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Month: March 2023

“The heckler’s veto”

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 28, 2023

The politics of loud and obnoxious

Jamelle Bouie turns a phrase that distills the loud-and-belligerant’s approach to politics: the heckler’s veto.

From Clear Skies to Healthy Forests and beyond, American conservatives have displayed a knack for couching objectionable legislation in unobjectionable terms. When Democrats were 19th-century America’s conservative party, they framed their defense of slavery as “states’ rights” — “pro-slavery” being too gauche even for Southern slave owners.

MAGA Republicans’ 21st-century enthusiasm is for “parents’ rights,” a catchall for “pro-book-banning,” “pro-censorship,” and “pro-discrimination.” Particularly in Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Florida-based, freedom-frosted fascism incubator. Envious GOP governors in Texas and Virginia nip at his heels.

Photo Caroline Brehman/CQ Roll Call.

Bouie explains:

The reality of the “parents’ rights” movement is that it is meant to empower a conservative and reactionary minority of parents to dictate education and curriculums to the rest of the community. It is, in essence, an institutionalization of the heckler’s veto, in which a single parent — or any individual, really — can remove hundreds of books or shut down lessons on the basis of the political discomfort they feel. “Parents’ rights,” in other words, is when some parents have the right to dominate all the others.

Jim Crow practices secured the blessings of white dominance over former slaves for 100 years. The taste for dominance in Jesus’ name over racial, ethnic, religious, and other disfavored monorities never worked its way out of much of American culture. It’s where the phrase “dominant culture” gets its bite, after all.

And, of course, the point of this movement — the point of creating this state-sanctioned heckler’s veto — is to undermine public education through a thousand little cuts, each meant to weaken public support for teachers and public schools, and to open the floodgates to policies that siphon funds and resources from public institutions and pumps them into private ones. The Texas bill I mentioned, for instance, would give taxpayer dollars to parents who chose to opt out of public schools for private schools or even home-schooling.

The culture war that conservatives are currently waging over education is, like the culture wars in other areas of American society, a cover for a more material and ideological agenda. The screaming over “wokeness” and “D.E.I.” is just another Trojan horse for a relentless effort to dismantle a pillar of American democracy that, for all of its flaws, is still one of the country’s most powerful engines for economic and social mobility.

Ultimately, then, the “parents’ rights” movement is not about parents at all; it’s about whether this country will continue to strive for a more equitable and democratic system of education, or whether we’ll let a reactionary minority drag us as far from that goal as possible, in favor of something even more unequal and hierarchical than what we already have.

Team Parents’ Rights would like that just fine.

“Only in America” once was a good thing

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 28, 2023

Now tolerating “pure evil” is

How long before carnival shooting galleries replace little yellow ducks with cutouts of schoolchildren? Would anyone notice? Would anyone take offense?

First news reports Monday said the Nashville elementary school shooter was a woman. All the rest was familiar. All too familiar. Read the gory details elsewhere.

What stood out in the aftermath more than the gender identity of the shooter was the exasperated reaction of one Nashville tourist, Ashbey Beasley:

“It’s only in America can somebody survive a mass shooting and then go on vacation…and find themselves near another mass shooting.”

“That is a thing that happens now in our country,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow told viewers Monday night. “Gun murders are in fact so common in this country that the shooter in one attack can shoot and kill 11 people [and] drive to a nearby parking lot to kill himself at the site of where another mass shooting had occurred just a few years prior.”

Beasley’s preliminary assumptions about the shooter appear incorrect, but so are many early reports about these events. In one video, Beasley says she’s in town to visit a sister-in-law. In another, she says she’s visiting someone she met through gun safety advocacy. Both can be true these days. God Bless America.

New York Times:

As a spokesman for the Nashville Police wrapped up a news conference on the mass shooting at an elementary school, an exasperated mother stepped up to the cluster of microphones and cried out: “Aren’t you guys tired of covering this?”

Ashbey Beasley said she and her young son were at the scene of another mass shooting just nine months earlier, at a Fourth of July parade in their town of Highland Park, Ill. Demonstrating how frequent such shootings have become, her family happened to be on a vacation in Tennessee visiting her sister-in-law on Monday when yet another shooting took place in their vicinity, this one claiming the lives of three children and three adults.

“How is this still happening? How are our children still dying, and why are we failing them?” she said to the reporters gathered.

