'Remaking a 3-decade-old flop': Conservative laments GOP propensity for 'conspiratorial extremism'

Conservative David Frum on Monday published an article in the Atlanticthat warned the Republican Party against “remaking a three-decade-old flop,” arguing the GOP’s tendency to “[talk] themselves into deeply believing” fantasies about their Democratic counterparts will cause the party to lose the White House once again.

Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, examined four case studies in how Democrats and Republicans allow scandal to impact elections. As Frum noted, the Democratic Party took over the House of Representatives in 2006 and 2018 and went on to win the presidency in 2008 and 2020. “By contrast,” Frum explains, “the Republican majority elected in 1994 and 2010 lunged immediately into total war.”

That “total war,” Frum writes, led to “a conspiratorial extremism that frightened mainstream voters back to the party of the president.”

The Republican Party officially won a modest majority in the House of Representatives last Wednesday. But, Frum warns, “the signs strongly indicate that the next Republican House majority will follow the pattern of its predecessors.”

“The most urgent of those warning signs is Republicans’ urge to base their program for the next Congress on an investigation of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter,” Frum notes.

After securing the House of Representatives, Republicans on Thursday held a press conference during which they pledged to investigate President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

“There are plans to subpoena Hunter Biden,” GOP Rep. Jim Comer, who will likely chair the House Oversight Committee next legislative session, told CNN in a seperate interview.

For Frum, the party’s impetus to investigate Hunter Biden is clear: “Whataboutism.”

“What Republicans want … is an excuse for their enabling of Trump,” Frum argues.

“Republicans supported and defended a strikingly corrupt president whose children disregarded nepotism rules to enrich themselves and their businesses,” and are now “[trying] to neutralize four years of nonstop genuine scandals,” Frum writes.

As Republican leaders “[talk] themselves into deeply believing these fantasies,” voters “demonstrated again in the elections of 2022 just how unimpressed they were by the extremist fantasies of the conservative fringe,” he continues.

“But Republicans are more and more isolated in their ideological information networks and seem even less connected to mainstream America today than they were a generation ago,” Frum laments. “They so passionately believe the stories they hear that they forget who confected those stories: themselves.”

Read the full article at the Atlantic.