parties are white Americans. But where the Democratic Party electorate was 61 percent white in the 2020 presidential election, the Republican one was 86 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. Similarly, there is much less religious diversity among Republicans — more than a third of Republicans voters in 2020 were white evangelical Protestants — than there is among Democrats. And while we tend to think of Democrats as entirely urban and suburban, the proportion of rural voters in the Democratic Party as a whole is actually greater than the proportion of urban voters in the Republican Party. There is, in other words, less geographic diversity among Republicans as well.Most important, where nearly half of Democrats identify themselves as either “moderate” or “conservative” — compared with the half that call themselves “liberal” — nearly three-quarters of Republicans identify themselves as “conservative,” with just a handful of self-proclaimed moderates and a smattering of liberals, according to Gallup. This wasn’t always true. In 1994, around 33 percent of Republicans called themselves “moderate” and 58 percent said they were “conservative.” There were even, at 8 percent, a few Republican liberals. Now the Republican Party is almost uniformly conservative. Moderate Democrats can still win national office or hold national leadership. Moderate Republicans cannot. Outside a handful of environments, found in largely Democratic states like Maryland and Massachusetts, moderate Republican politicians are virtually extinct.But more than the number of conservatives is the character of the conservatism that dominates the Republican Party. It is, thanks to a set of social and political transformations dating back to the 1960s, a highly ideological and at times reactionary conservatism, with little tolerance for disagreement or dissent. The Democratic Party is a broad coalition geared toward a set of policies — aimed at either regulating or tempering the capitalist economy or promoting the inclusion of various groups in national life. The Republican Party exists almost entirely for the promotion of a distinct and doctrinaire ideology of hierarchy and anti-government retrenchment.There have always been ideological movements within American political parties. The Republican Party was formed, in part, by adherents to one of the most important ideological movements of the 19th century — antislavery. But, as the historian Geoffrey Kabaservice has observed, “The conversion of one of America’s two major parties into an ideological vehicle” is a “phenomenon without precedent in American history.”It is the absence of any other aim but the promotion of conservative ideology — by any means necessary, up to and including the destruction of democratic institutions and the imposition of minority rule — that makes this particular permutation of the Republican Party unique. It helps explain, in turn, the dysfunction of the past decade. If the goal is to promote conservative ideology, then what matters for Republican politicians is how well they adhere to and promote conservatism. The key issue for conservative voters and conservative media isn’t whether a Republican politician can pass legislation or manage a government or bridge political divides; the key question is whether a Republican politician is sufficiently committed to the ideology, whatever that means in the moment. And if conservatism means aggrieving your enemies, then the obvious choice for the nation’s highest office is the man who hates the most, regardless of what he believes.The demographic homogeneity of the Republican Party means that there isn’t much internal pushback to this ideological crusade — nothing to temper the instincts of politicians who would rather shut down the government than accept that a majority of Congress passed a law over their objections, or who would threaten the global economy to get spending cuts they could never win at the ballot box.Worse, because the institutions of American democracy give a significant advantage to the current Republican coalition, there’s also no external force pushing Republican politicians away from their most rigid extremes. Just the opposite: There is a whole infrastructure of ideologically motivated money and media that works to push Republican voters and politicians farther to the right.It is not simply that the Republican Party has politicians like Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene. It’s that the Republican Party is practically engineered to produce politicians like Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene. And there’s no brake — no emergency off-switch — that might slow or stop the car. The one thing that might get the Republican Party back on the rails is a major and unanticipated shift in the structure of American politics that forces it to adapt to new voters, new constituencies and new conditions.It’s hard to imagine what that might be. It can’t come soon enough.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Debate Over How Dangerous Trump Rages On

