I know it is naive and yet - all these guardians of the Republic

Whenever you’re not sure why people who you think are people of conscience let something happen that you think no person of conscience would ever let happen, the answer is probably Money.

Compartmentalization is a subconscious psychological defense mechanism used to avoid cognitive dissonance, or the mental discomfort and anxiety caused by a person's having conflicting values, cognitions, emotions, beliefs, etc. within themselves.

Compartmentalization allows these conflicting ideas to co-exist by inhibiting direct or explicit acknowledgement and interaction between separate compartmentalized self-states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmentalization_(psychology)

but there’s still a part of me that expects better of them.

Today’s Republican Party is little better than a Banana republic oligarchical power, a party lacking honor, ethics, scruples, and common decency

anything like the Democratic Party. We are a coalition of coalitions who unite around policies.

The Republican Party is like an identity group (or maybe it's identitarian?). They unite around the idea of being in the same group, and opposing liberalism at any cost. And they were conditioned to do that by a RW media designed just for that purpose, not to be serious journalism but to become a sphere where they teach eachother what to think and what to say. You'll notice, it's only a language of opposing things. It is not constructive. It is only a language of tearing down and destroying.

Other than a few figleaf policies, like Immigration and Abortion, they do not care about policies. I don't care what they say, they don't care about deficits or budgets. Not one fucking bit.

I was just reading about a study where they cut up a bunch of things Trump said that were totally contradictory, and Republicans agreed with them no matter how liberal if they knew Trump had said it.

Masha Gessen says something in her new book, that we need to get off of policies and find a more aspiration language to talk about politics. For our own survival.

Lots of people just don't like democracy. With some, it's brain laziness. They don't want to learn from credible news sources. They want their biases confirmed. They want a strong leader, not thinking about what dark consequences that can lead to. But as a party, the gop harbors subversive elements... not lazy, but authoritarian.

they just hide behind freedom and republic.

The USSR had a constitution the totalitarians largely ignored it.