Tuesday, May 02, 2023

A Minority Of A Minority Of A Minority...Party

75% think Trump won in 2020? 75% of what? 1% of the voting population? 1% of the remaining Boomers still above ground?

Wow. 😲

I do like "Show support for legal fights."  That's not a legal defense, however.  Tacopino's letter/motion for a mistrial and his cross-examination may have given MAGA the warm fuzzies, but it won't win Trump a verdict.

And "He makes liberals angry"?  What, no antifa anymore?

In light of which:  whither are the moral majorities of yesteryear?
If my daughter The Golden Child knows the name "Falwell," she connects it to the disgraced former President of Liberty University.  The "Disney boycott" of the 1990's?  She was born in 1992.  We still have all the old (now obsolete, thanks to Disney+) VHS tapes of classic Disney movies she grew up watching.  Boycott?  What boycott?  And it certainly put Disney in its place, didn't it?

I'm not decrying this ancient (to my daughter's age cohort) history; I'm just saying the imprint of those "culture warriors" is practically nil.  Sure, they ran up big threats in their day, and Newt Gingrich used the moral panic preached by Falwell and represented by the McMartin preschool "Satanic panic" as a backdrop to attack Bill Clinton (who survived Gingrich), and that effort led directly to the House GOP operating in the imago of MTG today.  But even MTG is the blush on the cheek of a dying age.  And what Belvedere is describing there is, I suddenly realize, truly ancient history.

How do I explain to my daughter that, 10 years before she was born, men went on TeeVee and wept and prayed and people sent them money hand over fist?  And other men pretended to be in an esctatic state and predict the future of the republic and that "Rhonda" and "Jim" would be cured of their ills because God had spoken?  It was a routine that seemed more like "Romper Room" where the hostess would look in her "Magic Mirror" and see all the "boys and girls" at home staring at the Boob Tube.  I'd have to explain to her that one seemed credible because we were four years old, but why did adults think Pat Robertson and Jim and Tammye Faye were believable?  At the time they seemed to wield incredible power, and yet the Bakker's collapsed into scandal and bankruptcy faster than they became famous, and Pat Robertson shot all his celebrity in a failed bid to turn it into political power, a bid all the pundits were sure he'd win, until he didn't.  I'd also have to explain to her that "cable" was new technology at the time, not unlike the internet today.

Gone, all gone.  And no one to mourn it.  And as we got used to cable, and then bored with it, well....draw your own conclusions about the near future.
Face it, folks: there is indeed nothing new under the sun. And while DeSantis is neither "winning" nor "losing" votes yet (nor will anybody until February 2024, at the earliest), he's already losing donors as the stink of "loser" attaches to him like skunk spray.  He's doing nothing but reiterating the fights of 30 years ago, and almost nobody is here for it.  The cable audience Pat Robertson commanded couldn't get him more than a handful of votes in the GOP primary in 1980, and the "evangelical vote" didn't carry Trump across the finish line in '16 or '20. And where is that SBC cred now? Wasted on internecine fights over the ordination of women and whether or not LGBT+ people are actual human beings. And don't forget the sex scandals.  Boomers may still be going to SBC churches and putting coin in the plate, but almost nobody else is, and the SBC is declining in membership and power and social position along with the rest of the major denominations.  The laws of gravity eventually apply to everyone, big and small.  The smaller denominations may have gone first, for the sin of being "liberal," but the reckoning is catching up to the SBC's, for being too "conservative."  Live by the sword, and eventually you, too, die by the sword; because you find out it is, indeed, double-edged.  

It really doesn't matter if it's a sitting governor or a preacher with a megaphone; nobody's listening anymore.  Not that many ever were, anyway.  Audience is often confused for political reach (Trump still thinks the size of his rallies mean the country is with him).  It's never proven to be so.
Yes, it is the whole tree. But that's not because a "woke mind virus" infected the GOP; or because they ate the infected monkey brains (Charlie Pierce's metaphor, from the monkey brain scene in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.") It's because, starting at least with Goldwater's failure, the GOP has been steadily pruned of all its branches, and whittled away at until only this "tree" is left. Feature, not bug.

And now they're stuck with it.  A minority of a minority of a minority party, stuck with a culture that progressively eliminates more and more of the rest of the country; where the voters are.
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