Democrats can’t seem to make up their minds about the state of their GOP rivals.

On the one hand, leading progressives warn that Republicans are on the verge of a total government takeover that will mean the destruction of Democracy, as we know it. The scheme through which they will achieve this devastating change involves minor voting adjustments in a handful of GOP controlled states.

At the same time, the Democrats deride this fearful opposition party as decrepit and on the verge of total dissolution, doomed by demography to utter irrelevance due to the growing numbers of left-leaning, non-white, and younger voters.

It’s an obvious contradiction to claim that the GOP is perched on the verge of collapse at the same time you insist they’re on the cusp of executing a sweeping coup to impose one-party rule. Of course, neither caricature of Republicans counts as even vaguely accurate, but Donald Trump’s party does sustain some serious damage from contradictions of their own.

Most seriously, Trump loyalists want the public to embrace their hero as the powerful, purposeful, all-knowing mastermind who Made America Great Again, but for some reason couldn’t manage to preside over an honest, reliable election or to block what he has called the “greatest crime in human history”. Let’s face it, any chief executive who permits a theft of that magnitude under his watch is either utterly incompetent or totally delusional or, more likely, a bit of both.

In the middle of Joe Biden’s first year, no theme damages Democrats more grievously than their paranoid predictions that the other side is engaged in some massive conspiracy to suppress votes and, in the midst of record turnouts, disfranchise millions of people of color.

As both major parties suffer from self-destructive, conspiratorial obsessions, it’s the political system as a whole that endures the most meaningful damage.