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That's a funny way of saying "former Republicans." By definition, anyone who wants to preserve democracy can no longer be a member of the Republican Party because they are directly at odds with 100% of its platform and ideology.
A lot of people have a political party woven into their identity. It's hard for them to accept that their party is no longer aligned with their views. If they still identify as Republicans but oppose Trump, they might just avoid confronting the cognitive dissonance by staying home or writing in a candidate for president. Plenty of others will pinch their nose and vote Trump because they just can't escape seeing it as R vs D.
By appealing to them as Republicans, the Harris campaign is able to basically say that it's ok, you don't have to choose between being a Republican and voting against the insurrectionist would-be dictator.
You're not wrong, tactically speaking about the current election, but at some point afterwards we've got quit enabling their denial and start helping them through the rest of those stages of grief.
Yeah, that’s what it’s become. A lot of people who voted for Trump the first time won’t do it again, because they thought the warnings and predictions were exaggerated. Oops.
Now, we’ve got a Republican Party that’s painted itself into a corner, because they let themselves become overrun by fascists. Former Republicans need to come to terms with that.
I mean, yes, but also no: it's not so much that they've "let themselves become overrun" and more "willingly given in to their basest desires."
Just give em the benefit of the doubt that they are really just conservatives, who may be misguided, but who are generally still operating in good faith, unlike the Trumpists simply looking to seize power and abuse it.
That's always been a fiction. The word for people who believe in things like democracy and the rule of law has always been some variety of "liberal."
Conservatism -- yes, true conservatism -- is an unbroken thread from monarchists, to Confederates, to NAZIs, to Trump.
Conservatism, minus the not-a-true-scotsman thing, is rooted in tradition. Traditions can vary from culture to culture, a person could even have liberal democracy as their tradition.
It's really just a sort of tag you can apply to any other ideology that means "very rigid-minded". You could have a conservative liberal, or a conservative communist if you wanted, they simply need to embrace those as traditions and refuse to alter their opinions no matter how much contradictory evidence is presented.
In this sense it is the opposite of progressive, which is identified by seeking change, both in the world around us, but also within ourselves as we try to stay current with changing environments and growing bodies of knowledge. We change our minds very readily when proven wrong, that's what makes us distinct from conservatives.
You didn't watch the source I cited at all, did you? Conservatism has a specific set of philosophers who founded it and we know what their goals were. It was not about being "very rigid-minded;" it was about defending the monarchy (and once that proved to be a lost cause, hierarchy in general).
Conservatives only want to "conserve" the status-quo insofar as the status-quo happens to be hierarchical. If the status-quo were egalitarian instead, they would 100% be champing at the bit to make broad, sweeping changes to introduce hierarchy as hard and fast as possible.
It's called disagreeing with your source. Our world is a fluid thing, I don't think a responsible historian or philosopher can try to define something by its origin without taking a broader context into account.