(2) They will steal elections by rigging the results if they can get away with it. They seek to lower the number of the votes cast by people of color and young people. To do this, they purposely try to reduce the number of polling places in Democratic districts and purge voter rolls in suspect ways. They are masters at gerrymandering voting districts. They manage to dream up false irregularities in the voting process when they lose. They attempt to strip Democratic governors of the power of their offices. These are the actions of an essentially lawless collective.
(3) For many of those still loyal to the Republican Party, the Democrats, and liberals generally, are not just political rivals. They are reprobates -- enemies of the Republicans' peculiar ideology of minimal government. By demonizing their opponents they share a certain fanaticism with all other extreme ideologues, left or right, religious or racist.
(4) The Republicans evolved this outlook before Trump arrived on the scene. You can see intimations of it in the behavior of Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush. All of them, and their supporters, saw little wrong with ignoring inconvenient facts and inconvenient laws as well, in favor of their own personal interests and ideological convictions.
(5) Thus, this wayward Republican Party was ready for the Mussolini style of leadership that Donald Trump had to offer. And, having made their unholy pact with him, they are now stuck. They have no democratic values or moral principles to fall back on.
Part III -- Conclusion
Therefore, it should come as no surprise that when the head of the Democratic impeachment team, Adam Schiff, delivered his powerful closing remarks on 24 January 2020, his argument hit a wall of Republican indifference. Schiff explained that President Trump "will choose his own personal interests over protecting our national interests -- which makes him dangerous." Therefore, the "right thing to do" is to remove him from office. "Because right matters. And truth matters. Otherwise we are lost."
The problem is that the Republican Party is already "lost." As Nancy LeTourneau put it in the Washington Monthly, "Don't hold out much hope that either right or truth matter to the Republicans sitting in that chamber, which is why we recognize that it is not simply Donald Trump that poses a threat to our country."
The conviction that the pursuit of personal wealth is more important than any other social goal is a fundamental capitalist tenet. Societies devoted to this capitalist worldview and simultaneously hostile to economic regulation, must expect ever more frequent episodes of corruption and ultimately the erosion of liberal democratic values. The latter comes from capitalism's inherent hostility to the equalitarian impulses that such a democracy represents. If not otherwise misdirected by propaganda and greed, liberal democracies should incline toward social democratic policies that reflect this equalitarianism. But this is anathema to the Republicans and their leader, Donald Trump.
Thus, come November 2020, American citizens will have a choice: either vote for the Democrats (whoever they put up for election) or vote for Trump's evolving authoritarian and lawless Republican Party. It might strike the reader as surprising and disturbing, but how this choice will go is still undecided.
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