“We have to do something,” she added, urging people to call their representatives. “This is going to keep happening. It’s going to be your kid and your kid and your kid and your kid next because it’s just a matter of time.”

At the Fourth of July parade last year in Highland Park, Illinois, Beasley turned and ran with her son from another mass shooter. Then she turned activist. She’s made twelve trips to Washington, D.C. since last July to advocate for gun reform.

The CEO of Daniel Defense, the firm that manufactured the AR-15 style weapon used in the Uvalde, Texas school shooting, testified to Congress that mass shootings using such weapons is “pure evil.” But heaven forbid we limit access to them.

Nuclear weapons don’t kill people either. Just “pure evil” people with nuclear weapons.

Oh right, that was Americans too.

Depressing values poll

Published by digby on March 27, 2023

Apparently, the only thing people still value in this country is money. Ugh:

Patriotism, religious faith, having children and other priorities that helped define the national character for generations are receding in importance to Americans, a new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll finds.

The survey, conducted with NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan research organization, also finds the country sharply divided by political party over social trends such as the push for racial diversity in businesses and the use of gender-neutral pronouns.

Some 38% of respondents said patriotism was very important to them, and 39% said religion was very important. That was down sharply from when the Journal first asked the question in 1998, when 70% deemed patriotism to be very important, and 62% said so of religion.

The share of Americans who say that having children, involvement in their community and hard work are very important values has also fallen. Tolerance for others, deemed very important by 80% of Americans as recently as four years ago, has fallen to 58% since then.

A number of events have shaken and in some ways fractured the nation since the Journal first asked about unifying values, among them the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent economic downturn and the rise of former President Donald Trump.

The only priority the Journal tested that has grown in importance in the past quarter-century is money, which was cited as very important by 43% in the new survey, up from 31% in 1998.

Aside from money, all age groups, including seniors, attached far less importance to these priorities and values than when pollsters asked about them in 1998 and 2019. But younger Americans in particular place low importance on these values, many of which were central to the lives of their parents.

Some 23% of adults under age 30 said in the new survey that patriotism was very important to them personally, compared with 59% of seniors ages 65 or older. Some 31% of younger respondents said that religion was very important to them, compared with 55% among seniors.

Only 23% of adults under age 30 said that having children was very important.

[…]

Some 21% in the survey said that America stands above all other countries in the world, a view that some call American exceptionalism. Half said that America is one of the greatest countries, along with some others. The share who said other countries are better than the U.S. rose to 27%, up from 19% when the same question was asked in 2016.

Jennifer Benz, vice president of public affairs and media research at NORC, said that views in the survey might have been colored by the downbeat economic outlook that the poll also found. “People are just sort of down on everything about the country,” she said. 

The survey found sharp differences by political party on social issues that have gained prominence.

It asked whether society had gone far enough—or had gone too far—when it comes to businesses taking steps to promote racial and ethnic diversity. Just over half of Republicans said society had gone too far, compared with 7% of Democrats. Some 61% of Democrats said diversity efforts hadn’t gone far enough, compared with 14% of Republicans.

Overall, 63% of people in the survey said that companies shouldn’t take public stands on social and political issues, while 36% of people said companies should take such stands. Among Republicans, 80% opposed companies doing so, while 56% of Democrats favored the idea.

Half of people in the survey said they didn’t like the practice of being asked to use gender-neutral pronouns, such as “they’’ or “them,’’ when addressing another person, compared with 18% who viewed it favorably. Some 30% of respondents under age 35 viewed the practice favorably, compared with 9% of seniors.

The Journal-NORC survey polled 1,019 people from March 1-13, mostly online. The margin of error was plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.

Differences in how the new poll and prior surveys were conducted might account for a small portion of the reported decline in importance of the American values tested. Prior surveys, conducted for the Journal and NBC News, used live interviewers to reach people by phone.

With lawyers like these …

Published by digby on March 27, 2023

Trump is once again scraping the bottom of the barrel:

It reminds me of this…

He only hires the best…

Newtie’s last act

Published by digby on March 27, 2023

Those of you who have read this blog over the past two decades know how I feel about Newt Gingrich. I hold him just as responsible and Donald Trump and Roger Ailes for the dark turn the GOP took since the early 90s. (And yes, their over racism was always reprehensible.) His influence over this country’s politics cannot be overstated and it’s all bad.

