Paul Campos has a good piece at the Lawyers Guns and Money site that pretty much spells out why our particular system makes these people so dangerous:
“But what gives these paranoid visions so much political power is that there is, in fact, an empirical reality in which the MAGA base is suffering a massive ongoing status degradation. The country is becoming less white, less religious, and less culturally conservative, while people who aren’t part of the increasingly mobile and increasingly credentialed professional classes are bearing the brunt of increasing economic inequality, and the precarity that comes with it.
It’s an oversimplification to say…that the Republican party is now divided between college educated people who are embarrassed by Trump and prefer their tax cuts and cultural reaction is a more genteel form, and a working class base that is all in on the MAGA paranoid vision, but there is something to this.
Trump’s support comes primarily from downwardly mobile less educated white people, small business owners obsessed with low taxes, lax regulation, and good old days (read: white supremacist) nostalgia, along with a non-trivial percentage of ethnic minority members who are attracted enough to the authoritarian patriarchal cultural reaction he represents to ignore their own out status within that hierarchy.
It’s a coalition that reflects a rapidly dying vision of America, but one that may not die fast enough to save an increasingly sclerotic constitutional system that, as almost all the experts Edsall interviews assert, is moving into a potentially existential crisis.”
In a more flexible system such as a parliamentary one the whackos would be firewalled into a Monster Raving Looney Party.
(Which, as Israel is showing us, is NOT a vaccine against these political pathogens – get enough of them who are willing to cooperate and you still get Hitler! – so a lot depends on the sociopolitical bedrock beneath the system…)
But here? They’ve taken over one of the two parties we’re limited to by the Constitution and FPTP voting.
Guess what? Turns out that maybe the Constitution IS a suicide pact! Whoodathunkit?
(A brief note re: the graphics for this one. I'm frankly sick of posting pictures of MAGAts to go with these. Instead I'm indulging my fondness for 1) old Warner Bros. cartoons and 2) Hayao Miyazaki. In case you're not familiar with the bottom image, it's Bugs as Howl and Daffy as Sophie cosplaying the iconic scene from Howl's Moving Castle.
Here's the original:
I totally stan for the revision version's expressions; Daffy panicking (because that's what Daffy does) and Bugs smug and kind of smarmy (because, well...Bugs).
Anyway, even in the darkest timeline there's points of light. Excuse me while I go an rewatch Chuck Jones 1952 classic Rabbit Seasoning...
Oh. and...
Ceterum autem censeo the GOP esse delendam.
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