These wingnuts are destroying American conservatism

The paranoid and hate-filled world of the “birthers”, the Tea Party people and all the rest is so alien to the British experience as to be incomprehensible. We tend not to take them seriously, or assume that the Republicans’ constant lurch to the right inevitably renders them unelectable. We may be making a mistake. The huge size of the rally held in Washington at the weekend – where several hundred thousand people turned up to hear the Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck announce that America was “turning back to God” – provides further disturbing proof, if any were needed, of the growing popularity of the hard right…

Here on the other side of the Atlantic, we await two things: for so-called ordinary Americans to recoil from and disavow the right’s toxic, divisive rhetoric; and for moderate Republicans to start re-asserting the very different traditions of Lincoln, Eisenhower, and George Bush senior, for that matter.

Neither of those outcomes seems to be materialising. Centrist Republicans have become a marginalised minority in their own party – eclipsed and somehow out of place among people who have come to expect references to God’s will to appear in almost every sentence. Meanwhile, Obama’s fellow Democrats are heading towards mid-term elections in November in a mood of despondency, and expect a drubbing at the hands of their adrenaline-filled opponents.