Al Hunt, who’s also been following this story for decades has written a piece about Newt and I hope people read it. It’s important to always remember that Donald Trump didn’t start this descent into fascism. Gingrich was an officer in the Reagan Revolution and he took it to its logical conclusion. He is now being feted as an elder statesman by the MAGA movement, which makes perfect sense:

Newt Gingrich is having another rebirth: reported whisperer to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), quoted hundreds of times as the supposed wise man to all things Congress and Washington, an off-Broadway version of Jim Baker or Leon Panetta.

Some reporters are too young to remember that Gingrich, a very effective guerrilla warrior, was a failed Speaker a quarter century ago.

Facile, glib, demagogic, he always has an observation, usually more inflammatory than insightful.

A review of Gingrichisms over the years is instructive. These do not include typical political sniping, such as Republicans calling the Democrats socialists or Democrats accusing their opponents of trying to push Grandma off the cliff. No, these are Gingrich originals. Here’s a sampling.

Gingrich charged that the Jan. 6 select committee that investigated the insurrection at the Capitol trying to overturn the presidential election was a “lynch mob.” Not, mind you, the people who erected an actual gallows outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 — no, Gingrich says, it’s the members of Congress who investigated them. He said people like Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and Liz Cheney (R-Colo.) were “going to face the real risk of jail.”

That’s a thing for Newt. More than decade earlier, he suggested that Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), authors of the banking reform measure that carries their names, should be thrown in jail.

Somewhat surprising given his own checkered personal background, Gingrich has thrived on linking Democrats to moral turpitude. Right before the 1994 election, a South Carolina woman drowned her two young children, and Gingrich jumped in to say the way to change that “sick” society is “to vote Republican.”

After Woody Allen had sex with his former wife’s daughter and was accused of abusing another, the Georgia Republican said that “fits the Democratic party platform perfectly.”  

Racial dog whistles are not uncommon for Gingrich. He said Obama was a “con” who could only be understood in terms of “Kenyan anti-colonial behavior,” (the former president’s absentee father was from Kenya) and that Obama was “authentically dishonest.”

Let’s not forget a flirtation with religious bigotry. As then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg and community leaders were backing a Mosque in lower Manhattan, Gingrich went ballistic: “There should be no mosque near Ground zero in New York as long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.”

Gingrich charged the 2009 Obama stimulus bill was an “anti-Christian” measure that would prevent churches, bible groups and Boy Scouts from using public schools. That was beyond hyperbole; fact checkers found it simply false.

Self-delusion is another Gingrich trait. Before Trump, Gingrich boasted how closely he worked with Ronald Reagan to change Washington in the 1980s. In the Reagan diaries, there’s only one innocuous reference to meeting with a group of young Republican lawmakers, including Gingrich. Reagan biographer Lou Cannon doubts the Gipper even knew who Gingrich was.

Hypocrisy? Check. In 1985, Gingrich told the Wall Street Journal’s Jane Mayer that the Vietnam War was the “right battlefield at the right time.” When she asked him why he took multiple deferments during that war, he admitted some discomfort while declaring, “No one thought of this as the bottom line on which freedom would live or die.”

Rule of law and separation of powers? Forget about it. In criticizing a supposedly radical judiciary, Gingrich said federal marshals should arrest liberal judges and bring them before Congress to explain their decisions.

While railing against lobbyists in his ill-fated presidential quest, it came out that the former Speaker had gotten $1.6 million or more over several years from Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored entity designed to aid the housing market. Gingrich explained he was hired as an historian.

As Gingrich approaches 80, his venom hadn’t mellowed.

Right before the Russians invaded Ukraine, he likened Joe Biden to Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who appeased Hitler; when the war started and Biden marshalled an effective international coalition, Gingrich nevertheless accused Biden being “timid, cowardly and pathetic.”

Flash forward a year, when leading Republicans Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis turned anti-Ukraine. Asked about it, Gingrich quickly shifted to Biden’s “family being corrupted by China” and declared “the Southern border is far more important to the United States than Ukraine.”

Every politician (and most all of us, if we’re honest) makes embarrassing or stupid comments now and then. President Biden and the late President Reagan were gaffe machines.

Bill Clinton infamously said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

Barack Obama made a comment about people “clinging” to guns and religion.

Gingrich’s statements are of a different order entirely.

Other than Trump, no major public figure over so many years has been as vicious or delusional.

Honestly, I think Newt is more influential. Trump jumped on the bandwagon after it was already well on its way. You know he never did anything original in his life.

