Read on Twitter
To understand the modern Republican Party, this is all you need to understand. Racism, fascism and corruption are not considered to be even mildly problematic within the party. Failing to serve whoever the current authoritarian leader is, with abject obedience, is the only crime. https://twitter.com/megkinnardap/status/1355574024902991881
. @JohnWDean wrote a terrific book more than a decade ago called Conservatives Without Conscience, which described the partyâs authoritarian drift and all-but predicted it would one day result in a Political Jim Jones like Trump. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/trumps-conservatives-without-conscience-are-rattled-by-john-dean/
More on the book in this 2006 review: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/books/review/30gillespie.html?referringSource=articleShare
And the thing that canât be said enough or ignored is that the cause of this drift is the age-old combination of plutocratic greed, which funds the party for its own purposes, and demographic panic, which has turned the GOP into a white-interests party. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-republican-choice/
Thatâs why Black folks were entirely unsurprised that the party of Reagan produced Trump and Q-Anon Marge and the Hitler Bungalow Enthusiast. The Republican Party has since the Southern Strategy been the redoubt of demographically panicked white voters who crave a past America.
And yes it also attracts a small number of nonwhite voters and even nonwhite immigrants who crave the runoffs of white privilege or openly reject fellow migrants to try to win acceptance as Super Duper American
or due to abortion or perceived competition for blue collar jobs...
or due to abortion or perceived competition for blue collar jobs...
...or who just gravitate toward the Republican Partyâs âstrongmanâ style of politics... https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54972389
But however you slice it, the one thing Trumpian Republican politics â which honestly is actually just regular Republican politics as practiced throughout my lifetime with more shock value, open racism, fascism and cruelty added on â the one thing it should NOT be, is surprising.
Postscript: re that 2006 review, it is very classic NYTimes: pooh-poohing what the writer views as excessive meanness towards the right. But these parts of it are absolute truth:
And especially this:
