Rule by means fair and foul

The writer is half right in saying, “At heart the GOP is now a burn-it-down party. They want to break things.”

Fair enough!

But it is also a party that acutely wants to govern, to command the ship of state, to rule by means fair and foul. And in that position, it would, if allowed, dismantle the “administrative state,” erase democracy and democratic institutions, and turn the “social welfare state” into a fading memory from what they say was an earlier debauched time. If there are differences in the GOP – and there are as we saw this week in the heated infighting among House Republicans over Kevin McCarthy’s bid to be the next House speaker – they are largely of a tactical nature. In other words, the intra party clash turns more on the pace and methods of struggle, and not so much on its overarching aims.

Does that make these differences unimportant? By no means, past experience tells us that factional fighting on tactical matters can tear a party apart as well as shift advantage to its adversaries. Of course, no one on the democratic and Democratic side of the main political divide in the country can count on such a turn of events. And no one is as evidenced by the election results in November.