He was a laughingstock

Published by digby on March 27, 2023

The delusional cult actually believes him. But that’s because of Fox news and the wingnut media:

Needless to say, people all over the world were laughing — nervously — for four long years, aghast that we could elect such a cretin and terrified that he was going to make a terrible mistake. But I’m sure his cult didn’t know about it. All they heard was how magnificently he was doing and how much the whole world respected him. It is an Orwellian horror but thankfully, so far, it only affects a large minority of the public.

The Revenge Tour’s opening date was all about Dear Leader’s problems

Published by digby on March 27, 2023

This past weekend, Donald Trump proved that he can still draw a crowd after appearing before an estimated crowd of at least 15,000 fans for the first rally of his 2024 campaign. He arrived on “Trump Force One” and circled the event before landing to the strains of “Danger Zone” from “Top Gun.” His entrance to the arena was even more provocative:

That song was recorded by the “J6 Choir,” made up of the inmates in the D.C. jail whom the court has deemed too dangerous or too much of a flight risk to be allowed out on bail. Some have already pleaded guilty. That Trump showed up in Waco, Texas, on the 30th anniversary of the 52-day standoff between the FBI and a small religious sect in their remote compound there, and open the event with images of Jan. 6, was described by his staff a a total coincidence. It was just a normal campaign stop, they insisted. (Sure it was.)

The opening acts weren’t exactly A-list. He had Ted Nugent demanding his money back because he “didn’t authorize any money to Ukraine, to some homosexual weirdo,” apparently referring to Volodymyr Zelenskyy. There was Mike Lindell, the “My Pillow guy,” describing Trump’s infamous phone call with Georgia official Brad Raffensberger as “the best call in history.” Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida were the biggest Republican names on the bill — which, interestingly enough, did not include any major Texas Republicans such as Gov. Greg Abbott or Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn. But the crowd didn’t care about that — they probably agree with Greene, who told a right-wing broadcaster before the rally that she wants to “end” the Republican Party of Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, “who don’t stand up and fight for the American people.”

The crowd was having too much fun, as they always do at Trump rallies. His cult-like following has the time of their lives: waiting in line for hours, wearing their tribal gear and sharing the experience of being a member of this traveling road-show “movement” focused on worship of the former president. Mind you, the man they adore bears no resemblance to the person the rest of us see, but the whole experience seems to give them genuine pleasure.

While everyone else was having a great time dancing and singing and cheering on their hero, Trump himself was in a darker mood. Sure, he hit some of the greatest hits, claiming that the U.S. economy was the greatest the world had ever seen when he was president and that he was good buddies with all the tyrants around the world, which made everyone respect us. But mostly he talked about how he was personally being persecuted: The campaign even passed out printed signs that read “Witch hunt.” He even contended, absurdly, that since he has not yet been indicted in any of the multiple the investigations against him, he is “the most innocent man in the history of our country.”

He said that “the Biden regime’s weaponization of law enforcement against their political opponents is something straight out of the Stalinist Russia horror show. … From the beginning it’s been one witch hunt and phony investigation after another. … The abuses of power that we are witnessing at all levels of government will go down as among the most shameful, corrupt, and depraved chapters” in all of history.

He reached a crescendo with his characterization of the government being taken over by “demonic forces”:

Either we surrender to the demonic forces abolishing and demolishing — and happily doing so — our country, or we defeat them in a landslide on Nov. 5, 2024. Either the deep state destroys America, or we destroy the deep state. We’re at a very pivotal point in our country.

Talk about Mr. Bringdown. No wonder there were reports of people leaving the rally half an hour in. What happened to the joyous frolicking to the 1970s gay pickup anthem “YMCA”? What happened to the lusty chants of “Lock her up”?

But Trump did strike one more upbeat note. He repeated the infamous line he delivered a CPAC a few weeks ago: “I am your warrior. I am your justice. For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” 

The revenge tour has officially begun.

The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey was in Waco and reported that some of those supporters are stoked. Seeing him as a president returning from exile (or perhaps as an avenging angel) one rally-goer said that while the earlier campaigns were optimistic and forward-looking (which they were not), this one was all about payback:

“To me, this is retribution. We’ve got to get our country back, because it’s been stolen from us.” What would that retribution promised by Trump look like? I asked. “People who have done fraud and illegal stuff, they’ve gotta be perp walked. They need to face justice,” he said. “There’s a two-tier level of justice in this country.”

