Fringe elements get amplified.
The January 6 seditionists apparently thought that they would be joined by throngs of tens of thousands across the country; didn't quite happen that way.
The Trumpublican Party remains as described by Jonathan Chait: "The Republican Party is constructed as a machine: Into one end are fed the atavistic fears of the white working class as grist, and out the other end pops The Wall Street Journal editorial-page agenda as the finished product."
What I think has really been happening is that the moneyed interests who are the core of the Trumpublican Party have been strategically investing in controlling the country for decades. They have exploited the strongly anti-democratic aspects of the Senate -- where podunk Idaho gets as much representation as California -- and the laziness of disengaged voters who don't show up in off years when state governments are chosen, but I think more than anything else they have just bought up all the cheap media markets across the country and inundated them with idiocy presented as truth.
So in al-Abama "everyone knows" that the Democrats' "socialist agenda" is going to force them to marry someone of the same sex (... but a different race!
) and then have an abortion, all while giving military secrets away to the Chinese.
And part, I think, of what has turned Georgia (Georgia -- !) purple is that Atlanta has just become an expensive media market, and it is no longer a matter of just buying a half dozen minor radio stations and a few television stations to be able to control the information people receive; Texas (Texas -- !) is starting to move along the same path.
And underlying it all is that Americans are extremely fat and happy. It's very easy to imagine that you'll live in a lean-to in the woods, drinking stump water and eating roadkill, while every night you slip into the nearest communist libtard city to kill the enemy and sabotage their economy.
But then you get pissed off because your cable provider isn't covering the American football game that you want to watch and the pizza you ordered hasn't arrived yet ... and it's been twenty minutes! And one of the springs in your La-Z-Boy recliner keeps getting stuck.
Average Americans aren't going to fight any kind of war anywhere for any reason. The military could, but there is not going to arise a civil war-level split in the military that would get them there before anyone took notice; the military prior to the 19th century American Civil War was organized state-by-state, and we do not have that any longer to any degree worth mentioning.
Plus, for all the tribalism, there is no singular issue around which anyone with even an eighth of a lick of sense would feel was worth going to war over, as there was with slavery.