In Fire

Where do Republican officials think this is going to end?
Damon Linker "The Republican lies about election fraud are a ticking time bomb"

That's easy. Back in 2012, Richard Mourdock (I keep coming back to this guy, don't I?) said in an interview with CNN: "What has motivated many people to get out and work for us and we are at that point where one side or the other has to win this argument. One side or the other will dominate." And I suspect that Republican officials have determined that now is their chance to win the argument and dominate. Because their constant assertions that the only legitimate elections are those clearly won by Republican candidates will motivate people to "get out and work" for Republican candidates by refusing to accede to Democratic politicians taking office.

As many people have pointed out, democratic government and peaceful handovers of power can only happen with the consent of all parties. One side consistently withholding consent results in a crisis. It's possible that Republican lawmakers hope that this crisis ends with Democratic voters understanding that their first choices to represent them will be unable to do so, and will settle for Republican leadership (and perhaps, in Republicans' sweetest dreams, succumbing to Stockholm Syndrome and deciding to back, however tepidly, the winning side). It's just as possible that they've bought into the more belligerent of their supporters' claims and decided that if it actually comes down to a literal fight, that the bloodletting will end with a Democratic surrender.

Either way, I suspect they think that they can use the fear and disaffection of their most ardent supporters as tools. Presumably, they would put those tools to use to make better lives for everyone, but I suspect that revanchism has become too deeply ingrained for that, and what would actually happen is simply a collapse into score-settling and reprisals, as the United States returns to a phase in which the law is meaningless, because people's personal understandings of right and wrong are considered more important than petty considerations of legality.

Republican backers of the narrative that they are the only legitimate officeholders in the country think that it's going to end in an enduing political victory at best, and likely a consequence-free return to the status quo at the very worst. And so far, there's nothing to demonstrate that they're wrong about that. It's unlikely that they'll manage to weld the rest of the nation into a coherent block of opposition, and that's more or less what would need to happen to overcome the structural electoral advantages that Republicans, especially at the national level, have. And if the Supreme Court becomes the openly partisan institution that many have hoped it would become and others believe that it now is, they can count on those people who follow the will of the institution wherever it leads them to be their allies in imposing their wills.

Sure, as I've noted before, democracy is not intended to be a means by which mutually hostile groups determine which one suffers for the benefit of the other. But this brewing conflict between two incompatible notions of justice and right isn't new. Republicans have simply decided that they are better served by following the example of former President Trump and raising the boil, rather than keeping the lid on things.