Skip to content

The manly Republican

Grown ass man throwing a tantrum at Costco because he was told to wear a mask. Location: Lantana FL from r/trashy

That is literally what a 3 year old in a store does when he wants to stage a tantrum in a public place.

I noted that former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson wrote an op-ed over the weekend in which he actually blamed Republican voters and observed that this is something only Republicans can do without being accused of being intolerant elites. (They are accused of being RINOS, which isn’t the same thing.) Here’s another one, this time from Jonathan V Last at the Bulwark (and formerly of the Weekly Standard) who calls out the Trump voters as suckers:

Normally this is the part where I insist that I’m not doing this to dunk on these poor marks. But like Kayleigh McEnany, I made a promise. I will never lie to you. So, yes. This is what I’m doing.

But I have a point, too: None of this is rational. This is the monetary equivalent of Eric Metaxas saying that it doesn’t matter what he can “prove” because he just knows that Trump won.

How do you argue with that? You can’t.

And when people stop being rational actors who respond to normal incentives, then things get dangerous.

By any reasonable metric, Donald Trump’s job approval rating right now should be far below what it was in 2018. We have over 315,000 dead Americans. Millions are jobless. We are in the middle of the worst cyber attack in American history. Trump lost the election and has continued to embarrass himself and his supporters for six weeks. And yet . . .

Trump’s job approval today: 44.8 percent. Trump’s job approval in December of 2018, when Americans were fat and happy and alive: 43.6 percent.

It’s ticked up over the last two years.

Put this all together and you have only two possible explanations:

(1) Trump supporters are irrational, which makes them wholly unresponsive to incentives—mass death, losing their jobs, losing bets about Trump.

(2) Trump supporters are rational, but their incentives are non-traditional. Which is to say, the benefits for them are more psychological than material, and are tied less to what happens in the real world than to the things Trump says. Such as insisting that he won the election in a landslide, that he wants the results overturned, etc.

I don’t know which of these is correct. But I also don’t really think it matters. Because either way it means that we have a large bloc of voters in this country who—for whatever reason—behave in ways which are antithetical to democracy and liberalism.

Yes, yes we do. And I would suggest that many of them exhibit both of those explanations, sometimes simultaneously. I also maintain that Trump has tapped into a mass case of arrested development on the part of a certain sub-set of white Americans who are simply unable to accept that they are not the center of the universe, entitled to always do exactly as they please. It’s a puerile version of the 60s counter-culture. They are stuck in infancy rather than adolescence.

I mean, just look at that guy above, having a toddler tantrum in the middle of Costco. That’s not normal, people. It really isn’t.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time. If you’re of a mind to drop something in the old HUllabaloo Christmas stocking, you can do so below.

cheers,
digby


Published inUncategorized