by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
The American Left and Right continue recede from each other at an alarming rate. The Right is so consumed by the culture wars and “owning the libs” that they are oblivious to once were really big concerns for them. So, all the talk about how Trump added trillions to the national debt just don’t mean jack shit on a political basis.
And, of course, the Left doesn’t do itself any favors by fixating on the very things that alarm and enrage the Right (or, more specifically, the Centrists who win elections.) The Left screams at the top of their lungs about “protect trans kids” when, as far as I can tell, there aren’t really all that many trans kids to “protect.”
One thing that has to be noted is the thing that MAGA people love about Trump is he’s a fighter. He has no ideology other than ranting about, in the stupidest way possible — a pretty complex macro issue: a lot of white Christian (men) are enraged by what’s going on in America.
Trump’s “magic sauce” is he’s a fighter. White Christian (men) feel put upon for various reasons, disenfranchised and so they love the “idea” of Trump. They could care less about what he actually believes or does — hence they ignore all the trillions of dollars he added to the national debt.
Having said all that, it’s clear that Vivek Ramaswamy has figured out enough of Trump’s winning formula that I believe he is going to soon be the second place “placeholder” that will exist solely for the purpose of being the nominee should something happen to Trump to make no longer politically viable.
From the clips I’ve seen of Vivek, he seems like just the sort of guy that the MAGA base would love. He’s post-truth, makes people like me angry and alarmed and so there you go — Trump 2.0.
That’s the thing about Ron DeSantis — he totally misses the point of what attracts people to Trump. He thought that by running to the Right of Trump on culture war issues that he could at least by the guy the party turned to if something happened to the Dear Leader.
But DeSatanis is to weird, off-putting –and humorless — to pull it off. Vivek, at least, has a big goofy grin on his face all the time. And Vivek knows the MAGA base well enough to know that they just don’t care about issues. They see them as white noise.
All the MAGA base wants is to “own the libs.” They hate liberals so much that many of them can’t even use the word “liberal” for any fucking reason without getting fucking triggered.
This is a “not great” situation for a lot of reasons. But it’s the political world we live in at the moment and it’s only getting worse. The big unknown of all of this is, of course, how far things going to go? Are we going to reach a breaking point where we turn to political violence because our political system finally collapses?
That is a question I don’t have the answer to and worry about a lot. At the moment, it really could go either way. We could descend into civil war (Reds) / revolution (Blues) or we could simply slide peacefully into autocracy.
