Paul Krugman is, as usual, shines a spotlight on something that in normal circumstances wouldn’t need a spotlight for everyone to see it…

Paul Krugman: Trump is appealing to aggrieved white men by lying to them  (Salon)

Both parties make promises to their bases. But while the Democratic establishment more or less tries to make good on those promises, the Republican establishment has essentially been playing bait-and-switch for decades. And voters finally rebelled against the con.

What Donald Trump has been doing is telling the base that it can order à la carte. He has, in effect, been telling aggrieved white men that they can feed their anger without being forced to swallow supply-side economics, too…

The truly interesting thing is how abruptly, how completely, the religious right became irrelevant in the Trump onslaught. Your gay and lesbian neighbors have questioned the sincerity of religious objections to gay equality for decades, and here I think is the proof in the pudding. It was, in the main, never about religious belief. Religion was just an excuse…something to wrap their bar stool prejudices in so they wouldn’t have to see a bigot staring back at them in the bathroom mirror. See it now. When it came time to choose between the religious fanatic and mount a grand crusade against Satan for the glory of god,  or  the fascist demagogue who gave  them permission to glory in their cheapshit prejudices, the bulk of the voters ran immediately to the demagogue.  And now the fundamentalist  true believers suddenly find the pews are looking a tad empty.

There’s what was going on all this time. All that talk of a moral majority. All that talk of a  Christian nation. All that talk about putting god back in the classroom, and in the seats of government. All those ten commandment monuments  that sprang up all over the country  in the years since Brown v. Board of Education…at the same time public swimming pools were being buried rather than let  the colored kids  swim there too. All those private Christian schools…with their prohibitions against interracial dating. I’ve no doubt that religious fervor moved a great many who gravitated to the republican party over the decades and felt nothing but contempt and scorn for the morals they saw in the world around them. But it is a peculiar sort of Christianity that has no charity either, toward the poor, the stranger, the outcast, and it was never a force in numbers. Not by itself.  

It turns out that many who sat with them in the pews and sang the hymns and put some money in the plate had simply adopted the brand, for lack of anything else capable of  preserving their  self respect. We are not racists. We are not bigots. We are Christians.  As soon as a messiah came to deliver them from that bondage they flocked to him in relief, without even a goodbye and thanks for all the grape juice and crackers.

There’s what was going on all that time. There’s what was going on.