We are living in a time of bad metaphors. Everything is fascism, or
socialism; Hitler�s Germany, or Stalin�s Soviet Union. Republicans,
especially, want their followers to believe that America is on the verge
of a dramatic time, a moment of great conflict such as 1968�or perhaps,
even worse, 1860. (The drama is the point, of course. No one ever says,
�We�re living through 1955.�)

Ironically, the GOP is indeed replicating another political party in
another time, but not as the heroes they imagine themselves to be. The
Republican Party has become, in form if not in content, the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union of the late 1970s.

I can already hear the howls about invidious comparisons. I do not mean
that modern American Republicans are communists. Rather, I mean that the
Republicans have entered their own kind of end-stage Bolshevism, as
members of a party that is now exhausted by its failures, cynical about
its own ideology, authoritarian by reflex, controlled as a personality
cult by a failing old man, and looking for new adventures to rejuvenate
its fortunes.

No one thinks much about the Soviet Union in the late 1970s, and no one
really should. This was a time referred to by the last Soviet leader,
Mikhail Gorbachev, as the vremia zastoia��the era of stagnation.� By that
point, the Soviet Communist Party was a spent force, and ideological
conviction was mostly for chumps and fanatics. A handful of party
ideologues and the senior officers of the Soviet military might still have
believed in �Marxism-Leninism��the melding of aspirational communism to
one-party dictatorship�but by and large, Soviet citizens knew that the
party�s formulations about the rights of all people were just window
dressing for rule by a small circle of old men in the Kremlin.

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�The party� itself was not a party in any Western sense, but a vehicle for
a cabal of elites, with a cult of personality at its center. The Soviet
leader Leonid Brezhnev was an utterly mediocre man, but by the late 1970s
he had cemented his grip on the Communist Party by elevating opportunists
and cronies around him who insisted, publicly and privately, that Brezhnev
was a heroic genius. Factories and streets and even a city were named for
him, and he promoted himself to the top military rank of �Marshal of the
Soviet Union.� He awarded himself so many honors and medals that, in a
common Soviet joke of the time, a small earthquake in Moscow was said to
have been caused by Brezhnev�s medal-festooned military overcoat falling
off its hanger.

The elite leaders of this supposedly classless society were corrupt
plutocrats, a mafia dressed in Marxism. The party was infested by
careerists, and its grip on power was defended by propagandists who used
rote phrases such as �real socialism� and �Western imperialism� so often
that almost anyone could write an editorial in Pravda or Red Star merely
by playing a kind of Soviet version of Mad Libs. News was tightly
controlled. Soviet radio, television, and newspaper figures plowed on
through stories that were utterly detached from reality, regularly
extolling the successes of Soviet agriculture even as the country was
forced to buy food from the capitalists (including the hated Americans).
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Members of the Communist Party who questioned anything, or expressed any
sign of unorthodoxy, could be denounced by name, or more likely, simply
fired. They would not be executed�this was not Stalinism, after all�but
some were left to rot in obscurity in some make-work exile job, eventually
retiring as a forgotten �Comrade Pensioner.� The deal was clear: Pump the
party�s nonsense and enjoy the good life, or squawk and be sent to manage
a library in Kazakhstan.

This should all sound familiar.

The Republican Party has, for years, ignored the ideas and principles it
once espoused, to the point where the 2020 GOP convention simply dispensed
with the fiction of a platform and instead declared the party to be
whatever Comrade�excuse me, President�Donald Trump said it was.

Read: The hole where Donald Trump was

Like Brezhnev, Trump has grown in status to become a heroic figure among
his supporters. If the Republicans could create the rank of �Marshal of
the American Republic� and strike a medal for a �Hero of American
Culture,� Trump would have them both by now.

A GOP that once prided itself on its intellectual debates is now ruled by
the turgid formulations of what the Soviets would have called their
�leading cadres,� including ideological watchdogs such as Tucker Carlson
and Mark Levin. Like their Soviet predecessors, a host of dull and
dogmatic cable outlets, screechy radio talkers, and poorly written
magazines crank out the same kind of fill-in-the-blanks screeds full of
delusional accusations, replacing �NATO� and �revanchism� with �antifa�
and �radicalism.�

Falling in line, just as in the old Communist Party, is rewarded, and
independence is punished. The anger directed at Liz Cheney and Adam
Kinzinger makes the stilted ideological criticisms of last century�s
Soviet propagandists seem almost genteel by comparison. (At least Soviet
families under Brezhnev didn�t add three-page handwritten denouncements to
official party reprimands.)

This comparison is more than a metaphor; it is a warning. A dying party
can still be a dangerous party. The Communist leaders in those last years
of political sclerosis arrayed a new generation of nuclear missiles
against NATO, invaded Afghanistan, tightened the screws on Jews and other
dissidents, lied about why they shot down a civilian 747 airliner, and,
near the end, came close to starting World War III out of sheer paranoia.

Read: How the GOP surrendered to extremism

The Republican Party is, for now, more of a danger to the United States
than to the world. But like the last Soviet-era holdouts in the Kremlin,
its cadres are growing more aggressive and paranoid. They blame spies and
provocateurs for the Capitol riot, and they are obsessed with last
summer�s protests (indeed, they are fixated on all criminals and rioters
other than their own) to a point that now echoes the old Soviet lingo
about �antisocial elements� and �hooligans.� They blame their failures at
the ballot box not on their own shortcomings, but on fraud and sabotage as
the justification for a redoubled crackdown on democracy.

Another lesson from all this history is that the Republicans have no path
to reform. Like their Soviet counterparts, their party is too far gone.
Gorbachev tried to reform the Soviet Communist Party, and he remains
reviled among the Soviet faithful to this day. Similar efforts by the
remaining handful of reasonable Republicans are unlikely to fare any
better. The Republican Party, to take a phrase from the early Soviet
leader Leon Trotsky, should now be deposited where it belongs: in the
�dustbin of history.