Free Republic

*** “It’s just an environment of possible retribution,” Mr. Wood said. “It is that fear she instills.” Over nearly 30 years, Ms. Collins, a self-styled moderate in a familiar Maine mold, has cultivated a public persona as a workhorse and a fastidious maestro of constituent services and pork-barrel disbursements, using her Washington know-how to get her constituents what they need. But for just as long, her detractors say, she has managed to mostly mask another reality. “The gentlewoman from Maine,” as her colleagues say on the Senate floor, is a formidable power broker who can play a fierce brand of...

Ending the pandemic has proved hard in the United States, and decades-long political dynamics are a big part of the problem. Not only has distrust in government contributed to vaccine hesitancy, but following a script too long in the making, many Republican leaders have encouraged citizens to see mitigation methods — like mask and vaccine mandates — as driven by malevolent motives.... This is the Republican playbook in 2021. But it’s nothing new. This sort of “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” epitomizes what historian Richard Hofstadter labeled “the paranoid style in American politics” almost five decades ago. In fact,...