Republican politics is fear-based politics. This is irrefutable. I understand why Republicans live in fear:
Fear is not a dominant feature of Conservative policies. ---Celebrating and embracing liberty, however, are dominant tenets.
Everything is a conspiracy. Dr. Fauci is out to get you. Bill Gates wants to microchip you. The shoe is coming; it's right behind you!
Who's talking about questioning authority? Republicans question science, and they go to shamans and quacks for guidance.
I might agree that fear is not the dominant feature of modern Republican politics, but it is certainly one of the dominant features. Other features are party members' preference for job training over education, anti-intellectualism and mistrust of academia. Most troubling is the party's latent White Nationalism which has been awakened by it demagogic leadership. This spells trouble for a country demographically becoming browner, and rapidly so. The last major nation where White Nationalism became a dominating feature ended up being bombed into the dust. The U.S. sorely needs healthy opposition in its politics to prevent one political faction or another from becoming either tyrannical or ineffectual. Where will that healthy opposition come from? Certainly not from the Republicans, who are working so hard to marginalize themselves. The danger they represent to the rest of us is their only feature keeping them from irrelevancy. I suppose the independent voter will now be called on to fill the void left by the Republicans who consciously abandoned integrity and reason and instead declared war on truth and embraced lies and nastiness in what is likely to be a futile attempt to hold their dwindling flock together.
FEAR: Fear of monsters under the bed caused a General to call his enemy and without regard to his soldiers offered to forewarn of troop movements against China