Leonard Pitts Jr. in The Miami Herald has the commentary Don’t blame Democrats for hyper-partisanship.

I bring attention to it for two reasons. One is that Leonard Pitts, Jr. points out that

this is not a problem caused by partisans “at both ends of the political spectrum.”

Further,

One cannot fix a problem one will not face. And the new cultishness of the Republican Party is certainly a problem. It should concern anyone who thinks democracy is best served when political parties offer coherent alternatives and hash them out in the marketplace of ideas — something the GOP no longer does.

The second reason for featuring this article, is the comment:

In their new book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein argue that the GOP has “become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

This is a book that reader RichardH has mentioned to me.  I had not looked into the book nor listened to an interview with the authors because I never expected a right-wing ideologue such as Norman J. Ornstein would ever have conceded what seems to be the premise of the book.