This thread came across my BlueSky feed the other day…

Yeah. The article in question is from fall 2019, but it seemed staringly obvious to me during the run up to the election and after, especially in how Trump and the republicans were governing. If the base was all about their economic anxiety you wouldn’t have known it by how often the republicans cut the economy out from under their base. But the base loved them anyway, because they were all in on the culture war items: racism, misogyny, xenophobia and homophobia.

That’s what it is about. It is the alpha and the omega of what it is about. “… the core of support is cultural backlash & reaction.”

It was, and is, staringly obvious. Yet it stunned me at the time, and still does, how so many democrats, liberals, and gay liberals no less, keep insisting the republican base is winnable if we can just speak to their economic woes. But no. No. That 35 or so percent of the American polity is not reachable.

I’ve been watching them from a gay man’s perspective since I was a teenager. But even before that, as a boy sitting in the pews of a Yankee Baptist church, singing in Sunday School that Jesus loved All the little children, and in grade school reciting the pledge of allegiance that ends with liberty and justice for All. I’ve been watching them all this time. It was hard to fathom people who categorically rejected the core values of their country and their religion, and yet insisted they were the perfect examples of both. Back in the day one just wrote them off as crazies. And now they have their hands on the levers of power.

They will never accept life an America that they have to share with the hated Other. They will burn it all to the ground first and dance in the ashes of civilization. They’ve been like this since before I was born, since before the Civil War. The white supremacy, the attitudes toward women, gays, other religions, other cultures, science, higher education. They will burn the earth to a cinder if that’s what it takes to rid it of everything they hate. They will never change. They are unreachable.