Why did the GOP slide so far towards authoritarianism between 2011 and 2020?

Donald Trump brought more ethnically antagonist voters into the Republican Party, and those voters are particularly anti-democratic

My opinion is that the media, which originally did a poor job conveying the threat of election subversion and violence after the 2020 election, has actually answered some of the bigger questions about the GOP’s anti-democracy turn and tolerance of party-sanctioned insurrectionists quite well. Most major papers have written some variation of the indictment of the problem: voters and politicians, mainly but not entirely members of the Republican Party, who don’t believe that Democratic electoral victories are legitimate.

Although there are still stragglers, this has been a marked improvement for many in the press that treated violations of political norms and values between 2017 and early 2020 with an air of both-sidesism or gave the impression that we were living under Republican government-as-usual. Though it took a violent attempted coup to break that spell, we can at least take solace that most politically aware members of the fourth estate seem to agree on the general location and …