We Need to Speak Honestly About the GOP’s Evolution Into a Conspiracy Cult

I considered myself conservative and supported Republican candidates until 2003 with the Iraq War, when the scales fell from my eyes and I finally saw what and where this ideology got us, coupled with the decline the article mentions. I agree completely with the excerpt's description of the GOP and its supporters' descent into blind knee-jerk fanaticism we see today. The GOP has always had its fringe, and always will (I hope nobody thinks this is all going to go away in November if Biden wins--it was there and growing all through Obama and before). But it wasn't always like this.

I can describe, but not defend, what I've seen. As recently as 2015, I knew conservatives who said Trump was not a real Republican, yet I was amazed at their reluctance to stand up against him. At the political level, I have been dumbfounded by the "Never Trumpers'" lack of cohesion, and how defections have been piecemeal and not carried any kind of punch at all. I think it's gotten to a point where party leaders and party supporters both fear that standing up for their conservative ideals against the fringe is seen as siding with the Democrat enemy. "Well, just vote for Bernie then, is that what you want?" In short, they were bullied and from my arm-chair observation of bullied folks, until they rebel they will parrot back what the bullies tell them to. They take the side of the bully on little issues to keep from being wrong about broader issues, or causing more trouble.

So who is bullying them? I believe they would say it's the Democrats. As the Democratic Party turned its attention to urban issues and became a party of the Coasts and cities, Rust Belt America (where I grew up amid Democrat farmers and card-carrying union factory workers) felt they had nowhere else to go. They felt marginalized and unheard, and going rah-rah-rah for a mascot was the only option they had. There is no middle yet, and no leaders in the middle they can get behind. There is also a segment who would say they are being bullied by the current state of things, some of which they blame on Obama, but in reality they don't know care who or what caused it; they just want it to change. Among my family members and friends, I know several Trump supporters who say "Trump's an idiot, but he's the only one saying what needs to be done." A useful idiot is still useful. Still an idiot, but still useful.

For all that's going on, I still believe the bulk of conservatives are kind, honest, loving people who, although I now disagree with their approach to what they see as progress, have been co-opted by the fringe because being reasonable wasn't working for them. They felt backed into a corner and lashed out in whatever way they could. Trump provided that opportunity.

I think constantly about Harold Bloom's quote that 'The real religion of America is gnosticism'.

But recently there has been a shift among GOP voters that is different not just in degree of virulence, but also in kind. For a host of different reasons, core Republican voters have begun to reconstitute themselves as a conspiracy theory cult devoted to beliefs that were once relegated to the farthest fringe–fictions that cannot help but end in civil conflict and violence if they fully become canon among conservative voters nationwide. This process arguably began as far back as Glenn Beck’s prominence on Fox News, but it has now blossomed into a grandiose collective paranoid fantasy.

Click to expand...

This paragraph sums up a glum realization I've had for a while now. What was once the fringe is now the mainstream of the party.

Compromise is the heart and soul of any democratic system of government, but it ceases to work when one side is not bargaining in good faith anymore, when one side has stated goals that are increasingly reactionary, so compromise pushes the "center" further and further off kilter. Things that were once unthinkable, even to most conservatives, become mainstream and the set point for new compromises shifts.

And something odd happens in the face of all this victory. You think the Right would be happy, but win or lose an election, win or lose a court decision, win or lose the passage of a bill in Congress, the Right gets ever angrier and more paranoid.

Roxxsmom said:

And something odd happens in the face of all this victory. You think the Right would be happy, but win or lose an election, win or lose a court decision, win or lose the passage of a bill in Congress, the Right gets ever angrier and more paranoid.

Click to expand...

I noticed this too. The anger has always been there. A (very liberal) friend of mine back in the 1990s worried that all we have done with political correctness is push hate underground, where it will fester unnoticed. "Some day it is going to come out, and come out sideways and violently." He wasn't wrong.

