The WaPo has a short opinion piece up under the Plum Line byline called "There are no more dog whistles" which I think doesn't go far enough.
The central tenet is that the right wing is now loud and proud about things that were previously considered unacceptable. More, not just that they are exposing these behaviors, but they are revelling in them, and using them for dick measurements:
[T]he party no longer concerns itself much with policy. Now you demonstrate your reliability as a conservative by showing that you don’t care what liberals think of you. Or more precisely, you care deeply about what liberals think of you; it’s just that you want them to loathe you, and the more they hate you, the more you’ve proved you’re a real conservative.
I think there are some obvious follow-ons that are equally true that could just as easily have been included. Mr. Waldman, I'll fix it for you:
First, it's a shame that this piece got labelled an opinion piece in the first place. It's entirely factual, blatantly obvious, and I think even most conservatives would agree with it. It should be included in history texts as a legitimate explanation to students from the future of the mood and tenor of the times.
When I was growing up a nerd (before that was cool) I was subjected to a lot of bullying. But I found that there were a series of "gates" that pared off the worst of the peer group into less dangerous (for me) paths: some of the worst kids dropped out of high school. A bunch of them went to Vocational-Technical school instead of being in the pre-college track. Going to a pretty good college left behind most of the rest of the dopers and bullies. And so on. But I remember them all. And those people I left behind are the ones who acted like what the entire right wing is doing now.
So, second: This is junior high behavior. These are the people who stopped maturing at 13. They never learned empathy or compassion or any comprehension of the scale of the world. They feel superior by making others feel inferior. And now they have a peer group that says it's OK to knock on this other group (liberals) and so they're just letting it all hang out and loving every minute of it.
And here’s the third thing: the value of smacking liberals in the face with what they are saying and doing is more significant to them than the actual policies they are using as weapons. They don’t care about politics while they’re watching NASCAR; they just love that they can be vulgar and insulting on national TV. They've been led by the nose for so long that whatever gets pushed by Fox is what they believe, and when they see that it irritates "the libs," that's the result they hoped for, not the policy itself.
To be clear, I'm talking about some proportion of the rank-and-file here, not all of them and not the leadership. The leadership wants these policies so they can continue in power and continue to make money. Others are true believers. But Joe Righty is getting serious jollies only from feeling his newfound power over those who he once was secretly afraid were "better" than he.
I have always been an advocate for fully funding education, and this is exactly why. There's a meme going around that basically says, "I'm happy to pay my school taxes even though I don't have any kids in school. Why? Because I don't want to live in a nation of stupid people." Well, guess what - we've cut education funding a thousand times. And now we're reaping the benefits.