I don’t know. I mean, they definitely hate each other, but there is also nothing Republicans do better than falling in line when it matters.
They may fall in line eventually, but not until after most of them have destroyed each other. Maybe that will lead to another demagogue like Trump, but in the mean time, they’ll all be out for each other’s blood in some amazing factionalism.
It is how cults of personality tend to work. That person dies, and they fall apart. There’s splinters that cause problems for decades to come, yes, but they have to rebuild their whole political power from scratch.
For every cult of personality that you’ve heard of that sustained themselves in the long run after their leader’s death (like Scientology), there’s a hundred more you haven’t that faded away. For example, the Oneida Community. The leader, John Humphrey Noyes, fled the United States following an arrest warrant for statutory rape in 1879, and the group basically dissolved after that. The only thing left is the silverware company.
The thing about fascists is that there’s a certain skill for unifying them. I don’t know if anyone but trump in American politics has this skill because they were divided before him. There was the setup phase, the tea party, militia movement, etc where normies were being radicalized more and more towards the right. But until trump they lacked a rallying point.
