Former Republican staffer says his party has morphed into “an oligarchy with a well developed public relations strategy”

Let’s face it: The Republican Party is no longer a broad-based conservative party in the historically accepted sense. It is an oligarchy with a well-developed public relations strategy designed to soothe and anesthetize its followers with appeals to tradition, security, and family even as it pursues a radical agenda that would transform the country into a Dickensian corporatocracy at home and a belligerent military empire abroad.

— Former Republican congressional staff Mike Lofgren, denouncing the GOP as a graveyard of progress in his new book The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.