Helping 'future losers succeed' is the new Republican Party platform: John Harwood

As 2021 comes to an end, many are coming back to remember the best and worst of the year. While no one can dismiss the horrors of the violence that happened on Jan. 6, what has followed has revealed terrifying details about the coordination, conspiracy, militias, officials and more.

Writing about the year of revelations, CNN's John Harwood explained that this began the latest attempts by the Republican Party to change the laws that govern voting. For a short moment, officials flocked to microphones to denounce the attack as unacceptable and even chastize then-President Donald Trump. That has changed, however, which is all part of the GOP plot to turn losers into winners.

"Those same Republican leaders later scuttled a proposed bipartisan investigation," Harwood wrote. "GOP legislators in battleground states curbed voting procedures and changed election administration to help future losers succeed where Trump had failed in thwarting the popular will."

Harwood went on to quote former GOP national security aide, Richard Haass, who said that until recently, "it didn't occur to me that American democracy might be in the balance. It's no longer a given. I don't think it's melodramatic to say this is the greatest crisis we've faced since the 19th century."

The GOP freakout over losses has come from decades of the party turning to the right, fighting civil rights, equality, and other ideas that may have been popular 50 years ago, but have gone away with phone booths, paper maps, and volumes of encyclopedias.

"When you think about the DNA of the current Republican Party being built around racial resentment, it's only one small step," said CEO and founder of Public Religion Research Institute Robert James. "The very idea that some citizens ought to have a privileged place in the eyes of the law is, at its heart, anti-democratic."

Anti-democracy is basically anti-America, which has prided itself on a democratic republic that allows all citizens the ability to elect their representatives. Taking that away, or restricting it as Republicans have done, makes the GOP "a grave threat to American democracy," wrote conservative Peter Wehner, a former aide to former President George W. Bush.

While some remain optimistic that the GOP would swing back from the far-right, the adoption of conspiracy theories and those Republicans who embrace them over the past decades may make it difficult to extricate themselves from that part of the party.

Read his full take at CNN.com.