I went to Trump's inauguration (I have no idea how long I will live in DC; this might be the only one I get to go to). Only about 1/3 of the people in the crowd near where I was were applauding at anything he said, but one guy near me was applauding furiously and giving "Damn right! Yeah!" interjections at everything Trump said. He seemed to notice I wasn't applauding (I wasn't reacting at all, just listening, not jeering, no sign waving or anything). He started moving nearer to me at each of Trump's statements, getting more animated and giving off "Whatcha gonna do about it, bro?" vibes and making ever more hostile eye contact with me. I moved further into the clumps of people and the situation de-escalated. But I kept thinking "That's your guy up there. And you don't even seem happy."

And the low crowd pictures are real. I got onto the Mall grounds right when he was being sworn in (I was one of the dots in the clump of people in front of the Smithsonian Castle in the famous Trump/Obama comparison photo). Below is the scene while he giving his speech.

Introversion said:

The anger is constantly stoked, because it’s how the party energized a base to vote. When they no longer have real issues to stoke, issues are invented.

OTOH, I’ve been eager to vote against Republcan presidential candidates since Reagan, but I’ve never been as angry and stoked to vote against anyone as I am this year. The behaviours, the agenda I want to vote against are quite real. So I guess each party uses anger to its advantage.

Click to expand...

I think anger in general works via a positive feedback effect. The emotions themselves trigger hormonal responses, which amplify the emotions etc. Anyone who has witnessed a toddler having a super tantrum knows how this works. With individuals, there's usually a point where the body grows too fatigued to sustain the rage anymore, and there's a crash (As a toddler, one of my nieces would vomit at this point, when her rage spiral reached its apex). But when anger is a collective thing, and when it's manipulated and sustained via rhetoric and messaging, the effect is terrifying.

But there's something really peculiar going on here, because this isn't like other kinds of political rage one witnesses in society. There are many groups who have legitimate reasons to be angry: people of color, women, LGBTQ people and so on, not to mention people concerned about the climate and about health care access and economic inequality. But these are all issues championed by the Left. Anger is a motivator, but when the Right dismisses members of these demographics "angry women" or "angry Black men" or whatever, it tends to have a stultifying effect.

There may be a demonstration here or there, or even riots, in response to particular travesties, like the acquittal in the police shooting of yet another unarmed Black person, but these expressions of rage seem to have a cathartic effect, and Leftist movements, whether it me Occupy Wall Street, or MeToo, or Black Lives Matter, seem to slip into the background after a while. They don't go away, but they fall out of the cultural spotlight. There's no evidence of the sort of rage spirals effect we're seeing on the Right.

Why is the rage of angry white (and disproportionately male-and-middle-aged-or-older) people different in this respect, and why is what amounts to such a small minority of the total electorate in every single state so disproportionately powerful that they can still win elections? The rage is certainly necessary because it's the only way to keep this minority turning out to vote for people who are doing everything in their power to suppress other voting blocks and gerrymander etc. to hold on to their power base, but the necessity doesn't explain why the rage and conspiracy minded propaganda media have been so much more successful for the Right.

Because I don't think left wing politicians are angels or above utilizing rage to their own ends. Sanders certainly touched on an angry base of his own. Some of the Bernie Bros are rather scary and there is Russian manipulation and conspiracy theories on the Left too. Thus far, though, it hasn't been successful at uniting the Left, let alone pushing it further and further towards leftist authoritarianism.

Maybe it's because the Left is made up of such disparate elements--basically everyone who is disenfranchised by the status quo. But it's hard to get the different groups that make up the Left equally on board with all the different movements. It's simply not possible to sustain the same level of rage over issues that don't directly affect one's own immediate daily life. Thus far, the Left has been only modestly successful (at best) at finding a commonality behind the different subgroups it encompasses.

Currently, the unifying factor for the Left is hatred of Trump, rather than any one issue. Is it enough to motivate enough Left-leaning voters to turn out in November, especially in the swing states, even though Biden is the ultimate compromise candidate who will not stir fire in the bellies of most Democratic voters? I guess we will find out. But if Biden does win, I don't see the Left staying angry and unified once the target of their anger (Trump) is gone. Maybe that's a good thing, because too much anger is toxic, but plenty of Trump's allies will still be in Washington, angry as ever and working to undermine everything Biden and any allies he has in Congress attempt to do, and of course to further enrage their own base for the next election.

