Trumpism and the Republican party are now identical
By 
The House vote this morning to authorize an impeachment inquiry passed without a single Republican’s support (two Democrats voted against it, one of them on the explicit ground that the resolution was unnecessary).
Note that this vote was merely to authorize an investigation by the full House of the question of whether Donald Trump should be impeached. That Trump has engaged in conduct which is at least arguably impeachable isn’t in question, and it’s already clear that the GOP strategy in the Senate will be to concede this, but to claim that his conduct in the Ukraine matter (and who knows what else), while undoubtedly bad, wasn’t bad enough to warrant removal.
The failure to get a single Republican vote for a House inquiry thus illustrates the extent to which the Republican party is now a creature of Donald Trump’s cult of personality, which is to say completely.
This is why the kind of “good people on both sides” mewling that keeps getting emitted by the likes of Joe Biden and (sadly) Barack Obama is certainly wrong on the merits, and probably wrong from a purely pragmatic standpoint.
There aren’t good people on both sides. There are people supporting a (for now) crypto-fascist takeover of the American government, and people opposing it. The former people aren’t good people, even if they love their children and their dogs and baseball and apple pie. They’re fascists and fascism-enablers.
It’s incredible — this is a rhetorical turn of phrase: it really isn’t — that almost exactly three years into this nightmare, and almost exactly one year to the day from what may turn out to be the last halfway-free election in the history of this particular political system, we still have so much respectability politics, and reactionary centrism, and elite denial, and general failure to grasp the actual situation.
The House vote this morning merely underlines that we are in a struggle between one party that, with all its many flaws, is still committed to liberal democracy and the rule of law, and another that has definitively rejected both.
It will apparently take yet more to wake up the why can’t we be friends crowd to this reality. Perhaps the disgusting spectacle on Capitol Hill this morning, during which the Republican party was indistinguishable from a North Korean legislative assembly, will open at least a few more eyes.