Here's my best explanation/theory about why those 126 Republican members of the House of Representatives, and 17 Republican state attorneys general, signed amicus curiae briefs in support of the attempt by Texas to get the U. S. Supreme Court to disallow the votes in swing states Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia that went for Biden in the Presidential election.
Republicans were traumatically horrified when Obama won not once, but twice, and against two mainstream, highly regarded, mainstream candidates. When Trump beat Hillary, even more loathed by Republicans than Obama, Trump won the inchoate love of many otherwise sane Republicans. They support Trump now because they want, against all odds, to somehow hold on to that evil magic. To keep that sick hope alive.
The Supreme Court wisely threw out the Texas attempt to overthrow the election. Biden will take the oath of office on January 20, 2020. But it will take a lot more than one Supreme Court decision to put the fascist, racist rage back in the hole from which it emerged.
2 comments:
I wish it was that simple, but it's not. If you haven't read Dark Money, do, because it provides a part of the explanation. The rest is well understood psychology.
But the bottom line is that the Republican party has, under the influence of that "dark money" been pushing out the moderate to conservative element of the party for at least four decades. What remains in the parties leadership and elected officials is almost entirely the mostly strongly ideological business-first candidates that could be recruited. Because they knew they couldn't win with that platform they've spent five decades recruiting single issue populations including racists (clothed in the sheep's clothing of anti-abortion; thank Nixon for that), evangelical and fundamentalist Christians (Nixon's southern strategy), modern (Kochian or corporate) libertarians (which has almost nothing to do with the libertarian movement of the 19th Century; thank the Koch's for them), gun rights extremists led by an NRA that was convinced to abandon its many decades long endorsement of reasonable gun laws 9thank Reagan and (later) Russian Intelligence for that), and anti-tax zealots (we actually expelled Russian "diplomats" for pushing that movement around four decades ago, and anti-liberals, a push that started in a public relations campaign by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce back when Nixon was President. Most recently they've added a subset of extreme judaism and Catholicism to the mix.
The single issues make those groups easier to manipulate, which is where the psychology comes in. I can only name a small number of candidates for office in any country that distributed pictures of the candidate walking or standing with Jesus to churches. The first I know of was Hitler. All the rest are U.S. Presidential candidates, notably Bush 43 and Trump, starting with Bush 43. That's one example of the Republican parties highly vertical campaign approach, in which they've told each of those groups what they wanted to hear while sticking to repetitive sloganeering in public contexts (especially debates). They've been least successful with libertarians, who continue to run their own candidates.
But their approach with all of these groups is to create cognitive dissonance and then, having succeeded in suckering them into making a commitment, ramping it up such that supporters reject reliable information. We saw that under Bush 43. We've seen it carried to extremes, by Trump. But it's not them, it's the party strategy which they've been ramping up since Nixon, and in a highly organized way since Reagan.
You are right that this will be hard to undo. Heck, Texas may secede and take other states with it. But it's all a lie, much of it intentionally rooted in the same tactics Hitler's Nazi party used (there is even a "Trump Youth" now).
Thanks for the comment, Davis. I agree with your analysis, with two exceptions: 1. The roots and appeal of fascism, the dark magical belief is a truth greater than democracy, is far from simple. 2. I don't think the deepest part of that is money. I think it's a childish belief that truth does not matter, that if you conclude that something is worthy, that belief is immune to all contradicting evidence.
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