Monday, March 27, 2023

The MAGA Base Is a Frankenstein Monster

The Republican Party has become a fetid swamp filled with the embrace of ignorance and conspiracy theories and an explosion of bigotry and prejudice against anyone or anything that challenges the party base's world view to the extent it has one beyond being racist, homophobic and isolationist.  In my view the seeds for today's GOP base were planted over two decades ago when evangelicals were voted into party positions by the party elites who foolishly believed they could control the unwashed elements they were ushering in.  Instead, the ever fanatical base took control and the asylum was taken over by the delusional patients, if you will.  Now, although Trump remains skilled at playing the MAGA base's hatreds and prejudices, what has happened is that the base is now a Frankenstein monster that demands to be coddled andpandered to. Hence all of the Republican officeholders falling all over themselves to attack critical race theory, proper medical treatment for transgender youth and the passage of "don't say gay laws."  Many such officials, I suspect, don't believe half of what they spout to the base, but they are too terrified of having the MAGA base turn on them and defeat them in a primary and back a candidate either far more crazy or with no qualms about lying to tell the base what it wants to hear.  A piece in the New York Times looks how the MAGA base has become largely uncontrolable.  Here are excerpts:

The most telling exchange in Donald Trump’s Waco, Texas, rally on Saturday didn’t come from Trump himself. It came at the beginning, when the aging rock star Ted Nugent was warming up the crowd. “I want my money back,” he yelled. “I didn’t authorize any money to Ukraine, to some homosexual weirdo.”

Moments later, speaking on Real America’s Voice, a far-right television channel, the former Fox News correspondent Ed Henry called Nugent’s words “about Zelensky” and about funding for Ukraine, “amazing.” He then summed up the Trumpist movement’s race to the bottom in one succinct line: “He is channeling what a lot of Americans feel.”

Yes, he is. And so did virtually every speaker at Trump’s marathon rally. One after another, they looked at a seething, conspiracy-addled crowd and indulged, fed, and stoked every element of their furious worldview. I didn’t see a single true leader on Trump’s stage, not even Trump himself. I saw a collection of followers, each vying for the affection of the real power in Waco, the coddled populist mob.

To understand the social and political dynamic on the modern right, you have to understand how millions of Americans became inoculated against the truth. Throughout the 2016 Republican primaries, there was no shortage of Republican leaders and commentators who were willing to call out Trump. . . . . Yet every time Trump faced pushback, he and his allies called critics “elitist” or “fake news” or “weak” or “cowards.” It was much easier to say the Trump skeptics had “Trump derangement syndrome,” or were “just establishment stooges,” than to engage with substantive critique. Thus began the coddling of the populist mind . . .

Disagreement on the right quickly came to be seen as synonymous with disrespect. If “we the people” (the term Trump partisans apply to what they call the “real America”) believe something, then the people deserve to have that view reflected right back to them by their politicians and pundits.

We see this in the internal Fox News documents that surfaced in the Dominion defamation litigation, in which Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News for broadcasting false claims about its voting machines after the 2020 election. Repeatedly, Fox leaders and personalities who did not seem to believe the 2020 election was stolen referred to the need to “respect” their audience by telling them otherwise.

I saw this phenomenon firsthand early in the Trump era. I was speaking to a small group of Evangelical pastors about how white Evangelicals no longer valued good character in politicians. Compared to other Christian groups and unaffiliated Americans, white Evangelicals went from the group least likely to believe that “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties” in 2011 to the group most likely to excuse immoral politicians in 2016.

In that conversation I discussed the 1998 Southern Baptist Convention Resolution on Moral Character of Public Officials. . . . . “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders,” it said, “sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.”

When I reminded the group of that language, a pastor from Alabama raised an objection. “That’s going to sound elitist to lots of folks in my congregation,” he said. I was confused. Here was a Baptist pastor telling me that his congregation would find a recent statement of Baptist belief “elitist.”

Politicians are always tempted to pander, but rarely do you see such a complete abdication of anything approaching true moral or political leadership as what transpired at the Waco rally. It began with that ridiculous and irrelevant statement about Zelensky . . . continued with MyPillow’s Mike Lindell repeating wildly false election claims; and ended with an angry, albeit boilerplate Trump stump speech that was also littered with falsehoods.

And if you think for a moment that there’s any Trumpworld regret over the Jan. 6 insurrection, the rally provided a decisive response.

There may have been a time when Trump truly commanded his movement. That time is past. His movement now commands him. Fed by conspiracies, it is hungry for confrontation, and rallies like Waco demonstrate its dominance. Like the pirate standing in front of Tom Hanks in the popular 2013 film “Captain Phillips,” the populist right stands in front of the G.O.P., conservative media, and even reluctant rank-and-file Republicans, and delivers a single, simple message: “I’m the captain now.”

1 comment:

Sixpence Notthewiser said...

Oh, and we all know what happened to Victor's monster, right?
Fingers crossed....

XOXO