An observation on Republican Party culture

[Waterfall]

Your example supports your point, but doesn't prove it. Meaning, you might inadvertently be cherry-picking: this was an atypical election, and my hypothesis is if you look back in history you can find equal amounts of these kinds of things going on in either party.

[Waterfall]

i will say on a high level, the Dems are actually the ones who seem more authoritarian-driven overall. For example, they have these closed primaries with the party able to just change the outcome on a whim (didn't that happen to Bernie in CO?).

This is because the Dems are a coalition of many very different, even oppositional groups. The ideal candidate of, say, unskilled Hispanic immigrants is very different from the ideal candidate of, say, leftist college students, which is very different again from the ideal candidate of, say, black single moms. Without a very top-down approach, this coalition would be unwieldy and collapse.

The GOP by comparison is fairly unified and simple to run: married white taxpayers mostly want the same things and have pretty close to the same idea of an ideal candidate. (Trump was an odd exception in this case, and I don't think any Republican voter would say he was anywhere remotely close to their ideal candidate.) So the GOP leadership can be more hands-off and let the party do its thing.