Fareed Zakaria nails it here:

Many of the critiques of the GOP and its leaders get it somewhat wrong. The party is not filled with authoritarians (though many do exist). It’s filled with cowards. Despite the pose of machismo, the swaggering strut and the tough talk, in fact the party is pervaded by fear and weakness, a terror of confronting the big bully in the room. Consider what happened with Jan. 6. Most Republican leaders, including the two senior-most congressional leaders, saw it for what it was, an unprecedented assault on democracy. They privately and even sometimes publicly spoke out against it. And then they worried that Trump still had the base with him, tucked in their tails and either quickly reversed course and became lapdogs (Kevin McCarthy) or quietly dropped the subject altogether (Mitch McConnell).

It’s always hard for politicians to break with an activist and energetic base. It took the Republican Party years to speak out against Joseph McCarthy. It took a while before Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were willing to distance themselves from the John Birch Society. In both cases it did happen in the end. It was easier in those days when the party was more hierarchical.

But it took the voice of the most influential conservative intellectual, William F. Buckley Jr., with his persistent attacks on the Birchers, to provide cover for a politician like Reagan. Today, Fox News does the opposite, persistently trying to stir up the anger, the hate and the conspiracy theories. Unlike Buckley, Fox News is not motivated by the national interest but by profit.

Will the fever break this time? Obama predicted that after his 2012 election, the GOP would free itself of its increasingly extreme elements (such as the tea party). But it never happened. While there have been opportunities to course correct, the party remains utterly enamored of and captive to its most extreme members and the media outlets that sing their praises. Remember that even as Fox News dominates cable news, its biggest show has 3.4 million viewers out of about 170 million registered voters, just under half of whom are or lean Republican. It is an extreme minority that has cowed the majority into silence.

There have been important Republican leaders who have spoken out against Donald Trump, most prominently Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney. Now is the time for them and others who want to save the party to come out and purge it of its extremism. The fever has broken, but if the Republican Party’s doctors willingly continue to behave like cowardly quacks, the patient could easily relapse once again.