General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: How the hell can Republicans so blindly follow and worship this criminal monster? [View all]JHB
(37,157 posts)Conservatives, including every "NeverTrumper" who made a career of Republican messaging or conservative media, have spent some 40 years building a base that demonizes opposition, that has contempt for moderation and compromise, that encourages and reinforces absolutes, that is hypervigilant for "betrayal" and primed to punish any backsliders.
They scare-mongered and scandal-mongered and played to all the bigotries and pet peeves, and called it "playing hardball". They wanted to get conservative Republicans elected, and there was no part of that job that involved "dialing it back." They painted Democrats as supervillains: utterly corrupt moral degenerates out to destroy the nation and all that's good and holy. They did that to get their voters all hot-blooded, into the voting booth, and pulling the lever for Republicans.
Conservatives have purposely whipped up an extremist frenzy to give them the margin of victory. They've been punishing any Republican who didn't fall in line since the 70s when they started ousting Rockefeller Republicans.
But the drawback is: When you paint the story that way, it's supposed to end with you bringing the bad guys to justice. They rot in jail, or better yet get hanged or fried. You blow up the Death Star. you drop the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. The Enemy surrenders unconditionally and their symbols get blown up.
Your audience wants this:
But they never get it.
When you tell that story for decades, continually amping it up despite its blatant falsehood, you create an expectation that you can never really deliver on. You can justify decades of investigations and re-investigations and re-re-re-re-re-re-re-investigations, but that's not going to hold up in court.
So you put yourself into the position of portraying the other side as unbearably evil and an active threat, and then don't do anything about it. The base still has their hot buttons pushed, still believes every word of it, they just start thinking you're ineffectual at best, or more likely are part of the problem.
Remember the cultishness around Bush? It was there, from groups organized to pray for him to the coining of the phrase "Bush derangement syndrome" (because one had to be crazy to criticize him.) They were already used to swallowing horseshit like it's chocolate. When a more shameless purveyor of horseshit arrived, the addicts switched right over to the purer smack.