The most important feature of liberal democracy isn’t written in a constitution or a statute–it is forbearance. The minority permits the majority to rule, because it believes that the majority has a right to do so, and because it thinks it has a fair opportunity to prevail at the next election. The majority respects the legal rights of the minority, because it knows it could lose the next election, and because all-or-nothing politics turn your country into Iran or Lebanon. Everyone ultimately accepts that no one has a monopoly on truth, and that the marketplace of ideas has to remain open for progress to be made.
Both the right and the left agree that the right has lost the culture war. For the most part, this was not due to the exercise of political and legal power; the system itself is neutral, and permits both Christians and non-Christians to worship and associate as they please. To the extent that the left’s victory has roots in anything other than the intellectual superiority of its arguments, they can be found in its dominance of popular media. Under our system, that is a phenomenon that is outside the political sphere, and not subject to the control of any level of government.
Having lost the battle for hearts and minds on cultural issues, and viewing the left’s ideas as irredeemably false and corrupt, a portion of the reactionary right openly intends to impose its values on the majority by winning and exercising political power. Can that work? Not under our system, as it currently exists, but that could change if forbearance goes out the window and the right no longer accepts traditional limitations on its right to regulate free speech. Since this is a minority position, in order to prevail, it inevitably leads to large scale voter suppression, massive gerrymandering, censorship, and illiberal democracy at best, and fascism at worst.