I found these paragraphs compelling:

If racial and cultural moderates abandon the GOP, the voters left in the party will tilt even further toward Trump’s message of racial and cultural resentment. “The Republican Party is going to continue to shrink and become more monolithic and less relevant and more regionalized,” Madrid, the Lincoln Project co-founder, told me. “They believe they are the last stand for America and [that] America is the white Christian nation. They believe they are what America is. And that kind of identity gets stronger as it loses—it becomes more self-righteous as it loses.”

The inexorable change coming to the Democratic Party could make the GOP even more reactionary. Biden has defined himself as a “transitional” figure, and demands are already building for a Democratic leadership corps that reflects the party’s increasing reliance on young people and people of color. It’s not hard to imagine that by 2024, Democrats will be led by presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who is of Jamaican and Indian descent; vice-presidential nominee Pete Buttigieg, an openly gay man; and House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries, who would be the first Black person to hold that post. Much like Obama did in 2008, such a roster would symbolize a changing America in a way that inspires the coalition of transformation—but terrifies many in the coalition of restoration. “It would touch on everything that a lot of Trump supporters were reacting to when they supported him in 2016—this sense of feeling threatened by the [challenge] to white supremacy in the U.S,” Schaffner told me.

Smug hatred. Ignorance brandished as a weapon. Malice disguising itself as a governing philosophy.