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      “Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections,” Adam Przeworski, a political scientist at N.Y.U., wrote in 1991 — a definition that would prove prescient in the wake of the 2020 election.“Outcomes of the democratic process are uncertain, indeterminate ex ante,” Przeworski continued. “There is competition, organized by rules. And there are periodic winners and losers.”Presumably, Donald Trump has no idea who Adam Przeworski is, but Trump refused to accept the Przeworski dictum in the aftermath of his 2020 defeat, claiming victory despite all evidence to the contrary.Trump’s success in persuading a majority of Republicans of the legitimacy of his palpably false claims has revealed the vulnerability of American institutions to a subversion of democratic norms. That much is well known.These questions were gaining salience even before the 2020 election. As Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, explains in her 2018 book, “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity”:The election of Trump is the culmination of a process by which the American electorate has become deeply socially divided along partisan lines. As the parties have grown racially, religiously, and socially distant from one another, a new kind of social discord has been growing. The increasing political divide has allowed political, public, electoral, and national norms to be broken with little to no consequence. The norms of racial, religious, and cultural respect have deteriorated. Partisan battles have helped organize Americans’ distrust for “the other” in politically powerful ways. In this political environment, a candidate who picks up the banner of “us versus them” and “winning versus losing” is almost guaranteed to tap into a current of resentment and anger across racial, religious, and cultural lines, which have recently divided neatly by party.Most recently, these questions have been pushed to the fore by two political scientists at Harvard, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, who published “Tyranny of the Minority” a month ago.Their thesis:By 2016, America was on the brink of a genuinely multiracial democracy — one that could serve as a model for diverse societies across the world. But just as this new democratic experiment was beginning to take root, America experienced an authoritarian backlash so fierce that it shook the foundations of the republic, leaving our allies across the world worried about whether the country had any democratic future at all.This authoritarian backlash, Levitsky and Ziblatt write, “leads us to another unsettling truth. Part of the problem we face today lies in something many of us venerate: our Constitution.”Flaws in the Constitution, they argue,now imperil our democracy. Designed in a pre-democratic era, the U.S. Constitution allows partisan minorities to routinely thwart majorities, and sometimes even govern them. Institutions that empower partisan minorities can become instruments of minority rule. And they are especially dangerous when they are in the hands of extremist or antidemocratic partisan minorities.The Levitsky and Ziblatt thesis has both strong supporters and strong critics.In an essay published this month, “Vetocracy and the Decline of American Global Power: Minority Rule Is the Order in American Politics Today,” Francis Fukuyama, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, argues:America has become a vetocracy, or rule by veto. Its political system spreads power out very broadly, in ways that give many individual players the power to stop things. By contrast it provides few mechanisms to force collective decisions reflecting the will of the majority.When combined with the extreme degree of polarization in the underlying society, Fukuyama goes on, “this leads to total gridlock where basic functions of government like deliberating on and passing yearly budgets become nearly impossible.”Fukuyama cites the ongoing struggle of House Republicans to elect a speaker — with the far-right faction dead set against a centrist choice — as a case study of vetocracy at work:The ability of a single extremist member of the House to topple the speaker and shut down Congress’ ability to legislate is not the only manifestation of vetocracy on display in 2023. The Senate has a rule that gives any individual senator the right to in effect block any executive branch appointment for any reason.In addition, the Senate requires “a supermajority of 60 votes to call the question, making routine legislating very difficult.”I asked Fukuyama whether America’s current problems stem, to some extent, from the constitutional protection of the interests of minority factions (meant here the way it’s used in Federalist 10).He replied by email: “The large numbers of checks and balances built into our system did not present insuperable obstacles to governance until the deepening of polarization in the mid-1990s.”Sanford Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas, makes a different argument: “I think that our current problems are directly traceable to deficiencies in the formal structures of the American political system as set out in 1787 and too infrequently amended thereafter.”In his 2008 book, “Our Undemocratic Constitution,” Levinson writes, “I have become ever more despondent about many structural provisions of the Constitution that place almost insurmountable barriers in the way of any acceptable notion of democracy.”In support of his thesis, Levinson asks readers to respond to a series of questions “by way of preparing yourself to scrutinize the adequacy of today’s Constitution”:Do you support giving Wyoming the same number of votes in the Senate as California which has roughly seventy times the population? Are you comfortable with an Electoral College that has regularly placed in the White House candidates who did not get a majority and, in at least two — now three — cases over the past 50 years did not even come in first? Are you concerned that the president might have too much power, whether to spy on Americans without any congressional or judicial authorization or to frustrate the will of the majority of both houses of Congress by vetoing legislation with which he disagrees on political ground?Pessimistic assessments of the capacity of the American political system to withstand extremist challenge are by no means ubiquitous among the nation’s scholars; many point to the strength of the judiciary in rejecting the Trump campaign’s claims of election fraud and to the 2022 defeat of prominent proponents of “the big lie.” In this view, the system of checks and balances is still working.Kurt Weyland, a political scientist at the