Extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene are the future of the Republican party | Thomas Zimmer

It's impossible to understand American politics without grappling in earnest with why Greene's extremism is widely seen as justified on the right

Ever since entering Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene has been making headlines for her long history of peddling conspiracy theories, her blatant embrace of anti-Muslim bigotry and white Christian nationalism, and her aggression against political opponents. The latest escalation came last week, when she smeared her Republican colleagues in the Senate, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and Mitt Romney, as pro-pedophile" after they voted to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson to the US supreme court; Democrats, she added, are the party of pedophiles."

There is a calculating quality to Greene's polemics. Last fall, for instance, she recorded a campaign video in which she used a military-grade sniper rifle to blow up a car that had the word socialism" written on it, promising to do the same to the Democrats' socialist agenda." It was over-exaggerated campaign nonsense. But Greene knew the unsubtle insinuation of using violence against a political opponent would demand attention.

Thomas Zimmer is a visiting professor at Georgetown University, focused on the history of democracy and its discontents in the United States, and a Guardian US contributing opinion writer