Bill Kristol ascribes responsibility to the leadership of the Republican Party for endangering American democracy.
Kristol's observations track a critical theme of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in How Democracies Die, "Put simply, political parties are democracy's gatekeepers." The GOP, even before the rise of Trump, has been failing in the gatekeeping role. Since Trump, the damage has been compounded many times over.
Instead of standing up to Trump, rejecting his authoritarian lies, and opposing his efforts to overthrow democratic rule, the party has gone along with Trump.
Sargent: We’re now stuck with a double whammy from the Republican Party. They’re still oligarchic, despite the populist feints of a few senators. And they’re sliding into full authoritarianism. Taking those two things together, it really seems like the Republican Party can’t be redeemed by the standards that you have set for it.
Kristol: I think that’s right. One can imagine an alternate history in which the conservative movement realized it was kind of exhausted; it had a good run. You can imagine a healthy if somewhat turbulent rethinking.
I thought that might happen. Instead, the Republican Party went the other way.
We’ve seen it in history before: Economic elites deciding to pursue their self interest, very narrowly understood, combined with the populist exploitation and intensification of grievances and anxieties, and frankly bigotries and prejudices.
You can’t overestimate how much damage the capitulation of conservative and Republican elites has done. Trump by himself succeeding was bad. The Republican Party going along with Trump — and the conservative establishment legitimating and rationalizing and enabling Trump — created the very dangerous situation we’re now in.
Kristol, who reveals in the interview that he hasn't cast a vote for a Republican since Trump's election, is chairing the Republican Accountability Project, which has an affiliated PAC 'spending money to try to defeat more than a dozen of the Trumpiest GOP candidates, those who support the “big lie” such as Doug Mastriano and Kari Lake, who are running for governor in Pennsylvania and Arizona.'
The organization is targeting a slice of the Republican base not enamored of Trump that might be persuaded to reject authoritarian extremists. Kristol suggests that moving 3 to 5 percent of the party's voters is a realistic possibility. The message? "A lot of what we do is simply publicize what they say. Convey the extremism of MAGA Republicans — and therefore the extremism of the Republican Party."