University of Texas-Austin, is the author of the forthcoming book “Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat.” Weyland contended by email that instead of treating the “United States’ counter-majoritarian institutions as a big problem, firm checks and balances have served as a safeguard against the very real threats posed by Trump’s populism.”Weyland continued:Without independent and powerful courts; without independent state and city governments; without federalism, which precluded central-gov’t interference in the electoral system; and without a bicameral congress, in which even Republicans slowed down Trump by dragging their feet; without all these aspects of US counter-majoritarianism, Trump could have done significantly more damage to U.S. democracy.Polarization, Wayland argued, is a double-edged sword:In a counter-majoritarian system, it brings stalemate and gridlock that allows a populist leader like Trump to claim, “Only I can do it,” namely cut through this Gordian knot, with “highly problematic” miracle cures like “Build the Wall.’ ”But at the same time, Weyland continued,Polarization has one — unexpected — beneficial effect, namely, to severely limit the popular support that Trump could ever win: Very few Democrats would ever support him! Thus, whereas other undemocratic populists like Peru’s Fujimori, Venezuela’s Chavez, or now El Salvador’s Bukele won overwhelming mass support — 70-90 percent approval — and used it to push aside liberal obstacles to their insatiable power hunger, Trump never even reached 50 percent. A populist who’s not very popular simply cannot do that much damage to democracy.Along similar lines, Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, argues in a 2019 paper, “Populism and the American Party System: Opportunities and Constraints,” that compared with most other democracies, “the U.S. system offers much less opportunity for organized populist parties but more opportunity for populist candidacies.”The two major parties, Lee continues, are more “vulnerable to populist insurgency than at other points in U.S. history because of (1) changes in communications technology, (2) the unpopularity of mainstream parties and party leaders and (3) representation gaps created by an increasingly racialized party system.”At the same time, according to Lee, “the U.S. constitutional system impedes authoritarian populism, just as it obstructs party power generally. But the vulnerability of the major parties to populist insurgency poses a threat to liberal democratic norms in the United States, just as it does elsewhere.”American public opinion, in Lee’s view, “cannot be relied on as a bulwark of liberal rights capable of resisting populism’s tendencies toward authoritarianism and anti-pluralism.”While the U.S. electoral system “has long been unfavorable to insurgent or third parties, including populist parties,” Lee writes, the avenue to political power lies in the primary nomination process:The American system of nominations subjects the major parties to radically open internal competition through primary elections. The combined result of these electoral rules is that populists win more favorable outcomes in intraparty competition than in interparty competition.In one area of agreement with Levitsky and Ziblatt, Lee makes the case that the diminishing — that is, veiled — emphasis of previous generations of Republican leaders on divisive issues of race, ethnicity and immigration provided a crucial opening for Trump.“Before 2016, the national leadership of the Republican and Democratic Parties had been trending toward closer convergence on policy issues relating to race and ethnicity, both in terms of party positions and rhetoric,” she writes, adding that “before 2016, the two parties also did not offer clear alternatives on immigration.”This shift to a covert rather than an overt approach to racial issues created an opening for Trump to run as a broadly “anti-elite” candidate representing the views of the white working class.“Willing to violate norms against the use of racialized rhetoric, Trump was able to offer primary voters a product that other Republican elites refused to supply,” Lee writes. “Those appeals strengthened his populist, anti-elite credentials and probably contributed to his success in winning the nomination.”There is a third line of analysis that places a strong emphasis on the economic upheaval produced by the transition from a manufacturing economy to a technologically based knowledge economy.In their June 2023 article “The Revival of U.S. Populism: How 39 Years of Manufacturing Losses and Educational Gains Reshaped the Electoral Map,” Scott Abrahams and Frank Levy, economists at Louisiana State University and M.I.T., make the case that polarization and institutional gridlock have roots dating back more than four decades:The current revival of right-wing populism in the United States reaches back to 1980, a year that marked a broad shift in national production and the demand for labor. In that year, manufacturing employment began a long decline and the wage gap between college and high school graduates began a long expansion.The result, Abrahams and Levy contend:was a growing geographic alignment of income, educational attainment and, increasingly, cultural values. The alignment reinforced urban/rural and coastal/interior distinctions and contributed to both the politicization of a four-year college degree and the perception of educated “elites” or “coastal elites” — central parts of today’s populist rhetoric.Abrahams and Levy conclude: “If our argument is correct, it has taken almost 40 years to reach our current level of polarization. If history is a guide, it won’t quickly disappear.”Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, argued in an email that the strains on the American political system grow out of the interaction between divisive economic and cultural trends and the empowerment of racial and ethnic minorities: “The inevitable emerging socio-economic divisions in the transition to knowledge societies — propelled by capitalist creative destruction — and the sociocultural kinship divisions develop a politically explosive stew due to the nature of U.S. political institutions.”On one side, Kitschelt wrote, “Technological innovation and economic demand patterns have led to a substitution of humans in routine tasks jobs by ‘code’ and machines — whether in manufacturing or services/white collar occupations. These precipitate wage stagnation and decline.”On the other side, “There is a revolution of kinship relations that got underway with the access of women to higher education in the 1950s and 1960s. This has led to a questioning of traditional paternalistic family relations and triggered a reframing of gender conceptions and relations, as well as the nature and significance of procreation and socialization of the next generation.”The interaction, Kitschelt continued, “of socio-economic anxiety-promoting decline amplified by rapid demographic erosion of the share of white Anglo-Saxon ethnics, and cultural stress due to challenges of paternalist kinship relations and advances of secularization have given rise to the toxic amalgam of white Christian nationalism. It has become a backbone and transmission belt of right-wing populism in the U.S.”At the same time, Kitschelt acknowledged, “Levitsky and Ziblatt are absolutely right that it is the circumstances of enslavement at the founding moment of U.S. independence and democracy that created a system of governance that enable a determined minority (the enslavers) to maintain a status quo of domination, exploitation, and dehumanization of a whole tier of members of society which could not be undone within the locked-in web of institutional rules.”To support his argument, Kitschelt cited “the process in which Trump was chosen as U.S. president”:Roughly 10 percent of registered voters nationwide participated in the Republican presidential primaries in 2016. The plurality primary winner, Donald Trump, rallied just 3-5 percent of U.S. registered voters to endorse his candidacy and thereby sail on to the Republican Party nomination. These 3-5 percent of the U.S. registered voters — or 2-4 percent of the U.S. adult residential population — then made it possible for Trump to lose the popular vote but win the Electoral College majority.All of which gets us back to the Przeworski dictum with which I began this column, that “democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.”Przeworski’s claim, Henry Farrell, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, writes in an essay published last month, “inspired a lot of political scientists to use game theory to determine the conditions under which democracy was ‘self-enforcing’: that is, how everyone’s beliefs and actions might line up to make democracy a self-fulfilling prophecy.”At the same time, Farrell continues, “his argument powerfully suggests a theory of democratic fragility, too.” What happens when “some powerful organized force, such as a political party, may look to overturn democratic outcomes” or “such a force may look to ‘drastically reduce the confidence of other actors in democratic institutions’”?At that point, as the two parties react to each other, Farrell suggests, “democracy can become self-unraveling rather than self-enforcing”:If you (as say the leader of the Republican Party) look to overturn an election result through encouraging your supporters to invade the U.S. Capitol, and claim that the election was a con, then I (as a Democratic Party leader) am plausibly going to guess that my chances of ever getting elected again will shrivel into nonexistence if you gain political power again and are able to rig the system. That may lead me to be less willing to play by the rules, leading to further collapse of confidence on your part and so on, in a downward spiral.In other words, with a majority of Republicans aligned with an authoritarian leader, Democrats will be the group to watch if Trump wins re-election in November 2024, especially so if Republicans win control of both the House and Senate.While such a turn of events would replicate the 2016 election results, Democrats now know much more about what an across-the-board Republican victory would mean as Trump and his allies have more or less announced their plans for 2025 if they win in 2024: the empowerment of a party determined to politicize the civil service, a party committed to use the Department of Justice and other agencies to punish Democrats, a party prepared to change the rules of elections to guarantee the retention of its majorities.In a report last month, “24 for ’24: Urgent Recommendations in Law, Media, Politics and Tech for Fair and Legitimate 2024 U.S. Elections,” an ad hoc committee convened by the Safeguarding Democracy Project and U.C.L.A. Law School warned:“The 2020 elections confirmed that confidence in the fairness and legitimacy of the election system in the United States can no longer be taken for granted. Without the losing side accepting the results of a fair election as legitimate, the social fabric that holds democracy together can fray or tear.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Apotheosis of Jim Jordan Is a Sight to Behold

