There was a time when the Republican Party had the moral high ground. Founded in the 1850s on the principle of restoring the nation’s governing ideals, it stood for equality for Black Americans. For their part, the Democrats were the party of Jim Crow. Later, when the GOP was hijacked by the robber barons, Theodore Roosevelt and other progressives fought to return the party to its founding principle. Even as late as the 1960s, a moral impulse led Republican lawmakers, without whom the bill would have failed, to support the Civil Rights Act.

Democracies depend on norms — unwritten rules about how leaders and citizens should behave. One norm is forbearance — the idea that political power should be used with restraint rather than weaponized and taken to its lawful limits. Such norms have little standing in today’s Republican Party.

There was, for example, no constitutional barrier to prevent Wisconsin’s outgoing Republican governor, Scott Walker, in consort with the state’s Republican Legislature, to strip the governor’s office of power before the incoming Democratic governor could take office in 2019. But it violated the longstanding norm of American politics that the outgoing party accept the change in power that comes with losing an election.