The insurgency that smashed its way into the Capitol on Jan. 6 didn’t end on that day. It certainly didn’t begin on that day. For more than five decades, Republicans have become more and more dependent on a system that feeds the most extreme voices, punishes any sign of moderation, and ensures that there is no such thing as “going too far.” 

When wondering why Republicans didn’t turn away from Donald Trump and try to salvage some modicum of responsibility as they tried to rebuild the Republican Party, the answer is simple enough—there is no Republican Party. There hasn’t been one in decades. There is simply nothing there to reform.

This is a party that, in the 2020 elections, did not even bother to write a platform. It makes no promises to the people. It has no defining philosophy. What it has is funding. What that funding demands is extremism. 

It’s a six-decade history of using “strategic extremism” to keep people angry and America off-balance. 

There is a fundamental difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party that has more to do with structure than with any policy. Going back to at least the time of Barry Goldwater, conservatives have funded an extensive network of “institutes” and “think tanks” that long ago stopped providing support to the party and instead became its masters. If Republicans want legislation, they get it from ALEC. When they want a judicial candidate, they find him at the Federalist Society. And if they need to be told what to say on any topic, they need only read the notes from the Heritage Foundation.

The interlocking network of councils, foundations, societies, etc., provides Republicans with pre-built policies. It also acts as both a refuge for failed candidates and a ready source of staff and advisers. With Donald Trump in the White House, these Republican adviser farms handed over a block of personnel who folded right back into the system when their time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was over. Jeffrey Clark, who spent his time in D.C. plotting to make himself attorney general in support of Trump’s attempted coup, is now “Chief of Litigation and Director of Strategy” at the New Civil Liberties Alliance—which is funded by the Charles Koch Foundation. John Eastman, author of the infamous memo providing easy steps for subverting democracy, is now director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence.

The number of these organizations seems endless. Their budgets bottomless. And they have only one requirement: extremism. From their foundation, they have operated for the goal of doing to democracy what Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist has long pledged to do to the government—“shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

When the London School of Economics (LSE) went in search of an example of political extremism, they looked at the rise of right-wing parties in Eastern Europe, and at the Brexit movement in their own country. But there was really only one place to go for a prime example of the situation in which a party that has lost any political relevance, a party on the verge of destruction, decides to instead offer a “radical alternative.” 

For Republicans, that switch happened in the 1960s. That’s when, as LSE describes, a party with a “battered reputation” decided to reinvent itself through extremism.

Republicans were coming off a series of losses. They lost control of the Senate in 1954, dropped their numbers again with the midterms in 1958, lost the presidential election in 1960, then saw their numbers shrink even further in 1962 midterms. The problem for Republicans was that decades of Democratic policies had been successful and popular. Programs like Social Security and the pilot Food Stamp Program were genuinely ensuring that children got enough to eat and that seniors didn’t spend their final years in grinding poverty. At the same time, unions were lifting workers with the best pay, the best benefits, and the best economy the nation had known. 

When Republicans talk about how good things were in the 1950s, they’re talking about an era in which they repeatedly lost ground—before they got a second wind by doubling down on racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and anti-immigrant policies. In the decades that followed, the Republican Party came not so much a coalition of like-minded Americans, as a front for the organizations doing the real work of preventing America from making social or economic progress.

As The Atlantic wrote in February, the 1964 switch from traditional political party to engine of extremism didn’t come without protest. There were divisions, protests, and a real sense from some of those in Republican leadership that they were losing something important. In a poignant moment, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller was booed by Goldwater supporters as he came to the podium to endorse an amendment to that year’s party platform that would have condemned political extremism—including the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society. The resolution failed.

Why didn’t the Republican Party press harder against Trump? Because that fight is over. Republicans long ago surrendered the idea that their party has an ideological core. Instead, it has a rotating series of agendas that all follow that 1964 script — exploiting racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and hatred of immigrants to generate anger. Anger. Anger. Money. And anger.

That pro-extremism position was enough to secure Republicans the White House just four years later. Since then, the answer to what Republicans would do next has been simple: More. When Watergate sent the party into a fresh spiral, the answer was more extremism. Richard Nixon might have felt he had to keep the worst of his racism for his “friends.” Ronald Reagan had no such qualms.

When Reagan’s level of “welfare queen” and anti-gay rhetoric was no longer enough, the Party reinvented itself again through the “Tea Party Movement,” described in a 2011 paper from Harvard University:

Like 1964 and 1980, the Tea Party revisions in 2010 represented that same turning of the dials by a desperate party seeking a do-over. And just as on those past occasions, tactical extremism was the answer. In 2016, it turned those dials again, with Trumpism.

When Trumpism lost the White House, Senate, and House in 2020, it might have seemed to ideal moment to seek something else. But only to those who aren’t utterly dependent on those “Republican business elites,” to “conservative media sources,” and the vast network of organizations that actually create, the messaging and the money that drives Republicans Inc. For them, more tactical extremism is always the right answer.

Tactical extremism brought Goldwater conservatism, then Reaganism, then Gingrichism, then the Tea Party, then Trumpism. For 2022, the not-at-all-invisible bosses of the Republican Party see only one alternative: embracing insurgency. 

Republicans running in 2022, with very, very few exceptions, will be running on a platform that supports the Big Lie of electoral fraud in 2020. And those same Republicans are going to be running on a platform that says Jan. 6 was justified; that it was an act of “patriots” trying to “take back” the country, and that any investigation of those events is clearly another deep state witch hunt.

Back in April, The New York Times reported that “Republicans who were the most vocal in urging their followers to come to Washington on Jan. 6 to try to reverse President Donald J. Trump’s loss, pushing to overturn the election and stoking the grievances that prompted the deadly Capitol riot, have profited handsomely in its aftermath, according to new campaign data.” 

That’s because Republicans have built a machine that rewards extremism. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan … they’re not flukes. They’re the desired outcome from a system that seeks out and funds extremism. They’re not getting money because people suddenly woke up in the morning and decided that this was the day to cut a check to a GOP congressman in another state. They’re getting money because all those institutes, foundations, societies, and councils are constantly bombarding Republican voters with a message of tactical extremism, driving dollars into the campaign chests of those who will carry that message.

Republicans in 2022 will be running in support of the Jan. 6 insurgents. At the moment this is being written, Greene and Gaetz are in the middle of a press conference describing how these patriots are being held as political prisoners by partisan Democrats. Who are also communist cockroaches.

Greene had totaled up a potential $80,000 in House fines for refusing to wear a mask by the end of 2021. Her concern for this is less than zero, because the reward she gets for this behavior far exceeds any potential punishment.

When talking to a general audience in a purple area, Republicans may try to ignore both Jan. 6 and the Big Lie. But that’s not how they will message their base. Because, as The New Yorker pointed out last August, the big money is behind the Big Lie.

That money is funding elections at every level, from county boards to state attorneys general, in an effort to determine who counts the votes in 2022 and 2024. Groups like ALEC are also out there right now, providing governors, boards, and Republican-controlled state legislatures with the directions they need on purging Democrats (or democracy-minded Republican holdovers) from positions of power.

Consider this: Former vice president Dick Cheney attended this morning’s pro forma session of the House as an outcast of his party now far to the left of the effective center of power. For 2022, that center will be squarely pushing both the Big Lie and the idea that the Jan. 6 insurgency was good. In the sense that it was a good start. 

Because when it comes to tactical extremism, the only answer possible is, “Yes, please. More.”