Conservatives Have Groomed the Perfect Suckers for Trump’s Epic Scam

[sufrommich]

In a sense, conservative voters have been groomed for Trump since the 1960s. As the historian Rick Perlstein wrote in The Baffler and The Nation in 2012, the American conservative movement has become more and more amenable to get-rich-quick schemes, snake-oil salesmen, and confidence men. Direct-mail barons like Richard Viguerie began raking in the dough in the 1960s by stirring up ideological hysteria and convincing an audience of senior citizens that only their small-dollar donation could fend off union bosses, abortionists, and gays. Of course, most of the money ended up with the fundraisers.

From the direct-mail bunco artists, it was a natural progression to conservative media selling ads to the most outlandish dream peddlers and conspiracy-mongers. After Perlstein subscribed to email lists for publications like Townhall and Newsmax, he started getting some strange notices, including “the 123-Cent Heart Miracle,’ the one ‘Washington, the medical industry, and drug companies REFUSE to tell you about.’ (Why would they? They’d just be leaving money on the table: ‘I was scheduled for open heart surgery when I read about your product,’ read one of the testimonials. ‘I started taking it and now six months have passed and I haven’t had open-heart surgery.’).”

Conservative ideology, as Perlstein persuasively argues, is particularly vulnerable to grifters because of its faith in the goodness of business and its concomitant hostility toward regulation—which makes it easy for true believers to buy into the notion that some modern Edison has a miraculous new invention that the Washington elite is conniving to suppress. In Perlstein’s words, “The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one place—and the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.”

There’s another factor at work here: The anti-intellectualism that has been a mainstay of the conservative movement for decades also makes its members easy marks. After all, if you are taught to believe that the reigning scientific consensuses on evolution and climate change are lies, then you will lack the elementary logical skills that will set your alarm bells ringing when you hear a flim-flam artist like Trump. The Republican “war on science” is also a war on the intellectual habits needed to detect lies.


https://newrepublic.com/article/134667/conservatives-groomed-perfect-suckers-trumps-epic-scam?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link




This is an excellent article ,nobody should be surprised that a party that encourages anti intellectualism and conspiracies eventually finds itself with a candidate like Trump.

[beachbum bob]

1. execellent article and so very true...my conservative friends haven't read any thing new in 30 years

except their NRA magazine and only watch foxnews....so they are 100% clueless with actual reality

[Hortensis]

2. Many GOP candidacies were obvious advertising campaigns

meant to build their brands in the past several elections, so many that their increasing numbers made a joke of their primaries.

Given what the GOP electorate has reduced itself to (with plenty of help of course), it now seems inevitable that eventually one of these shysters would catch fire with enough of them to become their nominee.

We've been amazed that such a clearly dysfunctional and disordered person would be the one, but in looking over the kind of people who have been willing to run in an increasingly extreme right-wing party, very few have been whole, well functioning people capable of fairly good judgement.