Ron Brownstein: “Republicans’ tolerance, if not active support, for President Donald Trump’s ongoing bid to overturn the 2020 election has crystallized a stark question: Does the GOP still qualify as a small-d democratic party – or is it morphing into something very different? Even with the Supreme Court still deciding whether to consider a last-ditch legal effort to invalidate the results from the key swing states, there appears little chance that Trump will succeed in subverting Joe Biden’s victory. But Trump’s failure on that front has obscured his success at enlisting a growing swath of his party to join his cause – a dynamic that is already prompting new Republican efforts to make it more difficult to vote and raising concerns about the party’s commitment to the basic tenets of Western democratic rules and conventions, including the peaceful transfer of power.”

“‘Where their hearts are is hard to know, but their behavior is not small-d democratic,’ Susan Stokes, a political-science professor and the director of the Chicago Center on Democracy at the University of Chicago, told me. Stokes, like other experts, says the Republican Party is on a continuum toward the kind of ‘democratic erosion’ visible in other countries, including Turkey under Recep Erdoğan, Hungary under Viktor Orbán, or, in the most extreme example, Russia under Vladimir Putin. In those nations, a party that wins office through a democratic election then seeks to use state power to tilt or completely undermine future elections. ‘With one of our political parties trying to overturn the results of a free and fair election, we are way farther down that road now than we were before the election, or a year ago,’ she told me. Republicans ‘have been going down that road all through Trump’s term, but this is the parting gift, which is more extreme than what has happened before.'”