Today’s Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau looks at a fundamental problem America faces.
There is a significant segment of the population that has been brainwashed by decades of conservative media and the Republican Party to the point where they can’t function in a democracy — and don’t want to.
They are eager and willing to follow Trump and any other demagogue who cares to follow in Trump’s footsteps. This is the slippery slope Ronald Reagan put us on, with his war on government. This was the “monkey brains” moment, then and now.
Newt Gingrich with his “language a key mechanism of control”, built on this. You can go back to the Powell memo if you like and connect it all the way to Citizens United.
Lather, rinse, repeat — decades of brain washing to a specific end, where a man like Trump can become president, and the Republican Party can escape all accountability while they loot the country for the 1%, even though they only represent a minority of the population.
They’ve been dragging the country to the extreme right for years, with racism and religious bigotry, with lies and the politics of destruction. The cliff is looming, but they can not/will not put on the brakes or turn away from taking the country over the edge. Hell — they’ll even work with Russia to stay the course rather than risk losing power.
Trump voters are people who get all their news from Fox and talk/hate radio. These are people who know what they know, think what they think, and feel what they feel in a closed loop of futility, hate, and denial. They have been carefully nurtured into this state. If Trump and the Republican Party were magically removed from power this instant, they would still keep trudging towards the cliff, because they literally can’t see any other way forward.
Read Doonesbury today. It’s a fantasy, but Trudeau is looking at a very real problem. What happens afterwards… if there IS an afterwards.
Ideas? Thoughts? (Prayers?).
We can’t get out of this if we aren’t prepared to deal with them and the mechanisms that got them into that state. There’s always been a certain percentage of the population that buys into this stuff; what’s different is how stupidity has been weaponized.
What do we do going forward?
UPDATE: Two Party Opera does a good job capturing the difficulty Democrats seem to have coming up with a messaging strategy, let alone sustaining it for decades like the GOP does.