A few moderate Republicans at long last are pushing back against their party's lurch to the extreme right. Poll results on abortion rights, accompanied by the GOP's blistering loss in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, are prompting increasingly vocal challenges to the party's extremist takeover. Democrats might be watching with only slightly subdued schadenfreude, but it's the nation's future they should really be concerned about.

A party whose extreme right-wing members in Congress and statehouses have built their identity around amassing guns and sharply curtailing voting rights and personal autonomy can only bode ill for the country's future. Anyone who needs reminders of how badly this can go should rewatch videos of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, or simply review the bizarre yet earnest pronouncements of Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert.

Instead of cheering for the GOP's self-destruction, a smarter Democratic approach might be to lend encouragement and support to the likes of Rep. Nancy Mace, R-South Carolina, who is trying to dig her party out from its "rabbit holes of extremism." Take abortion. "This is an issue that Republicans have been largely on the wrong side of," Mace told CNN. "We have, over the last nine months, not shown compassion towards women, and this is one of those issues that I've tried to lead on as someone who's 'pro-life' and just have some common sense."

She went overboard in urging the Biden administration to ignore a federal judge's ruling in Texas that invalidated Food and Drug Administration approval of the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone. We can't think of a faster way to engineer America's slide into division and chaos than for any administration to decide it only needs to abide by court rulings it agrees with. But Mace is spot-on in calling out her fellow partisans for being out of step with the nation. She favors granting abortion rights in the first trimester and spelling out exceptions for rape and incest victims as well as for the health of the mother.

Polls show that most Americans favor limited abortion rights. Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, has begun sharing those polls with party members, apparently to warn them that the party risks more electoral losses if it insists on abortion radicalism. In Wisconsin on April 4, a liberal Supreme Court candidate who ran specifically on the issue of protecting abortion rights trounced her conservative, anti-abortion opponent by 11 points.

The same holds true with the party's gun radicalism. It's hard to tell what might bring Republicans around. The Democrats lurched far to the left in the 1970s, and it took 12 years of Democratic exile from the White House for the party to start aiming for the moderate middle. Whether left or right, extremism doesn't sell with the American people. Can the nation afford 12 years of Republican craziness before that party comes to its senses?

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