Many of the critiques of the GOP and its leaders get it somewhat wrong. The party is not filled with authoritarians (though many do exist). It’s filled with cowards. Despite the pose of machismo, the swaggering strut and the tough talk, in fact the party is pervaded by fear and weakness, a terror of confronting the big bully in the room. Consider what happened with Jan. 6. Most Republican leaders, including the two senior-most congressional leaders, saw it for what it was, an unprecedented assault on democracy. They privately and even sometimes publicly spoke out against it. And then they worried that Trump still had the base with him, tucked in their tails and either quickly reversed course and became lapdogs (Kevin McCarthy) or quietly dropped the subject altogether (Mitch McConnell).

It’s always hard for politicians to break with an activist and energetic base. It took the Republican Party years to speak out against Joseph McCarthy. It took a while before Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were willing to distance themselves from the John Birch Society. In both cases it did happen in the end. It was easier in those days when the party was more hierarchical.

But it took the voice of the most influential conservative intellectual, William F. Buckley Jr., with his persistent attacks on the Birchers, to provide cover for a politician like Reagan. Today, Fox News does the opposite, persistently trying to stir up the anger, the hate and the conspiracy theories. Unlike Buckley, Fox News is not motivated by the national interest but by profit.

Will the fever break this time? Obama predicted that after his 2012 election, the GOP would free itself of its increasingly extreme elements (such as the tea party). But it never happened. While there have been opportunities to course correct, the party remains utterly enamored of and captive to its most extreme members and the media outlets that sing their praises. Remember that even as Fox News dominates cable news, its biggest show has 3.4 million viewers out of about 170 million registered voters, just under half of whom are or lean Republican. It is an extreme minority that has cowed the majority into silence.

There have been important Republican leaders who have spoken out against Donald Trump, most prominently Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney. Now is the time for them and others who want to save the party to come out and purge it of its extremism. The fever has broken, but if the Republican Party’s doctors willingly continue to behave like cowardly quacks, the patient could easily relapse once again.

A convulsion has shaken America and many other Western democracies over the past few years. People became disgusted with established power, trust in many institutions neared rock bottom, populist fury rose from right and left.

On the right, in America, this manifested as Donald Trump. To his great credit, Trump reinvented the G.O.P. He destroyed the corporate husk of Reaganism and set the party on the path to being a multiracial working-class party. To his great discredit, he enshrouded this transition in bigotry, buffoonery and corruption. He ushered in an age of performance politics — an age in which leaders put more emphasis on attention-grabbing postures than on practical change.

The left had its own smaller version of performative populism. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became a major political figure thanks to her important contributions to Instagram. The Green New Deal was not a legislative package but a cotton candy media concoction. Slogans like “Abolish ICE” and “Defund the police” were not practical policies, just cool catchphrases to put on posters.

The populist convulsion had its moment, but on the left, prominent Democrats tried to harness its energy while reining in its unelectable excesses. In 2020, James Clyburn threw his weight behind an establishmentarian moderate, Joe Biden. That year, after progressives appeared to cost the Democrats several House seats with randy talk of socialism, moderate Democrat Abigail Spanberger roasted the left and was one of those who helped pull the party back toward the center on crime and other issues. Biden rejected the performative style of the populist moment while harnessing some progressive ideas.

Performative populism has begun to ebb. Twitter doesn’t have the hold on the media class it had two years ago. Peak wokeness has passed. There seem to be fewer cancellations recently, and less intellectual intimidation. I was a skeptic of the Jan. 6 committee at first, but I now recognize it’s played an important cultural role. That committee forced America to look into the abyss, to see the nihilistic violence that lay at the heart of Trumpian populism.

The election of 2022 marked the moment when America began to put performative populism behind us. Though the results are partial, and Trump acolytes could still help Republicans control Congress, this election we saw the emergence of an anti-Trump majority.

According to a national exit poll, nearly 60 percent of voters said they had an unfavorable view of Trump. Almost half of the voters who said they “somewhat disapprove” of Biden as president still voted for Democrats, presumably because they were not going to vote for Trumpianism. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll in September, 58 percent of respondents said that the MAGA movement was threatening America’s democratic foundations.

The single most important result of this election was the triumph of the normies. Establishmentarian, practical leaders who are not always screaming angrily at you did phenomenally well, on right and left: Mike DeWine in Ohio, Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania. Workmanlike incumbents from John Thune in South Dakota to Ron Wyden in Oregon had successful nights. Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin had the quotation that summarized the election: “Boring wins.”

Americans are still deeply unhappy with the state of the country, but their theory of change seems to have begun to shift. Less histrionic media soap opera. Less existential politics of menace. Let’s find people who can get stuff done.

The telling election results were at the secretary of state level. The America First Secretary of State Coalition features candidates who rejected the 2020 election results and who would have been a threat to election integrity if they had won Tuesday. Most either lost or seem on their way to losing. Meanwhile, Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state of Georgia who stood up to Trump’s bullying, won by a wide margin.

Because Democrats restrained their more extreme tendencies while Republicans didn’t, they held their own among independents in a year that could have been a G.O.P. romp. On abortion and many other issues, the median voter rule still applies. If you can get toward the spot where moderate voters reside, you will win elections.

To be clear, I am not saying the fever has broken within the minds of those in the MAGA movement. I am not saying MAGA Republicans won’t unleash a lot of looniness in the next Congress. I am saying voters have built a wall around that movement to make sure it no longer wins the power it once enjoyed. I am saying voters have given Republicans clear marching orders — to do what Democrats did and beat back the populist excesses on their own side.

There are two large truths I’ll leave you with. The first is that both parties are fundamentally weak. The Democrats are weak because they have become the party of the educated elite. The Republicans are weak because of Trump. The Republican weakness is easier to expunge. If Republicans get rid of Trump, they could become the dominant party in America. If they don’t, they will decline.

Second, the battle to preserve the liberal world order is fully underway. While populist authoritarianism remains a powerful force worldwide, people, from Kyiv to Kalamazoo, have risen up to push us toward a world in which rules matter, practicality matters, stability and character matter.

As Irving Kristol once wrote, the people in our democracy “are not uncommonly wise, but their experience tends to make them uncommonly sensible.”

And the election certification would have happened at some point soon afterwards once the situation was secure.

Seriously you guys, you can’t actually believe a rightwing coup would go unchallenged? Even if it was successful for a few days or weeks, it would not withstand the rage it would produce in its opponents. America is not Gilead.

I certainly believe there needs to be laws passed to make sure this madness never happens again. Fixing the electoral college act is step one.