The real – and far scarier – reason Republicans think Biden is illegitimate | Thomas Zimmer

Many conservatives don't think the 2020 election was stolen. But they believe democracy itself has betrayed America, by allowing the wrong' people to take charge

Earlier this month, Team Trump claimed in court that their efforts to nullify Joe Biden's victory could not possibly have been fraudulent or be described as a criminal conspiracy, because those in and around the White House had merely been acting on the basis of sincerely held suspicions.

This sparked the latest round in the never-ending debate over whether or not Republicans actually believe that the election was stolen from them. Politically, it is important to push back against the opportunistic ways in which Republicans up and down the country have been using the big lie". But if we are trying to understand what is animating the right's rapidly accelerating radicalization against democracy, binary assumptions of Republicans as either true believers or power-hungry cynics are not very helpful and actually obscure more than they illuminate. In some fundamental way, Republicans are both. What we really need to grapple with is why so many Republicans are convinced the outcome of the election was illegitimate regardless of whether or not there were specific procedural irregularities.

Thomas Zimmer is a visiting professor at Georgetown University, focused on the history of democracy and its discontents in the United States, and a Guardian US contributing opinion writer