American politics move fast, but we on the Politics + Society desk keep a close eye on the deeper, systemic issues behind the headlines. So when I came across a scholarly paper about how the Republican Party’s devotion to Donald Trump endangers democracy, I got in touch with its authors.

Those authors − Erica Frantz, a political science scholar at Michigan State University; Joseph Wright, who studies political science at Penn State; and Andrea Kendall-Taylor, who holds, among other posts, a position as distinguished practitioner in grand strategy at Yale − translated their scholarly article into a piece for regular readers.

In it, they describe how democracy can be subverted into giving birth to authoritarianism. It has to do with political party insiders being purged or converted into supporters not of ideals or policies but of a particular person. It has happened around the world, and it’s happening here, too. In 2020, for instance, the Republican Party adopted no new platform, agreeing instead to support whatever Trump did or said.

The cause of this problem, Frantz, Wright and Kendall-Taylor explain, is not so much with the person at the top but rather with all those in the lower ranks who go along or allow themselves to be pushed out of the way. These scholars describe a process, already underway in the U.S., that provides a warning not about politics but about democracy.