This week I’ve been writing about the way the Republican Party is quickly forgetting about January 6 and falling back in line behind Trump. As part of that, I noted that Trump had led the Republican base to a bad place and what’s required is a new leader who can lead them back.

I received the obvious response that the Republican base was awful long before Trump arrived on the scene, and that’s true. But not “storm the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power” awful. Can we at least stipulate to this?

The way I put it is that “Trump recognized all the latent worst tendencies that had been cultivated over the years by the GOP and exploited them.” When I say “all” there, I mean “all.”

Attitudes about race, immigration and policing are foremost, but also basic selfish instincts on foreign aid or greedhead instincts on taxes. Trump ramped up the discomfort many feel about transgendered people and he greatly amplified suspicion and contempt for scientists, experts and reporters.

Some of these things were not particularly latent prior to Trump but most involved some degree of sheepishness or rationalization. On race and immigration in particular, Trump brought new people into the GOP, including former Democrats and many who had not previously been engaged in politics or voting.

I’m reminded of something that struck me back in 2001, in the weeks after the 9/11 and anthrax attacks. At the time, I was working in a corporate job and had known quite a few of my colleagues for several years. In late September and early October of that year, I noticed that a large percentage of the people I worked with had suffered a stress-induced outbreak of sores around the mouth. They had herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1).

I was married at the time, but I still found it unnerving to realize how widespread the virus was, and it really demonstrated how the September 11/anthrax attacks had collectively traumatized the country. I had never seen the latency period of the virus broken before in my colleagues and now the virus had reemerged in so many of them all at once.

This is how I think about how racism and other negative human attitudes work in a political context. It’s always lying there below the surface, but it isn’t always present and it’s seldom contagious. No amount of stress can cause an outbreak of herpes in someone who doesn’t have the virus, but it’s still possible to catch it from someone who does. This is why you don’t want the people exposed to racist leaders and you don’t want leaders who use racial issues to cause stress.

A Republican leader can choose how they want to lead. The choices they make will influence how people feel and how they act. They can cause an outbreak of racism. They can activate latent racist attitudes in people. They can create new racists who will infect their associates. They can also decline to exploit opportunities to do this. John McCain could have run a very racist campaign against Barack Obama, and his contest certainly wasn’t free of racist themes. On the whole, however, McCain himself took a higher road, sometimes even sticking his neck out to tamp down the racism in the base. If nothing else, this prevented things from getting worse.

Trump saw this as weakness. He didn’t understand why McCain, and Romney after him, left tools on the table that might have helped them win. So, he pursued a viral outbreak as the core of his strategy and built a political coalition around it.

As mentioned above, race is only one of several wedges he used, but the point remains consistent with all of them. You can lead people to a bad place. You can make people embrace their worst emotions, feelings and instincts. That is what’s happened to the Republican Party and the Republican base, and it culminated on January 6.

So, yes, the Republican base was always full of deplorables and greedheads, and simply leading them back to where they were before Trump arrived won’t change that. It’s just the minimum that is needed right now.