re: #246 uncah91

But if you go back more than 40 years, you’re not talking about the GOP exclusively.

The reason I use 4 decades as my marker is it’s the point where that political party assembles a complex of…horrible bullshit…that’s been lingering in US politics for a very long time. It’s not a perfect number: there’s this layering of shitty ideas that happens, and I used 4 decades as the ballpark figure on when those things cease to discrete, and starting being an alloy.

Prior to this I’ve jocularly called it “Bullshit Voltron”…but there’s a very interesting weave of thought systems that have brought us to the current day and Donald Trump. The subcomponents can be teased apart, but there’s so much interconnection that you have to talk about how it’s all interconnected, or you’re being reductivist. The way the conspiracy politics (the Birchers and their second coming, the Tea Partiers) has merged with signs-and-wonders religion and nativism and racism and anti-intellectualism and authoritarianism…all of which have created a population who don’t really have a standard of veracity, but feel everything they believe must be True. And mostly they believe that they deserve everything, that they don’t have everything because they’ve been cheated, and anyone they identify as undeserving should suffer.

It’s why there’s such an endless reel of wingnut sites getting away with obvious hoaxes and lies. It’s why the SMOTI can pay his bills. The “higher truth” that their ingroup is righteous and everyone else is a Satanic baby-murdering commie counts more than the “truth truth” of faked videos, deliberate misquotes, and flat-out lies.

And that’s what Trump is sitting atop at the moment.