America has two parties, a center-left Democratic Party and a far right Republican Party (with a tiny sprinkling of moderates with little influence). Until the GOP changes, anyone who thinks of themselves as "center-right" has a choice between voting far right or center-left.

There are plenty of old school conservatives/Republicans who recognize this fact of current American politics, and they have said unequivocally that they will vote Democratic for now to halt the dangerous rightward slide of the GOP.

And then there are those, like Rich Lowry of the National Review, who don't love Trump and what's become of the GOP, but they either approve of or don't find dangerous the drift of the GOP off the right edge of the political map.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that prevents the US political system from being taken over by far right theocrats who believe their principles, based on a "higher law," are more important than the rule of law. See, e.g., Bill Barr.

The impeachment hearings are just the latest example of the extent to which the GOP is engaged in an all-out assault on the imperfect norms and institutions which have historically sustained the nation's imperfectly democratic political culture.

Once a far right party has succeeded in destroying those norms and institutions, all that will be left is power, naked power with little to stand in its way--not truth, not bureaucracies, not the media, not the law. It's what the founders most feared.

So if you're a centrist or a center-rightist...you may not like it, but in this historical moment the only choices you have before you is a Democratic Party that feels too far left to you but which still respects truth & the rule of law, or a far right GOP that respects neither.

The day after Trump was elected I happened to be eating dinner with several scholars who studied Latin America. They all recognized clearly the significance of what had just happened. The US is not immune to becoming a nation plagued by full-bore, thuggish illiberalism.

Here's a thread from yesterday where I talk about one explicitly illiberal thread of American political culture embodied by Gerald LK Smith--founder of the "America First Party" and advocate of "Christian Nationalism." https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1198307146749763585?s=20

When I look at MAGA political culture today, I see lots of things that look mighty Gerald LK Smith-ish.