Last edited Sat Mar 26, 2022, 09:12 AM - Edit history (1)
The policies of the Movement Conservatives who took over the party, and their wealthy backers/allies, aren't popular and couldn't get passed on their own merit. They want to restore the Gilded Age, where wealthy men had few if any impediments to doing whatever they wanted, and they liked the government they bought. They want to wipe out every law and policy put in place since the late 19th century that works for ordinary people.
How many votes would they get running on that?
Not many, so instead they promote rage and foam, but tried to keep it under control. Buckley gets a lot of credit for sidelining the Bircher leadership, but he and his crowd were hardly less extreme. They were just better at strategy. There was no hope of splitting, say, conservative Jewish voters away from the Democrats if the face of conservatism were people who reflexively spout anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
They still encouraged bile and foam from the general public. In the 70s they used early forms of data mining to identify hot-button issues that could be used to split New Deal-era voting blocks, foremost among them abortion and guns.
By the 80s they were driving the Rockefeller Republicans, who they considered quislings, to political extinction. They'd gotten the numbers they needed to not bother compromising.
All through the late 70s, 80s, and 90s they encouraged axe-grinding and played footsie with RW crusades in order to get votes. Newt Gingich and Frank Luntz tested and compiled radicalizing language and promoted its use by Republican candidates.
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 to get their voters all hot-blooded and into the voting booth.
Their entire success has been built on not compromising. The closest they come is when they act to blunt or stall actions by Democrats until Republicans are back in the driver's seat again.
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. Blow up the Death Star. Drop the Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. The Enemy surrenders unconditionally and their symbols get blown up.
They turned the Party of Lincoln into the Party of Salome. Salome is the base, and she grew increasingly pissed that the establishment Herods weren't bringing her the heads she'd asked for.
They turned the Party of Abe into the Party of Ahab. Ahab is the base, who if their chests were cannons they'd shoot their hearts out like cannonballs to trigger the libs.
They built a base that wants this:
But never gets it.
When you tell that story for decades, continually amping it up to keep the audience's blood at a rolling boil, 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 turn up anything that will 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.
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