"President Joe Biden has largely given up on trying to negotiate anything with Republicans. There's a good reason for this: the GOP is no longer a legitimate political party.

One of the most comprehensive and well respected surveys of political parties worldwide is called the Global Party Survey and came out of work done at Harvard in the US and Sydney University in Australia. The researchers note: "Drawing on survey data gathered from 1,861 party and election experts, the study uses 21 core items to estimate key ideological values, issue positions, and populist rhetoric for 1,127 parties in 170 countries."

What they found was that the Democratic Party in the US is fairly solidly within the norms for political parties in fully developed countries around the world. It resembles normal and legitimate parties in Canada and most of Western Europe.

Today the libertarian—and petro-billionaires that Ronald Reagan welcomed to the party so completely own it that no Republican is willing to admit that climate change is real, that the American people actually like Social Security and Medicare, or that people working full-time shouldn't live in poverty.

The Republican party, however, both behaves and is ideologically most similar to Hungary's Fidesz party, Turkey's AKP party and Poland's PiS party.

All three are, essentially, fascist parties. As Zach Beauchamp of Vox notes, Turkey is one of the world's leading jailers of journalists, Poland's party has threatened judgeswho don't rule the way they like with criminal punishment, and Hungary scapegoats immigrants as a strategy to gain and grow political power."