I guess that's the difference. When the Left wins, they lapse back into complacency and/or bickering about which group's issues should be prioritized. When the Right wins an election, they stay angry and (mostly) unified.

I suspect that the difference is that the Left is angry about things that can be changed or fixed - once they see that progress is being made, they settle down.

The anger on the Right seems to be about change, in general. Things aren't the way they were at some self-determined point in time. This can't be changed, time can't be unwound and it's impossible to make things just the way they were, especially when much of that is 'when I was young' misty-eyed romanticism. Therefore, the anger never goes away, and is constantly fed by, well, change.

frimble3 said:

I suspect that the difference is that the Left is angry about things that can be changed or fixed - once they see that progress is being made, they settle down.

Click to expand...

Oh, I don't know. We're pretty good at lapsing into numb complacency, even when the country takes two steps back on certain issues. I think the Left has so many concerns that it's hard to pick just one thing to be really angry about sometimes, so the anger is diluted, except maybe about about a particular one that are immediately threatening one's direct well being. We all know that White, suburban feminists don't get as angry over police brutality as Women of Color do, and Women of Color feel that feminism isn't addressing the issues that most directly affect their lives. And while nearly everyone on the Left supports the endangered species act and thinks that human-caused climate change is real, few Democratic voters really care that much about sea turtles or spotted owls, or even rising sea levels, when they can't find a job. But what's the answer here? Picking one overarching issue and ignoring everything else? Even the economy, which is supposed to be the great unifying issue, can be less pressing to people for whom the economy never works well.

But the breadth of the people and issues of concern the the Left is also a potential strength, because it does encompass the majority of people. It's just hard to get everyone equally angry at the same time. Though Trump has done a pretty good job of making pretty much every Democratic constituency mad, since he likes to attack and offend everyone who isn't a white, straight, cisgender, able-bodied evangelical male. Being united against a single person may work for one election (we shall see if it does here), but it isn't going to work as a long-term strategy.

The anger on the Right seems to be about change, in general. Things aren't the way they were at some self-determined point in time. This can't be changed, time can't be unwound and it's impossible to make things just the way they were, especially when much of that is 'when I was young' misty-eyed romanticism. Therefore, the anger never goes away, and is constantly fed by, well, change.

Click to expand...

This is true.

Plus our founding fathers, in all their wisdom, wanted low population states to have equal clout as higher population states in the senate, but also to have a disproportionate effect int he House and Electoral College. I assume this was because the more agrarian states never would have agreed to form a union if they didn't get these incentives, but as the majority population becomes more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer states, it means a relatively small number of reactionaries wield a disproportionate influence in government and in elections.

I suspect that if the Founding Fathers had knowledge of how things were going to go, they'd have done a lot of things differently. The ones who weren't born here, were chiefly English-born. They couldn't help it - they thought small. It didn't occur to them that there would be states the size of all New England, without the population to match. They didn't realize the huge communications changes, that would change the political system. They didn't comprehend one country the size of Europe, near enough.
Heck, they may not have all agreed with slavery, but they had it.

A lot of their cherished ideas, like the Electoral College, were the product of their times and should have had a sunset clause. If not an outright ending, at least a review. Although the people who were benefiting from it would have yelled that they were robbed.

One thing a lot of people miss in the turbo version of US history most of us are taught is how chancy a coalition it always was. As long as the goal was unity, there were going to be some ugly compromises, and it wasn't at all apparent that any kind of union was going to be formed at all, never mind sustained.

There were a lot of monarchists in the bunch, and we could easily have ended up with another king. There was also this idea that honor was enough, and good people would do the right things. They should have known better, even at the time, but there was definitely classism involved. Wealthy businessmen were of course good people, and if they weren't they'd be exposed and rejected by all the others.

frimble3 said:

I suspect that if the Founding Fathers had knowledge of how things were going to go, they'd have done a lot of things differently. The ones who weren't born here, were chiefly English-born. They couldn't help it - they thought small. It didn't occur to them that there would be states the size of all New England, without the population to match. They didn't realize the huge communications changes, that would change the political system. They didn't comprehend one country the size of Europe, near enough.
Heck, they may not have all agreed with slavery, but they had it.

