He warned democracy was in peril. And that was before the Capitol riot
After decades as a leading expert on Congress and our fragile American experiment in democracy, Tom Mann shed his impartiality and scholarly distance and co-wrote a clanging alarm of a book that said government was headed seriously off the rails.
“It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” didn’t steer a middle course by blaming “both sides,” or countenance the “well, what about” school of reductive reasoning — as in, “Well, what about Hillary’s emails?” — which shrinks any difference between Democrat and Republican to the level of a schoolyard taunt.
The problem, Mann and coauthor Norman Ornstein stated, was a Republican Party captive to its most unhinged elements.
“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics,” the two wrote. “It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-07-29/how-did-trump-hurt-democracy-boost-gop-extremism