[The Soup Nazi]

From Fareed Zakaria's newsletter:

America’s Political Unreality

As the US Senate proceeds with former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, two recent New York Times columns by Thomas B. Edsall make clear that America’s problems run deeper than any Senate-chamber drama.

A CNN poll from January, conducted by SSRS, found that 58% of Republicans surveyed believed there was solid evidence that President Biden didn’t legitimately secure enough votes in November to defeat Trump and win the presidency, and in a column published Wednesday, Edsall cites more polls and other research as indicative of a troubling—and troublingly partisan—rift. “Asked if Trump has acted ‘responsibly’ or ‘irresponsibly’ since the Nov. 3 election,” Edsall writes of a mid-January Washington Post/ABC News survey, “the 1002 adults polled chose ‘irresponsibly’ by 66-30. Republicans, in contrast, chose ‘responsibly’ by 66-29.”

Conspiracy-theory thinking has flourished, Edsall wrote in a column last week exploring the drivers of QAnon and painting a choleric portrait of the contemporary right: “The problem of keeping the extremist fringe at arm’s length has plagued the Republican Party for decades—dating back to Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society—but nothing in recent American history has reached the crazed intensity of Donald Trump’s perseverating, mendacious insistence that he won a second term in November. That he is not alone—that millions continue to believe in his delusions—is terrifying.”

As Edsall notes, Harvard scholar Daniel Ziblatt told Vox last month that he believes the GOP “now looks like a European far-right party. But the big difference … is that the US only has two parties and one of them is like a European far-right party.” To Edsall, that raises disturbing questions about the country’s political future.