What happens when years of propaganda cause pro-democratic norms to collapse

The New York Times writes:

Yet when the House Republican leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, was shown to have lied about his response to the deadliest assault on the Capitol in centuries and President Donald J. Trump’s culpability for it, there was little expectation that the consequences would be swift or severe — or that there would be any at all.

Dissembling is not a crime, but doing so to conceal a wholesale reversal on a matter as serious as an attack on the citadel of democracy and the possible resignation of a president would once have been considered career-ending for a politician, particularly one who aspires to the highest position in the House.

Not so for a Republican in the age of Trump, when Mr. McCarthy’s brand of lie was nothing particularly new; maybe it was just a Thursday. On Friday, another House member, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, said under oath at an administrative law hearing in Atlanta that she could “not recall” having advocated Mr. Trump imposing martial law to stop the transfer of power to Joseph R. Biden Jr., a position that would seem difficult to forget.

“It’s a tragic indictment of the political process these days — and the Republican Party of late — that truth doesn’t matter, words don’t matter, everybody can be elastic in areas that were once viewed as concrete,” said Mark Sanford, a former Republican governor of South Carolina who lied to the public about his whereabouts when he was pursuing an extramarital affair in South America and was censured by the State House of Representatives. “You cross lines now, and there are no longer consequences.”

Mr. Sanford’s political comeback as a Republican member of the House ended when he crossed the one line that does still matter in his party: He condemned Mr. Trump as intolerant and untrustworthy. Mr. Trump called him “nothing but trouble,” and Mr. Sanford was defeated in a primary in 2018.

It was Mr. Trump himself who showed just how few consequences there could be for transgressions that once seemed beyond the pale for the nation’s leaders in 2016, when he survived the release of leaked audio in which he boasted of sexually assaulting women — then went on to win the presidency. In the years afterward, he survived two impeachment trials, on charges of pressuring Ukraine for his own political gain and of inciting the Capitol riot, and he continues to spread the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. (emphasis added)

That speaks for itself. What is happening right now is the rise of neo-fascism in the Republican Party, the poisoning of society with distrust in democracy and fellow citizens, belief in falsehoods, moral rot, etc. This is just a brief consideration of some of the evidence.