"Vladimir Putin has this deep appeal to the modern Republican Party because he believes in power, he believes in wealth, he believes in control," former GOP strategist Rick Wilson warned recently in a conversation with me on "Salon Talks." Wilson added bluntly, the GOP "have become very friendly to dictatorship, to authoritarianism…people like Putin."
Wilson is no longer a Republican himself, but knows them from the inside and out — from their strengths to their dark, undemocratic desires. After all, he was one of the top political consultants building the party from behind the scenes for decades. Wilson, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, candidly described today's GOP as "an authoritarian, dictator-friendly party that has abandoned all of its ideological predicates except pure power, and these small-D democratic values." And he was just getting warmed up. Wilson added, "What the Republicans are doing, they're racing to make 2024 the very last election we ever have in this country…I don't want to seem like I'm exaggerating that, they don't want elections, they want power."
