The Atlantic published an op-ed on Thursday comparing the GOP to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the late 1970s, claiming that Republicans — like the last Soviet-era holdouts in the Kremlin — are “growing more aggressive and paranoid” as the “dying” Republican Party is described as “more of a danger to the United States than to the world.” The essay , penned by Harvard professor and prominent anti-Trump voice Tom Nichols, is titled, “The Republican Party Is Now in Its End Stages” and begins by claiming that the GOP “has become, in form if not in content, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the late 1970s.” Clarifying his intent, Nichols writes 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.” After describing the Soviet Union’s Communist Party as “a vehicle for a cabal of elites, with a cult of personality at its center” whose members could be denounced or fired if they “questioned anything, or expressed any sign of unorthodoxy,” Nichols writes “This should all sound familiar.” Nichols goes on to accuse the GOP of hypocrisy and idolization. “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,” he writes. “Like Brezhnev, Trump has grown in status to become a heroic figure among his supporters.” "Like Brezhnev, Trump has grown in status to become a heroic figure among his supporters. If the GOP 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 ...
