It won't be easy to break Donald Trump's grip on the Republican Party, and it won't be possible without recognizing that his anti-democratic tendencies were already baked into the conservative movement.
Matthew Continetti, author of the history of “The Right,” warns that Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election by inciting mob violence was an explosion of the long-festering grievances by the nativist, white supremacist elements who had been welcomed and nurtured within conservatism, wrote Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent.
"All of the unreason and hatred that had been slowly growing in the body of the Right burst into the open," Continetti told Sargent.
Conservative elites have long blurred the boundary between their own political values and right-wing mass politics to mobilize larger groups of voters, but Trump largely erased that boundary by flaunting his bigotry, corruption and contempt for democracy, and Continetti wrote that many on the right were openly antagonistic toward American society and constitutional order.
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"You can discern many signs that Republican lawmakers think the party’s future depends, at least partly, on sustaining the engagement of the voters that Trump brought into the GOP coalition, and that a full-throated repudiation of Trump’s contempt for democracy might imperil this project," Sargent wrote.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), for example, declared the GOP "can't grow" without Trump, and GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) refused to acknowledge Joe Biden's election until after the Georgia Senate runoffs were decided, and then Republicans censured the only two members of their caucus who signed onto the House select committee.
"In this there is a spectrum of motives," Sargent wrote. "Some Republicans really do think future elections should be subject to nullification by any means necessary, justified by wildly inflated depictions of the leftist enemy. Somewhat less menacingly, others feed these tendencies for instrumental purposes, to keep GOP voters on full boil."
