I’m not saying that Romney is in any way comparable, I’m saying that in 2012 it was not possible to predict that Romney would become a hated figure within the Republican base. Acknowledging that there are good reasons to believe Trump is different, I think it’s unwise to put too much stock in just extrapolating from current conditions and assuming that there won’t be some event that sends politics lurching off in an entirely new direction.
As an example of something which might happen, there’s a moral panic underway about child sex trafficking. QAnon is one manifestation of this. We are drawing extremely live to very disturbing future revelations about the tolerance of child sexual abuse by organs of the ruling class. If this happens, I could see reactionary voters becoming single-issue on the need to rip this evil out from the body politic, root and branch. It could become the new Islamic Terrorism post 9/11 in terms of how totally it captivates the right.
While QAnon obviously positions Trump as one of the good guys here, in 2024 it would be impossible for even hardened cultists to deny that, well, there weren’t any sickos executed or put in Guantanamo when Trump was at the helm. What gives? That, in combination with the obvious misconduct in Trump’s past, makes it hard to imagine Trump successfully running an explicit “round up the sickos” campaign. People wouldn’t have to go so far as to stop liking him altogether, but maybe they’d conclude he’s not the man for the moment, with such pressing concerns about the infiltration of Satanic child molesters into American power.
That’s just one scenario obviously, but what I’m saying is that extrapolating forward from the present moment with regard to the forces of American reaction has a bad track record. The Trump phenomenon is the obvious recent example, but 9/11 is another good one, taking a conservative movement that was majority isolationist and instantly turning them into committed neoconservative nation-builders. It would have been hard to predict in the mid GWB years that Islamic terrorism and Moral Majority bullshit would be irrelevant to the GOP in just a decade. Things change.
I don’t disagree with the thesis that things change unpredictably (or the overall assessment of the odds), but I do think you’re undervaluing that Trump is personally popular in your analysis.
He’s a charismatic figure, people like him for the way he says things not what he says. I’m not deeply plugged in to US politics, but I don’t think any of the other shifts you identify are really about adherence (or not) to such a figure. It’s not impossible for people to go off him, but it is a qualitatively different type of change (and more unlikely).
Nobody is going to prison. Not one person. Not one day. Nobody will even be convicted. This waste of time Georgia case announced today is just that. It simply allows people to continue to believe there is a functioning legal system. It’s like the TSA at the airport. Pure theatre.
Yeah I agree with all this, this is pretty much what I meant when I wrote “Acknowledging that there are good reasons to believe Trump is different”. Thing is, if this was another thing like Islamic Terrorism or whatever I’d be basically certain they’d eventually move on, like maybe not by 2024, but at some point. The fact that Trump has this cultish adoration doesn’t move it all the way to thinking he definitely still rules the GOP in 2024, it just means it’s a strong possibility. I’m not denying it’s a strong possibility, I just don’t think it’s anything like a certainty.
To some extent the personal charisma of Trump is the result of him occupying a certain zeitgeist, just like GWB’s affected cowboy swagger was appealing when the US was dropping bunker-busters on caves just after 9/11 and less appealing after Iraq started to turn into a disaster. GWB didn’t have the cult-like appeal of Trump but I think there are still circumstances where Trump’s schtick loses its charm even to cultists. The scenario I outlined is one, but probably also some true catastrophe like a devastating earthquake and subsequent economic collapse, a situation where there are sustained right-wing terrorist attacks with substantial loss of life, and so on. Trump is not a guy I consider capable of adapting to circumstances, and cult leaders do fall out of favour, it has happened many times before.
Trump obviously. The field splinters their vote. That’s what happened in 2016. Trump was getting 45% while like 11 other candidates were getting 5% each. Easy game.
He had something very much like that immediately after 9/11. In some ways it was more powerful because centrists were willing to go along with his 1984 bullshit.
I think you’re going to see the GOP get even more insane. I know it seems impossible but they seemed crazy in 2016 and look where we are now.
It is going to be very hard for them to burn it down and start over. 80-90% of their voters want the pure uncut insanity, almost all their House seats are gerrymandered and the only way to lose most GOP Senate seats is by losing a primary from the right. There remain no incentives for most elected Republicans to moderate.
It seems likely that we’re in for a kind of prolonged stalemate, unless of course the Democrats come to their senses and nuke the filibuster. There is also a pretty good chance the GOP hits the trifecta in 2024 and legit just ends democracy.
Think this is likely, but not sure what flavour exactly the insane will be. Again, imagine extrapolating insanity into the future from the Falwell Moral Majority set, you’d be right that the GOP got more insane, but it was on a different axis to what you expected. Some sort of insane religious revival movement is overdue. The New Age/QAnon to Born Again pipeline is real.
