Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.

That's the headline in The Washington Post for an essay that summarizes a forthcoming book by two think tank scholars.  They see the GOP as bringing down American democracy:

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

The writers are Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Norman J. Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. The essay is adapted from their book  It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism. The book will be available Tuesday.