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U.S. political thought has long assumed that extremism carries the seeds of its own correction— that the system, left to its own natural cycles, will eventually drift back toward balance.

Under that logic, the Republican Party’s future goes something like this: After two presidential terms and the MAGA coalition that Donald Trump built, the party will eventually self-correct, nudged back toward stability by growing dissatisfaction with Trump’s low approval ratings, unstable economy, and social media threats to obliterate an entire civilization in Iran.

U.S. political thought has long assumed that extremism carries the seeds of its own correction— that the system, left to its own natural cycles, will eventually drift back toward balance.

Under that logic, the Republican Party’s future goes something like this: After two presidential terms and the MAGA coalition that Donald Trump built, the party will eventually self-correct, nudged back toward stability by growing dissatisfaction with Trump’s low approval ratings, unstable economy, and social media threats to obliterate an entire civilization in Iran.

Such hope was on display when former Rep. Majorie Taylor Green, once a MAGA warrior of the first degree, broke with the administration over the Epstein files, and denounced the president’s Iran threats as “madness.”

But recent history suggests the party may end up moving toward greater extremism, not less. After the era of Newt Gingrich’s bomb-throwing GOP, there was an expectation—highlighted in George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign—that the party would try to shift to the center. Instead, as the 2010 midterms and the emergence of the Tea Party showed, Republicans ended up moving further right.

The same thing could happen again. A recent New Yorker piece by Antonia Hitchens traced the growing ranks of young white nationalists who have migrated from the fringes of social media into circles surrounding mainstream Republicans. The popular streamer Nick Fuentes and his Groypers—who are generally antisemitic, nativist, and racist—have become impossible to ignore. The war in Iran, Fuentes argues, could prove a breaking point that expands their power. “Trump is the trailblazer,” one Republican told Hitchens, “the person who opens the door for the rest of us. He opened the door to this next generation coming to take over.”

Fuentes and the Groypers are just one extremist faction circulating within the Republican body politic. Unless........

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