I really have a hard time believing that Mytheos Holt is willing to make an argument that among the primary reasons that Donald Trump is having some success among Republican poll responders is that the American people, as a whole, are “getting fed up with treating their fellow citizens like overpriced glassware.”
Now, to be fair, I am interested in listening to theories about how the left (and the president in particular) has driven the right towards their nihilism, but you can’t blame Bruce Caitlyn Jenner and Laura Kipnis. It’s true that trigger warnings make me want to dismember small animals, but they haven’t driven me to xenophobia.
And the kind of people who are supporting Trump wouldn’t know what a trigger warning is if you handed them a copy of The Ithacan.
What’s propping up Trump is less about Trump than it is about George W. Bush and John McCain and Mitt Romney and Bob Dole and Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. It’s about losing two straight presidential elections and the popular vote in five of the last six. It’s about the browning of America and the American electorate, which was a process that was furthered by St. Ronald Reagan and which the Chamber of Commerce-dominated Republican Party has done nothing to arrest. It’s about losing the battle on health care and on gay marriage. It’s about broken promises and government shutdowns that end only in defeat. It’s about not being able to end legal abortion. It’s about having to take down the Confederate Flag.
Now the party is selling another Bush. And this Bush is more like the father than the brother, which speaks well of him, actually, but is more than discouraging to the GOP’s base. The Bushes represent failure and accommodation. They are the embodiment of a lie.
The Bushes gave us David Souter and John Roberts, and they wanted to give us Harriet Miers instead of Samuel Alito. They are not to be trusted, even a little bit.
No doubt, the president had made the right crazy, but their real rage is reserved for their own leaders.
And it’s not just that they haven’t gotten what they were promised. It’s become evident that there never really was any real intention to try to deliver on the big ticket items. And, in the process of leading the base on for the last thirty-five years, the GOP elite mastered the art of destroying faith in all our institutions, from the universities to the scientific community to the media to the government and its agencies.
The more that Trump disrespects these institutions and their values, the stronger he gets. The more he points out the ineffectiveness and hypocrisy of the Republican leadership (where are the results?), the more people rally to him.
This is the triumph of not believing in anyone or anything. It’s partly a result of failure, partly the result of lies, and largely the result of the base being trained to think this way.
We’re seeing a gigantic backlash against the right by the right. Insofar as the left shares any responsibility, it’s only through poaching the intelligent people until the brainpower on the right was too weak to spark.
That, and winning.
Winning elections, and winning on issues.
In fact, the single biggest explainer of Trump’s success is probably that the GOP did so well in 2010 and still lost every important battle, and then won in 2014 and still can’t stop the president.
Winning elections was supposed to be the solution, but the last two years have been catastrophic for the right.
So, they’re not listening to advice anymore. They’re not even going to listen to Fox News anymore.
They’ve gone around the bend, and political correctness has virtually nothing to do with it.
