How Trump supporters see it: One topic of persistent, high personal interest is what supporters of American radical right authoritarianism are feeling and thinking. Most of that group, maybe about 95%, is mostly anti-democratic. Most of the group, maybe ~98%, is rigidly anti-inconvenient fact, truth and sound reasoning. Because of that, this group appears to be necessary to support the radical right’s push to get rid of secular democracy and install some form of plutocratic, theocratic Christian-capitalist dictatorship. What these people think and feel is critically important.
The WaPo discusses this issue and reports:
Feeling ‘overwhelmed’ and ‘fatigue,’ some GOP voters look beyond TrumpIn recent focus groups of persuadable Republican primary voters from key early states, most stood by their past support for Trump, but the future was a different issueNearly all of the focus group participants had supported Donald Trump in 2020 and said they would vote for him again against President Biden in 2024. But things got complicated when the moderator asked for the one emotion they now felt when they saw Trump on television or computers screens.
“That’s a hard one. That’s a hard one,” said Angela, 53, from South Carolina. “Just because of the way they’ve done him.” She spoke of Trump’s opponents who had tried to hurt him both in office and since he left the White House. “It’s more of an embarrassment for him for what they put him through. I feel embarrassed for him.”Deborah, 67, also from South Carolina, described herself as “stumped” by the question. “I was proud when he was our president, but you know, there’s so many things … the way they treated him and everything, ” she said, alluding to Trump critics.Two people picked “pride” and “hopeful” as their emotions upon seeing Trump, but the rest pulled from the other end of their emotional range, with words like “anxious,” “neutral,” “frustrated,” “nervous,” “overwhelmed,” “fatigue,” “embarrassed,” “annoyed,” and “maddening.” Most were careful not to criticize Trump directly — they praised his presidency and had critical views of Biden — but something had shifted. They spoke of him as a victim with flaws, not as the unassailable political alpha leader that had taken the party by storm in 2016.
The important points:
- Trump supporters mostly blame his critics for unfairly or unjustifiably criticizing him and they are getting fatigued by it, but most see little or no merit in the criticisms.
- Some supporters see some flaws in Trump but they stand by their past support and at least implicitly see his critics’ arguments and evidence as not persuasive (motivated reasoning at work).
- Because most in this group stand by their past support and see no reasons to back away from the Republican Party, they now look for a different radical right authoritarian demagogue they can support.
This information is in complete agreement with what the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit found about why Faux News reported lies about the 2020 presidential election. When Faux reported facts and truths that were inconvenient, its audience started to migrate to Newsmax. That scared the crap out of Faux, which immediately switched from some truth to mostly comforting lies to keep its audience. Collectively, all of this is solid evidence that the minds of most radical right supporters (~95% ?) are firmly closed, badly deceived, and heavily biased toward authoritarianism.
This is not good news.
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Breaking up the Union: The Hill reports:
Marjorie Taylor Greene on Monday suggested the U.S. “separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government,” re-upping her suggestion of a “divorce” to solve the nation’s division.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) on Monday hit back at Rep. Greene’s calls for a “national divorce” of Republican and Democratic states, saying the lawmaker’s rhetoric is “evil.” “This rhetoric is destructive and wrong and—honestly—evil. We don’t need a divorce, we need marriage counseling. And we need elected leaders that don’t profit by tearing us apart. We can disagree without hate. Healthy conflict was critical to our nation’s founding and survival,” Cox wrote on Twitter.
At least one Republican politician thinks keeping the Union together is a good idea. One can only wonder how most see it.
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Israel inches toward dictatorship: The NYT reports on an Israeli radical right movement to limit the power of independent courts and shift that power to politicians.
Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in Jerusalem for a second straight Monday as Israel’s far-right government pushed forward with a divisive plan for a judicial overhaul that critics say will weaken and politicize the country’s courts and undermine its democratic foundations.One bill would change the makeup of a nine-member committee that selects judges to reduce the influence of legal professionals and give representatives and appointees of the government an automatic majority. The change would effectively allow the government of the day to choose judges.
The other bill would strip the Supreme Court of its power to strike down basic laws passed by Parliament.
The authoritarianism in this is clear. Autocrats and theocrats want power. Democracy gets in the way, so democracy has to be weakened. The same thing is happening in America, except here authoritarians and theocrats have taken control of the US Supreme Court. The US court is accumulating power for itself and its ideological agendas, brass knuckles capitalism and Christian nationalist theocracy. The end game is the same, theocratic dictatorship, but the strategy and tactics differ.
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Weaponizing the Ohio train derailment -- Republican hypocrisy is off the charts (as usual): The radical right led by Faux News has weaponized the train derailment in Eastern Ohio, a white conservative part of the state. The WaPo writes:
.... in certain right-wing media precincts, the [train derailment] disaster is about something else: A campaign of discrimination being waged against White people.
“East Palestine is overwhelmingly White, and it’s politically conservative,” Fox News’s Tucker Carlson recently said of the roughly 4,700 residents of the disaster zone. “That shouldn’t be relevant,” he added, but “it very much is.”
It very much isn’t. But ever since the Feb. 3 disaster, Carlson and his comrades have sought to transform East Palestine’s plight into a tale about “woke” Democrats abandoning White communities in the virtuous, forgotten heartland.What this illustrates is how the right uses race-baiting to deceive people into forgetting that Democrats are now the far more committed party when it comes to investing in such left-behind communities.
The story goes on to report that Republicans are savaging Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for failing to push for more stringent safety standards. That is true and I've recently criticized Buttigieg here for that manifestation of Democratic Party neoliberalism, which is pro-corporation and anti-consumer.
But the same complaint coming from Republicans is pure hypocrisy in the name of cynical, toxic politics. Republicans hate safety regulations more than the neoliberal Democrats. If the president and Transportation Secretary were Republicans, there would no complaints about this from Republicans. They rarely criticize their own, especially when their own ideology is at fault. But because the Dems are in power, the GOP cynically complains about regulations that they would otherwise hate and get rid of to the maximum extent possible.
Republican lies and hypocrisy here are blatant, shameless and cynical. Unfortunately, they are effective.
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