Though a disaster was avoided, it is important not to normalize what had happened. The radical right wing of the Republican Party, xenophobic nationalists, many of them evangelical zealots, motivated by a worldview fashioned by the alt-right, or Pat Buchanan’s extreme America-first nationalism, a group whose hard core accounted for 10 percent of the House of Representatives, had threatened to paralyze the most important nation-state in the global system.
