We underestimated the power of brainwashing
Yes, there is latent and often blatant racism behind support for Donald Trump. Yes there are fervent one issue voters, who will vote for Trump simply because he vows to overturn Roe V Wade, or because he strongly supports "gun rights." Yes there are those who will vote for Trump because they know on which side their bread is buttered, and thus advance their own narrow economic self interests. And yes there are "low information" voters who are not well educated and/or poorly informed about the issues that effect us all. Yes there are also tribalists who automatically give the advantage of the doubt to whoever is wearing their own team colors. But it is much more than all of that combined. There is brainwashing.
It is easy to be critical of those who succumb to brainwashing when you yourself can't identify with them. It is easy for me to accept that budding new racists get indoctrinated into white nationalism, for example, when I start out viewing them as being particularly vulnerable to recruitment into that toxic creed, or in other words, if I see them as inherently unlike me. But while brainwashing might be most easily effective against those who are most vulnerable to it, far fewer people than that are actually immune to it.
I have seen too many instances where people who I would characterize as being left of center fall victim to what I see as brainwashing. I moved to San Francisco in 1977, and when I first arrived there The People's Temple and its pastor Jim Jones were well regarded in liberal politics. The vision that the Peoples Temple embraced was multi-racial, multi-culteral, humanistic and avidly behind advancing social justice on every front. The Peoples Temple, for a time, was a player in Democratic local politics. Many political activists belonged to it. Many well educated and socially conscious people were drawn into it, and the sense of community and inclusion they felt inside its ranks. It was painful years later to watch video interviews with Peoples Temple members who one way or another avoided a deadly fate in Guyana. Though I did not know those people personally I still recognized them, they weren't much different than me.
There are other examples, some of them relating to those among us who suffered from the feeling of a spiritual void, ranging from those who were ensnared by the Moonies to those who became followers of this or that eventual cult leaders. There are, and have been, relatively extremist political movements on the left also dominated by central figures and bold ideological views painted in primary colors. Many of us heard of the late Lyndon LaRouche, whose movement (according to Wikipedia) "originated within the radical leftist student politics of the 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of candidates, some with only limited knowledge or connection to LaRouche or the movement, ran as Democrats in the United States on the LaRouche platform."
Brainwashing does not just affect stupid and/or uninformed people. Once the infection begins it often spreads to ohers, much like a potential viral pandemic. The body politic in America had no built up antibodies to someone like Donald J.Trump. The last political figure in America who remotely compares to Trump in his ability to remold minds through propaganda and lies was Joseph McCarthy, and that was almost 70 years ago. Americans were not psychologically prepared by our recent political past to reject a constant thundering waterfall of lies. We knew how to respond when small lies were injected into the political discourse. Small lies can be fact checked and debunked, and those who tell them usually reacted with discomfort, and one or another form of chagrin when confronted with evidence that refuted them. America was not prepared for the introduction of Hitler's propaganda tactic, the use of the Big Lie, a totally fabricated alternative reality that defiantly proclaims itself the truth in the face of any and all evidence to the contrary.
The fact that The Big Lie now originates from the highest office in the land, one that for generations Americans have come to venerate as the focal point for our democracy, allows it to permeate through many of our rational defenses against it. We have become conditioned to expect lies to be retracted by reputable figures when the evidence doesn't support them. We have been conditioned to regard any siting President of the United States to be, essentially by definition, a reputable figure. Trump was a figure given a high profile national profile for many years prior as a reality TV star. Credible news networks covered his bombastic and hate riddled campaign rallies repeatedly and in full during his "novel" 2016 campaign, supposedly for news value but in reality for ratings. Cult figures ordinarily can not win 1/100th of the exposure that our assumed to be reputable media granted to Donald Trump. And then he seized the Bully Pulpit.
The Right wing news media in America cynically broadcasts to a hermetically sealed bubble. It is a hugely profitable business that's made mega millionaires out of the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity who front for it. At this point it is essentially one and the same with the National Enquirer in regards to objective truth. This propaganda echo chamber is fully deployed now and sanctioned from on high, and it is extremely effective at what it does, unrestrained as it is from any need to convey the truth. I say all of this not to excuse any of the racists in America who have crawled out from beneath their rocks, nor to excuse those who refuse to even look at evidence of their own embedded toxic prejudices. I say this not to minimize the caustic influence of greed in America, or the glorification of selfish individualism that runs rampant in our culture. Nor do I dismiss the danger from fundamentalist religious forces that seek to sit in judgement over us all, controlling the options open to us to conform to their own concept of morality. I say this because we need to both know and understand our enemy. We are up against more than just racism and ignorance, more than intolerance and greed. We face a full blown cult of personality in America today, one that is as much psychological and cultural as it is purely political. And to combat that we need to develop more than just sensible policies and better framed talking points. We need to somehow initiate deprogramming on a mass level.
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Damn, single spaced. Nice. 
