The State of the Republican Party

Here is a bit of a post from Robert Paul Wolff blog The Philosopher's Stone that summarizes the current state of the Republican party in the US:

For those who missed it, Huntsman published a Tweet defending the reality of global warming and the truth of evolution, and since then he has been attacking all of his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination as fringe characters with zero connection with reality. The common wisdom is that he has lost his mind and doesn't want the nomination. My guess is that that is all wrong. There is a fragment of the Republican Party [maybe 30%, I don't know] that is still in touch with reality, and he is playing for that group. I desperately don't want the Republicans to win the presidency [whatever Chris says], but I am genuinely frightened by what has happened in the Republican Party. I know what happened in Germany in the mid-thirties. The rise of a large, noisy, angry, bigoted, crazy rightwing political movement may be good electoral politics for the Democrats in the short run, but it is genuinely dangerous. If Hunstman's statements can start to change the public discourse, that is all to the good. We really do not need a rise of fascism in this country. We have gone far enough down that road already, and the weakness of the underlying economy will create the material conditions for a fascist party for some time to come.

His worries that the US can go down the path of Germany in the 1930s is my worry. Everybody I know says "that can never happen". But if you had asked Germans in the late 1920s they would have told you that their democracy would disappear and that a madman would lead them into a hopeless world war and would enforce genocide that would kill millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, socialsts, and handicapped they would have told you that it could never happen to a "civilized" country like Germany. Sadly it could and did. And it can happen in America as well.