This is my attempt to make sense of the current Republican Party. I think they have slowly morphed into a cross between a religious/cult-like group and an infomercial style marketing machine.
The religious element being that they largely do not see the world as complex or needing proportional solutions, but rather, a black and white fantasy story of good and evil. Jesus and the saints are replaced with Ronald Reagan and Grover Norquest & Fox News. The devil is inside all Democrats, government workers, and academia people who challenge the talking points of the saints. By definition, we should never question and always have faith in the decreed FoxNews commentary. They have no process of self-analysis of their own ideas (ie, just have faith in the initial brainstorming thought from the saints). It’s a simple world to process if you believe in set of easy to consume commandments (trickle down always works, lower taxes on super-rich , traditional family appearances, etc).
Just taking taxes as an example, if the tax rate for $1M+ income was 32%...they’d want it to be 20%.....if it was 2%, they’d want it to be 0%. The amounts don’t matter in their minds. There’s no interest in the details or the baseline or whether the number is a real world optimal or went too far…only that it should always be lower as the prophets have explained.
Democrats have constant hope they will act as a strong second party with a counter-balance of thoughts that add to the discussion. Instead they are like David Karesh followers that focus all mental energy on a perfect Heavenly or Armageddon end game of pure good and evil high level solutions. Their “good” solutions are auto-pilot in nature, meaning trickle down needs no self-checks, etc. Problems at the detail level are magically overwhelmed with their grand efficient and robust system based on the thought that all business is pure good and all government is pure evil. They spent 15 seconds to come up with this grand idea and repeat to themselves 5 times a day…how could it fail?
Meanwhile, democrats struggle to comprehend that a significant portion of our population is so far off the reservation as a baseline starting point. It’s one thing to apply good and evil struggles to our afterlife and spiritual lives, but to apply it to the leaky pipe in the bathroom or your health care choices or the next unanticipated national problem seems delusional, but that is the core belief system. Just have faith and put no energy into tinkering with the messiness of the details in a grey world.
The marketing side is built along the same lines. The idea is to just market and hammer home conclusions that sound complete. It’s like an infomercial that sells the ab-roller and claim it will not only help your abs, but also your entire body,….even your financial life…even your sex life…it will clear your mind at work…it’s more powerful than Tony Robbins. It’s all about selling the one size fits all solution and never stop repeating it. Just repeating it seems to convince people in droves...always amazed how popular mostly unsubstantiated opinions can get versus the boring facts. Facts are just not as sexy as innuendo.
The democrats are like a small company with many needed departments (customer service, engineering, IT, Sales/Mkt, etc). They may not be completely optimal and at some times clumsy, but the product is continually improved with a natural loop: customer->customer Service->engineering loop, while sales/mkt can sell an ever improving product.
The republicans are like a small company of all marketing people that focus on what marketing people do…hammering home ideas so they stick in your head. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose. The problem is they have no intention to make a usable product because they themselves (and their followers) believe as a core talking point that customer service, engineering, and any company infrastructure is useless overhead (aka, government spending). This can work to some extent with an every four or every two year election with dead periods in between. The election cycle is basically all marketing…it’s just talking about what-if scenarios.
The problem is eventually the product will fail (with no support) and to some extent they know that’s coming and hoping it happens in quiet non-election cycle times. The next card to play if you are all marketing and it’s clear your product just failed in front of our eyes is to apply your basic "confuse and deceive" game plan! It’s a fundamental key to the second wave playbook. Point fingers at the idol democrat in the back of the room or whatever straw man is convenient. That’s really all you got if your company is based on 100% marketing and not fully designing an organization that will make the product succeed and serve the customer’s needs.