The swing toward Republicans in this fall’s elections—including the victory of Glenn Youngkin in Virginia’s gubernatorial contest—has only deepened the sense of existential dread among liberals and progressives about what will happen to American democracy and the world if a Trump-led Republican Party wins back Congress in 2022 and the presidency in 2024. We are used to the alternation in power of two normal parties in the United States, but the Republicans today are not a normal party, and these are not normal times.
Republican leaders in both national and state politics have made it clear they will not be bound by normal electoral rules. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, the acquiescence in those lies by other Republican leaders, the Republican efforts in the states to suppress Democratic votes and seize control of the counting of ballots, the disclosures about how seriously Trump was pursuing the election’s overturn up to and during the January 6th insurrection—all these tell the same story. It is as though Republicans were now planning openly and shamelessly a murder that their party’s leader had failed to carry out successfully the first time.
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