The Grand Old Party has allowed their message and indeed every ounce of their base's energy to be transformed by the most reactionary and noisome con artists. They eagerly acquiesced and surrendered to their previously exiled mutants in order to rile up the hordes with rage, victimhood and paranoia. William F. Buckley purged the Klan and Birchers from the conservative coalition and the Republican Party.Now Buckley is gone and the benighted brutes are back and they're pissed.
The cynical GOP leadership gleefully staffed out the entire conservative platform to the personalities who could take them where the energy was.This makes some sense from a strategic marketing perspective, and the Democrats have had their own fringe message coup in an effort to compete.However attractive this enterprise must have appeared with each passing panic, the GOP establishment wishes they could hop in a delorean and stop themselves from engineering their own destruction.Examine the candidacy of Donald Trump from the perspective of the ordinary American citizens who have been told by our politicians that they can do things they simply cannot do.Resist the urge to revel in political schadenfreude because we need those establishment Republicans who the Trumpkins are so angry with if Western society is to right itself.The Bernie Sanders supporters are a different story.We never needed them before.They should return to the right wing pseudo-liberal Occupy tent with their poppers and wait for the next asinine fascist rally against free trade.
As much sense as this chorus of mouthbreathers operation may have made to the Republican country club set and Democratic consultant class who set it in motion, there doesn't seem to have been any doubt as to the wisdom or responsibility of this strategy on their part. It must have been irresistible if you consider the free messaging and organizing muscle that came with anger radio, and all the disciplined recruitment performed by televangelists, assorted Christian right media, and tabloid cable news that could tap into emotions, define issues and develop mass acceptance of political narratives for an audience who tend to vote without having to be begged or persuaded, unlike their liberal counterparts who incessantly vomit trite syllables approximating the deeply tedious half thought "lesser of two evils" sonnet. The right has a natural constituency of frightened and angry people who are quite good at following a routine.These lowest hanging denominators and the millions of indoctrinated Evangelicals make up the right wing coalition along with the young libertarian dudes and credulous conspiracy theory cultists that exploded onto the scene of a once silent reactionary counterculture. These are the people who suddenly dominate much of the national political conversation with more power than they merit and there is nowhere near enough sedative on hand to dull their malignant rage.Where there was once an establishment party of patriotic deal makers there is now flash, blustery belligerence and magnificently unapologetic hatred.
The working class and middle class, weakened and deluded by constant demagoguery, are feeling alien to their culture.They feel as though they are taboo in their country and they've been told to blame it on multiculturalism.These people are not stupid.They just have few alternatives to the sensory overload of clickbait media culture.This tabloid Saturnalia of sensationalism seems to have produced a psychotic political movement of paranoiacs at whose pleasure we now live.They're mostly in Congress.
The grown-up party of conservative, responsible, middle of the road, Alex Keaton type young Republicans, the unabashedly stuffy exclusive country club party of Poppy Bush and the Cold Warrior party that sheltered spooky Roy Cohn or E. Howard Hunt types is long gone.Those very stalwarts torched their reasonably successful moderate conservative brand of the "grown up" or "daddy party" and auctioned off their message to unscrupulous fiends who prey on credulous hordes.They now more resemble the party of your creepy uncle who still insists Ike was a pinko.
The old Republican establishment had such a reputation by the New century that Democrats were paralyzed and perpetually rattled by President Bush's popularity after September of 2001. They too fed their energy and enthusiasm deficit wherever they could.The progressive left, as it likes to be called, has an insatiable appetite for wish thinking and thought sanitation that is dwarfed by their compulsive cognitive dissonance and delusional dogmatism. The Democratic Party was infiltrated by naive pseudo-liberal progressives, 60's drop out nostalgists, failed spiritual seekers and social justice goose steppers who share the fundamentalist Chomskyite belief that motive can be discerned without evidence. When this crunchy lot of conspiracy theorists discovered that the mass media used populist white victimhood claiming hysterics to turn working men and homemaker women into diehard conservatives they saw diabolical sophistication where there was none. That mindset made for fertile ground for antisemitic mythology and it didn't take long to turn excessive white guilt and unfettered paranoia into mind reading.Did you know you're a racist? Now you know, and so does everybody else.
Welcome to 2016. After years of repetition, the phrase "lesser of two evils" is beginning to resonate, and the similarities, not between two parties as has been claimed for years, but between two mirrored edges of the ideological horseshoe are becoming rote, menacing and depressing.
The nation is divided between the two reactionary conservative factions of frightened and stubborn amnesiacs who are unaware of their similarities.The left and right are of one mind.They simply follow different politicians.Each day it becomes more and more difficult for liberals to align with the reactionary tattered edges of the horseshoe as they shout in unison what becomes a chant of "make free stuff great again."
"A republic, if you can keep it," Benjamin Franklin once said in the early days of the nation founded on Thomas Paine's radical liberalism and Thomas Jefferson's pen, but can we keep it away from ourselves?
