The combination of the GOP’s absolute shellacking in Tuesday’s elections and the conflagration at the Heritage Foundation around their president’s support for groyper Nick Fuentes and the growing realization internally about how many of their junior staffers are white nationalist Fuentes fans is exposing a real problem for the Republican Party: Most Americans aren’t fascists, but the Republican Party has become the ideological home of fascism.
One way to think of the extraordinary turn to the Democrats on Tuesday is that a lot of Americans didn’t really understand, back in November 2024, who Donald Trump really is, or what his party has become. They thought they were getting the part of lower inflation and a little bit less woke, and instead they got the party of high tariffs, masked thugs, and neo-Nazi youth.
For those of us who were paying attention, there’s an element of “Of course, you dummies, this was obvious for a long time!” to the present moment of realization, both on the part of the American people and GOP elites. Trump campaigned on doing everything he’s now doing, and he wasn’t coy about it. Kevin Roberts has long used fascist or fascist-adjacent rhetoric. The book he published last year (with an introduction by JD Vance) is profoundly ugly in the way it talks about anyone Roberts doesn’t like. And Roberts turns out to hate basically everyone:
it's utterly wild how the Heritage Foundation president talks about other people if you found a guy talking like this outside, you'd probably call the cops
What’s happening now, inside of the GOP, is the dawning understanding that (1) they have a serious fascist and Nazi problem and (2) the American people can’t stand them. The trouble is, for the future of the GOP, their serious fascist and Nazi problem is shockingly widespread among young Republicans, running through the bulk of their talent pipeline. To fix it, they basically need to reboot the American right as a movement, and somehow do that in a conservative social and information environment dominated by the likes of Fuentes. That’s an uphill battle.
And they’ll need to do this in a political environment that has turned decidedly against them. You’ve probably got a floor of around 30% who will support MAGA no matter what. But the remaining 70% are coming to see what MAGA is, and are swinging hard against it. Red states are gerrymandering on the assumption that the 2026 electorate, or the 2028 one, will look similar to 2024. But the turns we saw on Tuesday mean that strategy could blow up spectacularly, wiping out what once were safe red districts. Additionally, the GOP’s far-right culture war is pissing people off. When your campaign for governor, as was the case in Virginia, is built primarily around openly hating trans kids, you’re not going to win fans.
The best the GOP can hope for, if they want to hold onto power, is to either turn things around by November of next year, or to so fully consolidate power that it doesn’t matter. Neither is impossible, but at this point neither seems all that likely.
This is a lesson in how much the content of coalitions matters. If you let the rot in, either from the bottom or the top, that rot might give you a large enough coalition to win a few elections, but if the country itself isn’t as fully rotten as you’ve become—and America, thankfully, is nowhere near that fully rotten—you’re going to end up facing a backlash you probably can’t beat.
And the GOP deserves every bit of it.
If you enjoy my writing, consider supporting me on Patreon. You'll get early access to all new episodes of my ReImagining Liberty podcast, as well. Learn more here.