Over at the Washington Monthly, David Atkins has kind of figured out the same thing I figured out back in 2015: The modern Republican Party is terrified of and yet still panders to the rage and racism of their Far Right voting base.
Trump is not just a danger to the country and an embarrassment to his party. He is also a proven electoral liability, having weighed down Republican fortunes in the last three election cycles. And yet, his legal problems have only elevated his positioning in the fight for the Republican presidential nomination against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the rest of the field. Even though the party leaders know Trump is a liability, they remain silent or vocally defend him.
A normal, rational political party would jettison Trump and find a more reputable champion for its policies. But today’s Republican Party is not normal. It has seemingly abandoned basic political reasoning and lost its self-preservation instincts. Conventional wisdom in political science says the party decides who its nominees will be. But who makes the decisions in today’s GOP?
One answer is that Trump is in charge, singlehandedly bending the party to his will and putting his self-interest ahead of the party’s. But this explanation fails to explain why most influential conservatives and Republican leaders don’t try to change this dynamic.
More importantly, it misreads Trump himself. The man has bigotries, manias, and obsessions and has done much to imprint them onto the Republican Party. But he is more a sheep than a shepherd. His fervently held opinions reflect what he last saw on TV or social media. He usually agrees with whomever he spoke to most recently...
It's not so much that donald trump is in control of the GOP: It's that the only type of leadership the GOP voting base will respond to are those who will pander and instigate the same ways trump does. Watch how DeSantis is doing his damnedest to punish immigrants and attack liberals over "Woke" issues. He's doing the best trump impersonation he can, if not to usurp trump's position but to fill the void when trump eventually falls.
His criminal indictments may eventually doom trump, but the specter of trumpism is now embedded into the Republicans' collective psyche until the party itself crashes and burns. In short: For the Republicans it's now trumps all the way down.
Feeding into that doom is a Far Right media industry that profits immensely from their constant fearmongering to keep the MAGA voters entranced and enraged. But that very pandering makes that media terrified of losing their audiences, which drives them into self-inflicted damage like the Dominion defamation lawsuit:
Fox News and other conservative media outlets are often credited with being the real leaders. There is something to this: Republican politicians are far more afraid of Fox News personalities than vice versa.
However, one interesting result of the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit was the revelation that Fox News is terrified of its own viewers. Fox News executives feared that if they failed to toe the line on Trump’s lies about the election and many other issues, their viewers would abandon them for competing far-right TV networks Newsmax and One America News Network...
It doesn't help that Newsmax is facing their own lawsuits on the matter and could well be forced to stop pandering to their viewers... but that would kill off their audience and their profits. They're now stuck in that Catch-22 as well.
Nor are the billionaire GOP donors really in charge. The famed Koch network pulled its support from Trump long ago and has launched a so far unsuccessful campaign to defeat him because they believe he cannot win a general election. Newly empowered MAGA politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz are not darlings of the donor class, who prefer less overtly divisive candidates who will cut taxes for the wealthy without disrupting global trade.
The deep-pocket donors are stuck because they have nowhere to go to deny or delay a Democratic Party that would likely end their tax cut cash grabs and regulate their capital gains to - gasp - help the poor. They could afford to start a third party, but they don't have enough gullible candidates to put on the ballots to replace the existing Republican Party, and any splitting of the ballots could either give the Dems more legislative control or worse let trump back in the White House where his misrule would lead to global economic chaos.
As Atkins concludes, the Republican Party leadership created a monster in their lab: An unthinking, ill-informed voter base driven by decades of Culture War insanity to act with malice towards "the Dread Other" to where they can't dial it back. All that fear and hate the Far Right media - pushed by GOP officials to win elections for offices they can't govern - sold in the public forum were like drugs, addicting that voter base. And like any addict, the Far Right voters need stronger and bigger doses to feel the same highs.
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the GOP base is in control of the party. Trump succeeds because he appears to be one of them. He vents their rage, watches the same television, shares the same vitriolic personality, and wears the same hatreds. He is less their leader than their reflection. Fox News is expert not at manipulating the base—though its editorial choices do certainly accomplish that to some extent—but at stoking its outrage. Big donors don’t so much generate the passions around which the base revolves as they help provide the financial fuel to turn those passions into electoral victories and legislative action...
It's all one big circle jerk: The billionaire donors keep feeding in the money to the wingnut media who gives trump every outlet to spew outrage and keep the audiences fired up as raging hate machines. It's just the group behind the wheel of this clown car are now the MAGA voter hate addicts. Everyone else in the GOP are hanging on in the back seats for dear life.
The problem is that in our skewed two-party electoral system of Winner-Take-All and partisan epistemic bubbles, we face the dangerous reality that the MAGA voter hate addicts can end up driving the national bus, and drive us all over the cliff.
For the love of GOD, to everyone else NOT in the MAGA bubble, please stop voting Republican. It's the only honest way to end their cycle of self-immolation and even help them recover to some semblance of Eisenhower normalcy.
2 comments:
The gop voting base is the result of a decades long multibillion dollar investment in the farming of an infinitely reprogrammable bloc that can be told which issues to be enraged about and vote against even if they conflict with yesterday's (or last cycle's) issues.
Which made them ripe for a conman who spent hours daily watching the TV he knew they watched in order to be the "he says what I'm thinking" guy. Couple that with his willingness to serve them the racism straight up at full strength, and you have a base as fully loyal to Fergus as any junkie is to their main source.
As for the Republican establishment, their seemingly only approach to wresting the base away from Fergus is to provide an even stronger product (see Rhonda Santis) which doesn't seem to be working very well. Addicts like what they like, and these addicts like Fergus.
We are heading for a reckoning of one sort or another when Fergus finally leaves the political stage, however that comes to pass: Can a significant number of MAGAs be brought back to reality, or do we have to face them as a dead loss to society for the rest of their lives?
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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