Others agreed:

The legal system is corrupt, the political system is rigged, and Joe Biden was never elected president, Ricky Patterson told me. Trump’s campaign is a crusade for “redemption.” Trump is a “new-age Moses,” April Rickman, from Midland, Texas, told me. “He delivered the people from Egypt.”

I have little doubt that those ideas animate many MAGA true believers. They’re angry about losing and they want to make someone pay. But as I was listening to Trump’s endless blather about his alleged persecution, it occurred to me that he’s forgotten something important about what got him there. Whether this will make a difference in the upcoming Republican primary remains to be seen, but Trump’s solipsism, which has always been close to the surface, has now completely taken over.

Do Trump’s followers really believe that a case about paying hush money to a porn star, or about stealing classified documents, has the slightest thing to do with them?

Yes, he pays lip service to the idea that by persecuting him law enforcement is persecuting all the MAGA believers — but do his followers really believe that a case about paying hush money to a famous porn star, or about stealing classified documents, has the slightest thing to do with them? I suppose they can stretch the Jan. 6 cases to include the supposedly-wronged Trump voters, at least in spirit, but most of the people at these rallies would never storm the Capitol and engage in pitched battles with the police. They just like to dress up in hideous red, white and blue get-ups and party the day away before they go home to watch “America’s Got Talent.” Maybe he gives them the fantasy of being warriors for democracy but in the end, all of this is really about him, not about them, and they know it.

Trump once understood that he needed to channel the grievances of the voters, not just his own. So he talked about immigration and crime and terrorism and particular culture-war gripes he’d culled from the talk-radio circuit. You’d hear him rant about obscure issues like “Common Core” that only those who were clued into right-wing obsessions were even aware of. Now he talks about some of that stuff, just in passing, but reserves his real passion for his own troubles, which he obsesses over in great detail. His insults are saved for fellow Republicans and obscure prosecutors whom nobody in that crowd could pick out of a lineup.

Maybe it makes no difference to his devoted flock. They do seem to love him no matter what he says or does. But I have to wonder if at least a few of these people don’t watch an event like this and ask themselves, “Doesn’t he care about anyone but himself?” The answer, of course, is obvious, and on some level they’ve known it all along. 

Salon

Has Bibi finally gone too far?

Published by digby on March 27, 2023

Well, that didn’t go well. I noted over the weekend that the Israeli defense minister had called for the government to at least postpone its “judicial reforms” because the military was starting to fracture over the issue and it was threat to national security. On Sunday, Prime Minister Netanyahu fired the defense minister — and the country looks like it’s exploding.

This Liveblog of the “night of chaos” is stunning. An excerpt:

Anti-judicial coup protesters are blocking roads and intersections at multiple locations across Israel on Sunday night to protest Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to fire Defense Minister Gallant. According to police, demonstrations are taking place at over 150 locations.

Bibi wants to make these judiciary changes to protect himself from the corruption charges that hang over his head and he has a slim 4 vote majority which he cobbled together by selling his soul to the far right, which wants to hobble the independent judiciary for its own purposes.

The systems are very different and it’s not useful to make too many comparisons. But damn, there’s a lot in there that sounds familiar, no?

This will be a big story all day today. It’s important.

Building winning Democrat margins in 2024

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 27, 2023

Monday morning geek-out

11/08/2022 OFFICIAL GENERAL ELECTION RESULTS – NEW HANOVER COUNTY

Reflecting on the studies E.J. Dionne referenced (post below), let’s consider where Democrats can narrow their vote margins and perhaps turn losses into wins.

The key to Democrats winning in 2024 and beyond could lie in turning out more independent voters in precincts where they lean Democrat.

My focus at the moment is how independent voters swing, especially in evenly divided states like North Carolina. (Donald Trump won the state in 2020 by under 1.5 points.) “Unaffiliated” voters (UNAs) here are the largest tranche of state registrants (36 percent in 2022), meaning Democrats must turn out D-leaners to win.

Except UNAs statewide voted only 42 percent for the Democrat at the top of the November ticket in the last two general elections. That performance, however, varies wildly by precinct. In mine, four out of five UNAs voted for Joe Biden.* In some of North Carolina’s largest counties, UNAs split as much as 60 percent for Democrats.

But take note. North Carolina’s UNAs also turned out in 2022 at roughly 6 percent below overall voter turnout statewide and 8-10 points below Democratic turnout in precincts where my estimates show they lean blue. Why is that, and what if they didn’t?

