Here’s something I fundamentally disagree with:

Stuart Stevens, a veteran Republican campaign strategist who wrote a withering indictment of the party’s trajectory, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, said: “I don’t think Donald Trump made people more racist or antisemitic; I think he gave them permission to express it.”

One of the keys to understanding the trajectory of American politics is to understand how normalizing something makes it much more widely acceptable. If there are strange ideas out there held by just a few weird people, then most ordinary folks won’t see the appeal. In fact, not wanting to be considered weird themselves, most won’t even entertain them.

It’s easy to see, for example, why it’s so important to the Church of Scientology to have high visibility adherents like John Travolta and Tom Cruise. It makes the nonsense of L. Ron Hubbard seem vastly more plausible, and perhaps even tied to fame and success.

Also important is to focus on how people will adopt strange ideas without respect to their intrinsic value if it allows them to be part of a larger group that enjoys wide acceptance in their community. Someone from the North who has relocated to Alabama might join the Southern Baptist church, not through a rigorous comparison of available religions, but simply because it will aid them in making friends and advancing their career.

Something similar can happen with people who feel marginalized. They will join up with groups that are expressing defiance and resistance, and take it as a point of pride that their strange beliefs are scorned by more respectable folks.

All of these factors held explain how the MAGA cult of Trump, QAnon, and associated conspiracy theories (e.g., about voting, Jews, Black Lives Matter, immigrants, the LGBT community) have attracted so many adherents and taken over the Republican Party.

One key factor is that the Democrats went from being a forty percent party in much of the country to closer to a 25 percent party. Suddenly, the social costs of being a Democrat became so great that it just isn’t worth it for most casual observers of politics. Along with this, being a defiant conservative became part of many communities’  self-image and identity. I warned of this going back all the way to 2013, calling it the Southifaction of the North. The idea was that the conservatives who control the GOP would react to the presidential losses of John McCain and Mitt Romney by seeking to attract more minority votes but instead by winning a much higher percentage of white votes in exurbs and rural areas in the Midwest and North.

Donald Trump, whether by accident or design, chose this exact path and it has been wildly successful. At this point, believing crazy shit about pedophiles and voting machines isn’t about anything but expressing social pride and civil cohesiveness. You believe it because it makes you fit in better with your peers. Not believing it is suspicious, suggesting you don’t love your own town and your own people.

So, this isn’t really about latent racism or antisemitism being unleashed as much as it about creating brand new racists and antisemites. People are embracing these ideas who never would have embraced them when they were still considered weird and had social costs. Now that they’re normal, they bring rewards.

So, it’s the people who helped make these ideas normal that are most at fault. Donald Trump is the number one culprit, but every Republican who goes along with this and amplifies it is also part of the problem.

Another concept I’ve harped on over the last decade is that lower classes of the majority ethnicity/religion group will always be attracted to populist ideas, but right-wing populist ideas are always fascist in character. The danger for Democrats of writing these folks off as “deplorables” is that it will leave them with no labor/socialist alternative for their defiance.

What we’re doing now is harvesting to result of a suicidal response to the rise of Trumpism. Trump gave this folks permission to embrace their worst impulses and instead of giving them alternative outlets for their frustration, the left tried to take the permission away. That only increased the appeal of these hateful ideas and made them totems of identity, pride, and community. Left-wing populism has it’s own problems, but it’s a necessary counterbalance, and without it the glue that holds our democracy together becomes unstuck. Now we’re trying to govern the country without any prospect of consent from the governed.