Conservatives champion the oligarchs and the greed that fuels them. Ted Cruz proudly declares that corporations should control elections with money.
Republicans have demonstrated quite effectively that they are incapable of governing this country. In fact, Republicans in government are best considered performance artists, abandoning any effort to govern while pursuing the most effective performance to garner a choice spot on Fox News, guaranteeing maximum exposure to their red-meat audience.
The question has been raised and I have to agree: the Republican Party is not a political party but operates nowadays as a cult of greed, mendacity, and unabated selfishness. Thugs. Why is the Republican Party still a thing?
But the Republican Party is not really the cause of the demise of the American Democracy. They can blatantly lie, but people need to believe the lies for them to be effective; they can openly cheat and steal, but people have to uncritically believe that everybody does it; they can spout some mumbo-jumbo and syphon off the wealth of this country to further enrich the few, but this requires a lot of people to smile, bend-over, and spread ’em.
A Celebration of Reading 