Brentai wrote:No no no, no, no. That was entirely serious. You see the problem?
I'm just saying if you're using Kim Kardashian as shorthand for somebody who's famous but not particularly useful, I don't think she's the best example of that anymore.
(Her husband, maybe.)
Lady wrote:tbh I think that now he's normalized evangelical insanity in politics, they have no real use for him once his mind truly wanders, so someone will just tell him about how nasty it is in DC and wouldn't you prefer to be in NYC where all the real action happens?
Nixon normalized evangelical insanity. Reagan cemented it. W was their guy, moreso than Trump is (if perhaps not quite as much so as Pence is). Even McCain had to backpedal and kiss Pat Robertson's ring in 2008 after dismissing him in 2000.
White evangelical Protestantism* has had a symbiotic relationship with the Republican Party for fifty years. That's not Trump's doing. But what's unique about him, what's different this time, is that he's laid bare the uttery hypocrisy of that ideology in a way that I think -- hope -- will do devastating long-term damage to it.
White evangelical Protestants already had a problem with
diminishing appeal to young people before Trump -- it turns out that being racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and anti-science is not the sales pitch it once was.
And it certainly seems to me that embracing Trump makes it very, very clear that they don't give a fuck about those morals they're so goddamn sanctimonious about. Any reasonable person, and a significant number of unreasonable people, can look at Trump and see that he is an immoral man. Even by the professed standards of white evangelical Protestantism.
That, I think, is the fundamental difference between Trump and W, Reagan, and Nixon, in terms of evangelical support. You could at least respect evangelic support for W, Reagan, or Nixon as consistent; you might disagree, but supporting those guys was consistent with the morality that evangelicals espouse. Their support for Trump is as clear an indication as I've ever seen that the symbiosis between white evangelical Protestantism and the Republican Party is football at this point, it has fuck-all to do with any of that shit they say about right and wrong.
I like to think that, in the long term, that's going to be fucking devastating to already-troubled recruitment efforts. They were already losing young people; now I think those numbers are going to get a lot worse.
But I've been wrong about a lot of shit. Maybe I'm completely off-base. Lord knows I've been far too optimistic before, and maybe saying that Trump could be the last straw for the next generation of white evangelicals is just wishful thinking.
And of course as TA pointed out, even if he is, gerrymandering and voter suppression could mean it doesn't matter. We've already got a government by the minority. 2018 was a positive sign that maybe it's not permanently entrenched, but the Republicans have seen the writing on the wall and they've made their choice: instead of trying to expand their appeal to more voters, they're trying to restrict voting power to people who already support them.
* Evangelicals in, say, the black Protestant community and Latino Catholic community are doing just fine, but they ain't so Republican.