Your analysis gives me a little more hope, but I do have reservations about the "old school Republican" party. I believed that the Republicans in my own family, as well as former colleagues of mine, would fall into that category. They have spent their entire lives in Midwestern farm country, residing in or around small towns and villages. If affiliated religiously, they belong to mainstream denominations. They are civic-minded, volunteering within their communities and, in some cases, serving in local elective office.

I assumed that despite their support for Trump (many are lifelong Republicans) , they would share my disgust at the false claims about the election as well as my horror watching the events of January 6th play out.

But I was wrong. Dead wrong.

Everyone that I spoke to was eager to make excuses for Trump and either embraced the fictional election fraud, or at least insisted that it was a real possibility. They saw Biden as either incompetent or as a puppet of 'woke' social engineers and communists. They were equipped with stories about the horrible things that Democrats were doing (a friend insisted that in one blue state, abortions had been legal up until the second week after birth)! And they seemed comfortable with the idea that state legislators might have to simply set aside the popular vote if that was necessary to stop the radical left.

In short, these decent, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth people are no longer 'old school' Republicans. They are bitter and resentful MAGA extremists, swallowing the party line without any qualms or reservations. They would repeat the most absurd and irrational things as if they were self-evident and I was a fool for not grasping the truth (e.g., Trump didn't call off the mob that had invaded the capitol for more than two hours because his request for them to leave had to go through 'appropriate' channels).

To use an admittedly grim metaphor, I am very much afraid that this delusional condition that we associate with MAGA has metastasized and spread much deeper and farther in the body politic than we may have thought. If we still had telephone booths, the so-called 'old school' Republicans could probably hold their next convention in one of them.