I think we’ve all probably pored over Timothy Snyder’s little booklet “On Tyranny: 20 lessons for democracy” more than a few times over the past few years. (If you haven’t, get it. It’s worth it.) Anyway, I was intrigued by this piece by William Saletan for the same reason: This is part of Saletan’s super interesting deep dive into what happened to Lindsey Graham. It’s not about what a servile fool he is — he is used as a representative for the entire Republican party: Many other journalists have written about Graham and Trump. Most of them have focused on the personal relationship between the two men. They examine the ways in which Graham’s evolution was distinctive. I’m not interested in what’s distinctive about Graham. I’m interested in what isn’t. How does his story illuminate what happened to the whole Republican party? How did the poison work? We need to answer these questions because the authoritarian threat is bigger than one man. Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency destroyed the myth that the United States was immune to despotism. Our institutions and the people who run them are vulnerable. We have to confront these vulnerabilities and learn how to deal with them before our democracy is threatened again. So why focus on Graham? First, because he was a central player in the Republican party’s capitulation to Trump. And second, because he talked constantly. He produced an enormous trove of interviews, speeches, press briefings, and social media posts. Through these records, we…