The Republican Party has suffered a total moral collapse and is now held together by a bunch of “nutcases” happy to endorse autocracy and neo-fascism, according to Howard Dean, the former presidential candidate and ex-chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
The Democratic Party grandee tells Molly Jong-Fast he won’t run for office again, so he is no longer treading on eggshells, in a fiery edition of The New Abnormal.
Dean said there are still one or two decent Republicans in Washington, D.C. but they lack the backbone to stand up to the people who have taken over the party.
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“I hate to call Republicans right-wing fascists because often they supported me, but this is unrecognizable,” he said. “They believe in autocracy, not democracy, they are racist. It’s just shocking what’s happened to the Republican Party.”
He has said Republican members of the House of Representatives were particularly inept. “There are some House Republicans who are basically a sentient YouTube comment section,” Dean said. “They have nothing to contribute, frankly, to American politics, except for incendiary and sometimes delusional public statements.”
After the Jan. 6 insurrection, Dean said the need to keep these people from power has become all-encompassing, and he called on members of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to follow the lead of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in moderating their language while continuing to push their agenda within the Democratic framework because the alternative—a Republican administration containing the likes of Sen. Josh Hawley and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—is too alarming.
“These people are crazy. They’re conspiracy theorists, they’re whack jobs. They’re embedding their own reality. I mean, if they ever really run the country, it’s going to be a disaster for us. ’Cause you... this is why autocrats don’t run good economies, because they start believing in their own BS,” he said.
“You have a Republican Party, which emotionally, essentially are neo-fascist. They fundamentally do not believe that another legitimate point of view exists other than theirs.”
The former governor of Vermont said he had never been a Biden supporter, but he’s been stunned by the president’s performance so far and is pleased he wasn’t making the same mistake as President Barack Obama, who spent too much time waiting around for bipartisan support.
“Bernie Sanders said that [Biden’s] Rebuilding America bill was the most progressive piece of legislation he’d seen since Johnson and the war on poverty. And, I mean, it is,” Dean said. “I think he’s probably off to the best start of any president I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
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