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      No problem in the American system at this moment is as acute and disruptive as the one posed by the Republican Party.Yes, of course, there are any number of structural problems facing American politics.Our system of elections — first-past-the-post voting, the Electoral College, single-member districts and partisan gerrymandering — feeds into and amplifies our partisan and ideological polarization. Our system of federalism and dual sovereignty between state and national government allows for laboratories of autocracy as much as testing grounds for democracy. Our counter-majoritarian institutions and supermajority rules stymie democratic majorities and turn stability into stasis, putting terrible stress on our entire political system.But it’s hard to deal with any of those, or even just live with them, when one of our two major parties is on a downward spiral of dysfunction, with each version of itself more chaotic and deviant than the last.For years, it has been evident that the Republican Party can’t govern. When Donald Trump was in office, it was revealing to see the extent to which Republican majorities in Congress struggled to write and pass any legislation of consequence. To wit, after an unsuccessful herculean lift trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act and a successful effort to cut taxes (the lowest hanging fruit on the conservative menu), congressional Republicans essentially stopped legislating until they were dislodged from control of the House in the 2018 midterms.What’s become clear of late, in the midst of the chaos that has left the House without a speaker at a particularly fraught moment in foreign and domestic affairs, is that Republicans are as unable to organize themselves as they are incapable of leading the affairs of state.The worst of the problem of the Republican Party, however, is evident in the rise of Jim Jordan and the ascendance of the insurrection wing of the party, with only modest opposition from supposedly more reasonable Republican lawmakers.Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas, for example, has a reputation for being reasonable. He is staunchly conservative, but his feet are mostly planted in reality.Crenshaw has been publicly critical of the most disruptive and intransigent members of the House Republican conference, especially those in the House Freedom Caucus, and even wrote an essay in The Wall Street Journal condemning the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. A small gesture, all things considered, but still more than most of his colleagues could manage.Crenshaw seems like the kind of Republican who would oppose Jordan’s bid to be speaker of the House. Jordan, first elected to the House in 2006, is a far-right ideologue and conspiracy theorist whose most notable accomplishment in office was helping to organize his fellow ideologues and conspiracy theorists into the House Freedom Caucus in 2015. Jordan, who represents the Fourth District of Ohio, was one of Trump’s leading supporters in the months leading up to and following the 2020 presidential election, accusing Democrats, repeatedly, of trying to steal the election.“Jim Jordan was deeply involved in Donald Trump’s antidemocratic efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election,” Thomas Joscelyn, one of the authors of the final report from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol, told CNN last week. “Jordan also helped organize congressional opposition to counting Biden’s certified electoral votes. None of Jordan’s efforts were rooted in legitimate objections. He simply sought to keep Donald Trump in power, contrary to the will of the American people.”Crenshaw’s stated contempt for exactly the kind of rhetoric and behavior exemplified by Jordan has not, however, stopped the Texas Republican from backing his colleague from Ohio for speaker of the House. In an interview on Sunday with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Crenshaw claimed that Jordan had “become part of the solution, not part of the problem” with regard to the chaos among House Republicans and dismissed Jordan’s contempt for the law and attempt to overturn the presidential election as non-issues. “If I held that grudge, I wouldn’t have friends in the conference,” Crenshaw said. “I was on an island there.”Crenshaw isn’t the only supposedly reasonable Republican member of Congress willing to look past the fact that the leading candidate for speaker of the House was an active participant in a scheme to subvert the Constitution and install a defeated president in office for a second term.“Even some of the Republicans who have vowed, publicly and privately, to fight him at every turn are beginning to get weak knees about supporting him, fearing that collective will is dwindling as their numbers decrease,” Politico reports. Jordan’s allies have also expressed their view that the opposition to his bid for speaker will melt away as the actual vote on the floor comes near.Once again, Republicans are confronted with a deeply transgressive figure with open contempt for the institutions of American democracy, flawed as they may be. Once again, Republicans swear they’ll resist his ascent. Once again, Republicans cave, more fearful of losing a primary — or coming in for criticism from conservative media — than they are of virtually anything else.And each time they cave, these more moderate or mainstream Republicans make the situation a little worse, for themselves and for the country. Kevin McCarthy bowed to expediency and pressure when he voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election in the House of Representatives. He did the same when he empowered the most gleeful insurrectionists in his attempt to gain the speaker’s gavel. Now he’s out, and Jim Jordan is on the rise.If he wins, Jordan may not last in the position. The kind of speaker who must twist arms and make threats using conservative media to win the job is, in the modern House, not the kind of speaker who survives long beyond the next election cycle, even if his party holds its majority.Who will replace Jim Jordan if and when he falls? It could well be someone worse. And it will probably be someone worse, because there is nothing happening inside the Republican Party right now that can keep it from falling even farther into the abyss.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More