Mitch McConnell is not a counterrevolutionary. He has no reason to be; the McConnell Project is fully achievable under the current system. All he has to do is leverage the GOP’s structural advantages into election victories, and regressive tax cuts and deregulation follow naturally, since the filibuster stops neither.
The problem, of course, is that tax cuts and deregulation don’t resonate with the base, so he is forced to rely on nightmares of culture war apocalypse in order to get out the vote. The big change in the GOP over the last decade is that the base has started to take that pitch seriously, and to demand action to save white Christians from annihilation. Hence, the January 6 riot, the red state attempts to suppress the vote, and the threats and legislation directed at the tech companies and cancel culture.
The base is out of McConnell’s control. He can’t very well say that Christian camps really aren’t around the corner at this stage of the process. The freedoms provided in the Constitution–not the current administration–have become the enemy for reactionaries. Can Mitch restore order? For now, he just seems to be riding the waves.