I may disagree with Republicans on virtually everything, but I don’t believe they are unintelligent, just tragically misguided. That’s why I’m a bit surprised the “establishment” GOP did not see Trump coming.
Their first warning was Sarah Palin.
Palin was not surprised when was picked as John McCain’s Vice President. After all, she was the perfect specimen of the conservative the GOP had spent a great deal of effort to create. Hot button social issues and projection of all the nation’s ills onto the government (and Democrats) distracted voters from how the GOP systematically enabled the wealthy to sop up every last dime of decades of record breaking middle class productivity.
That’s some feat! How did (do) they do it? Ironically, with science. (a tool, also ironically, that Democrats have yet to employ). Decades of investment in cognitive science worked. Very complex problems were distilled into simple sound bites by operatives like Frank Luntz and Lee Atwater to distract conservative voters from the GOP’s single minded dedication to wealth consolidation. The ready-to-eat, fanciful worldview they created put ideology before reality and understanding. It is now a matter of pride for conservative voters to trust “horse sense” over knowledge or “nuance” and to distrust “pointy heads” and science. And conservative voters never looked behind the curtain.
Palin worked very hard at becoming the perfect conservative; her task made easier by the fact that she didn’t need facts or understanding of complex issues to do it. She became adept at voicing righteous indignation about things she knew nothing about in incoherent, stream-of-consciousness sentences. It was never the content (there was none); it was the emotion, the indignation, the anger, the intolerance, the fear that energized conservative voters who were told they were getting screwed by government and were understandably upset. By design, these voters became blind to the fact that they were voting for the very people who were screwing them!
And then there were the litmus tests: Are you conservative enough? Are you Christian enough? Do you hate Democrats, Black people. Muslims, regulation, welfare queens, the government (etc., etc.) enough? You can see where all this is going; at some point voters naturally expect their candidates to be impossibly “pure”. Republicans once thought extreme are not extreme enough. (And of course, some of the wealthiest among us, seeing the goal of wealth consolidation working so well, funded the Tea Party and ever more authoritarian candidates to keep the momentum going.)
The GOP intentionally created the very voter that now threatens to break them apart. These voters naturally support the guy that says the reality deficient things they find themselves saying - things that grew directly from the ideas intentionally planted in their brains by the GOP. The GOP’s plan worked too well!
I actually feel a little sorry for Palin -in her own addled mind, she did exactly what was expected of her and she did it perfectly. Trump I have no sympathy for -he’s simply a narcissistic opportunist. I’m not sure what to think of Republicans who were intelligent enough to understand that, like a magician or a con man, taking advantage of the way the human kind works was playing with fire.
In any case, the monster they intentionally created, embodied by both Trump and his extremist voters, has now turned on it’s creator.
Unlike the GOP’s Great Recession, I hope we all won’t have to pay the price.