A lot of their cherished ideas, like the Electoral College, were the product of their times and should have had a sunset clause. If not an outright ending, at least a review. Although the people who were benefiting from it would have yelled that they were robbed.

Click to expand...

I don't know if they could have conceived of how our country, not to mention the world, would evolve. Many of them assumed that the US should be primarily an agrarian society, so they took measures to assure that low population states wield a larger amount of clout, relative to their population. Of course they didn't envision the eventual inclusion of states from beyond the Mississippi that are geographically huge but even smaller in population than the thirteen original colonies. Perhaps they wouldn't be surprised by or all disapprove of the social conservatism of the rural states, though the rural population's willingness to embrace policies that benefit mega billionaires like the Koch Brothers might come as a surprise.

It's interesting, though, that the conservatives I know do hate some big businesses and billionaires with implacable fury. They loathe Bill Gates, the tech industry in general, biomedical companies, and future big corporations they think will put ranchers out of business by making fake meat in labs and forcing everyone to be vegans. They are strangely silent about billionaires like the Koch Brothers, who own so many companies it's really impossible to boycott them all, or about the people have grown rich from oil companies, or companies like Bechtel (who profited greatly from the war with Iraq).

Roxxsmom said:

It's interesting, though, that the conservatives I know do hate some big businesses and billionaires with implacable fury. They loathe Bill Gates, the tech industry in general, biomedical companies, and future big corporations they think will put ranchers out of business by making fake meat in labs and forcing everyone to be vegans. They are strangely silent about billionaires like the Koch Brothers, who own so many companies it's really impossible to boycott them all, or about the people have grown rich from oil companies, or companies like Bechtel (who profited greatly from the war with Iraq).

Click to expand...

Sounds, again, like fear of change. They are okay with the 'traditional' billionaires. People who make a fortune in the ways they understand. Oil, food, arms deals. Or, traditional manufacturing. Even the Koch brothers are, in their way, 'traditional'. The really rich guy who is rich from some kind of fancy wheeler-dealering. The Rich Uncle Pennybags of Monopoly fame.

It's people getting rich from doing things they don't understand that freaks them out.
Inventing new industries, or ways of looking at things.

They 'get' a car plant, even if inside, it's all robots. I suspect for some of them, Amazon is okay because it's just a modern version of Sears, Roebuck. A fancy catalog store.

There are, I think, moderate conservatives who don’t really speak up. Their voices are being drowned out by the loudmouth fringe. I used to consider myself fiscally conservative until I graduated college, and frankly given how much I was told college was the way to get ahead was exposed as a bald-faced lie, I would probably now call myself progressive.

The left has their fair share of conspiracies (GMOs, “Laci Green is in bed with the alt reich”, being just two examples I can come up with off the top of my head), but usually they’re easier talked down from the ledge by arguments that are actually supported by the evidence. And generally the conspiracies have to do with the effect they have on people, and not on money only, or personality cults against the conspirators.

darkprincealain said:

There are, I think, moderate conservatives who don’t really speak up.

Click to expand...

There absolutely are old school Republicans and Conservatives who are far more middle of the road, just as there are Democrats and Liberals who are closer to the middle than the far Left.

But they are being drowned out by the raging lunatics, white supremacists, Nazis, and other hate mongers.

AW Admin said:

There absolutely are old school Republicans and Conservatives who are far more middle of the road, just as there are Democrats and Liberals who are closer to the middle than the far Left.

But they are being drowned out by the raging lunatics, white supremacists, Nazis, and other hate mongers.

Click to expand...

I know some who are now Democrats, or who are independents who generally vote for Democrats in recent years. Which is consistent with the argument that what was once considered centrist, or even center-right, is increasingly branded as at least somewhat liberal.

But are there a larger number of moderate liberals than there are moderate conservatives these days? Or are there still a large number of moderate conservatives, at least in terms of their goals, but they are willing to accept Trumpism as a way to enact their own agenda?