Improving D-leaning UNA turnout could mean the difference between winning and losing in both statewide and some local elections. In red counties in swing states, it may be enough to shave Republican margins to contribute to statewide wins. First, campaigns have to know where to look.

The problem is that whether campaigns target individual UNA voters is influenced by whether the voter requested a Democratic ballot in a past primary in states with open, partially open, or partially closed primaries. But how many is that?

Just over 9 percent of UNAs participated in North Carolina’s 2020 presidential primary. Only about 6 percent requested a Democratic ballot. It’s kind of tough to reach a 50%+1 winning threshold when you’re starting out targeting Democrats (34% of registrants in 2022) and only 6 percent of an electorate that votes with you only 42 percent of the time.

But in one close 2022 state House race I’ve looked at, boosting UNA turnout to near-D levels in blue-leaning precincts might have turned a D loss into a D win. With only a one-seat margin for defending his veto after the last election, Gov. Roy Cooper could have used that extra seat.

My suggestion to campaign managers and strategists in North Carolina and beyond is that they reconsider standard practice in how they identify independent/unaffiliated voters for their get-out-the-vote efforts. You may not know what you’re missing.

* NC’s election data is the most accessible I’ve encountered. With a simplifying assumption, it is possible to estimate using hard numbers how UNAs voted by precinct without relying on exit polling.

Whitening the GOP

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 27, 2023

Tapping the American id

A second look at Abraham Josephine Riesman’s Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America, this time by John Hendrickson in The Atlantic, contemplates how watching a “good guy” wrestler like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson deliver “‘the people’s elbow’ to a bullying foe” is cathartic for professional wrestling fans. They pay good money for it. WWE’s McMahon “tapped into the American id,” made a fortune by it, and drew Donald Trump a roadmap to the White House.

A technology and science fiction writer I know online commented Saturday night on how Generative AI “will turn civilization upside down” in ways hard to predict. For better or worse, Pandora’s Box is open and will never be closed, she wrote. That’s how technology works.

Similarly, who could have predicted that professional wrestling and McMahon “could have such a profound influence on American culture and politics,” Hendrickson writes.

McMahon’s pal Donald has changed American political culture and the party he leads by dint of throwing elbows at people his fans love to jeer. (That’s you, Dear Reader.) The threats and injuries are more than theatrical. The “incentives and current architecture of politics” make it unlikely they will go away either, writes E.J. Dionne:

Two studies this month highlighted why. Let’s start with an analysis of all 435 congressional districts conducted by the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California in conjunction with the Atlantic. It found that 142 of the House’s 222 Republicans represent districts with low levels of racial diversity and that are dominated by White voters without college degrees.

As a result, wrote the Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein, “the energy in the party over recent years has shifted from the small-government arguments that drove the GOP in the Reagan era toward the unremitting culture-war focus pursued by Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.”

Like the propagandists at Fox — like McMahon too — Trump knows his marks and markets to them. The rest of his party does the same.

Another study released last week, by Alan I. Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, traced the dramatic change in the makeup of the American electorate over the past 40 years. The study, published by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, found that “racial and cultural issues, rather than economic ones,” have driven the enormous gains Republicans have made with noncollege Whites.

With Republicans losing ground among White college-educated voters, the cultural right and Trump’s base is more than ever the GOP’s. Old party hands dare not criticize Trump for fear of alienating them.

Republican pollster Whit Ayres tells Dionne that today’s GOP is about 10 percent “Never Trump,” 30 percent “Always Trump,” and the rest “Maybe Trump.”

The Maybe Trumpers are open to alternatives, he said, but having voted for Trump twice, “you will never, ever get these folks admitting they made a mistake,” meaning they do not take kindly to criticisms of the former president. This is why Trump’s rivals for the nomination have been so reluctant to take him on directly. The Republican Party’s swing voters are in a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil mood.

Until the incentive structures change, Dionne writes, or “until party leaders defy them” (or perhaps until Trump leaves the scene to pale imitators), “we’re stuck in the world that Trump’s neuroses create for us.”

Like McMahon, Trump taps the id. The party’s shrinking White base loathes the idea of sharing the country with neighbors of whatever complexion it considers less than equals. That part of the Declaration they treat as insincere showmanship, as they do professional wrestling. Trump knows and exploits it. The GOP base knows it is headed for shared minority status and no amount of voter suppression or abortion restriction may change that. Not that Republicans won’t persist in desperate attempts.

Trumpism’s Pandora’s Box will not close again. That’s how political technology works.