Zack Beauchamp has written what I think is the best and most empirically rigorous article in the genre of “the Republican Party has become a menace to democracy.”

As readers of “Republicans’ unhinged moderation” and “Is asymmetrical polarization real?” know, I fundamentally agree with this diagnosis. In part for deep reasons rooted in demographic and sociocultural change, and in part for the shallow reason that happenstance has led Republicans to benefit from counter-majoritarian aspects of U.S. political institutions, normative support for democratic self-government has collapsed among Republican elites and the GOP base. That’s a large challenge to America going forward.

I think that most people who believe that tend to be fairly hardcore liberals with some leftist tendencies — they have a lot of ideological distance from the conservative movement, and thus are willing to be very harshly critical of it — and what I want to argue today is that tendency creates a bit of a trap. The sam…