"Malleable To The Point of Innocence" is NYT-Speak for "Reprogrammable Meatheads"*

After reading Thomas Edsall's column today, The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage reportedly got knee-walking drunk, downed a whole bottle of prescription Oxford commas and then threw itself off of a precipitously high dangling participle.

Because like pretty much every other Nerf Ball column about partisanship and politics the Beltway generates these days, Mr. Edsall's contribution to the genre is an exercise in attempting to write about why the GOP is a reeking shitpile of bigots and imbeciles without actually, y'know, talking about why the GOP is a reeking shitpile of bigots and imbeciles.

Right off the bat he tries to clear the very first hurdle from the wrong foot.

In the Trump era, Republicans have been revising their views on right and wrong.

No, Mr. Edsall, this is not some exotic new plague that arrived on our shores with the advent of Stupid Administration.

In fact, for decades the Republican party has depended entirely on it's reprogrammable, bigoted, brain-dead base to win elections -- a base that has eagerly and radically revised their views on right and wrong over and over again depending on whether or not their party occupies the White House. And they have gotten away with it so often thanks to the invaluable assistance of the Conservative media and the Beltway media that by now they have been conditioned to believe that it is their inalienable right to just doublethink all contradictions out of existence -- to wish, wish, wish away their own, inconvenient past as though it had simply never happened.

And it is this corrupt bargain between the media and the Republican Party to never, ever hold the bigoted, brain-dead Republican voters responsible for the disastrous policies and cartoonishly incompetent demagogues and con men they vote for that resulted in the election of President Stupid.

But please, do go on.

...“In a head-spinning reversal,” Robert P. Jones, the C.E.O. of P.R.R.I., wrote in the July 2017 issue of The Atlantic,

white evangelicals went from being the least likely to the most likely group to agree that a candidate’s personal immorality has no bearing on his performance in public office.

What happened in the interim? The answer is obvious: the advent of Donald Trump.

No, no and no again.  The depravity of the Republican base, especially its white conservative evangelicals, is a long-standing pre-existing condition that has manifested itself in many, horrifying ways, the latest and ugliest of which the Trump/Pence administration.

Jesus Syllogism Christ, am I the only who watched the West Wing does the fucking homework?

But please, by all means proceed, Mr. Edsall.

There is more to this phenomenon than evangelical hypocrisy. Many Republican voters, including self-identified strong conservatives, are ready and willing to shift to the left if they’re told that that’s the direction Trump is moving.

Michael Barber and Jeremy C. Pope, political scientists at Brigham Young University, reported in their recent paper “Does Party Trump Ideology? Disentangling Party and Ideology in America,” that many Republican voters are:

malleable to the point of innocence, and self-reported expressions of ideological fealty are quickly abandoned for policies that — once endorsed by a well-known party leader — run contrary to that expressed ideology.

Those most willing to adjust their positions on ten issues ranging from abortion to guns to taxes are firm Republicans, Trump loyalists, self-identified conservatives and low information Republicans.

This is straight-up, cask-strength, Orwell stuff.  The nightmare scenario about which the dirty hippies have been warning for 30 years (and for which we have been slandered, mocked and roundly ignored by the Very Serious men and women of the mainstream media.)

I have nothing to dispute here.  I just wanted to give you a moment to pause before plunging again to our next stop:  watching as the authors of the cited study -- Messers Barber and Pope -- avoid having their academic funding pulled for being too partisan by abusing the word "may" way past the point of decency (emphasis added.)

Many partisans are, in effect, more aligned with the leader of their party than with the principles of the party. (Although Barber and Pope confined their study to Republicans, they note that Democrats may “react in similar ways given the right set of circumstances.”)

Most of the rest of the column is (as I mentioned at the start) an extended exercise in attempting to write about why the GOP is a reeking shitpile without actually talking about why the GOP is a reeking shitpile.  Most glaringly, there is no whisper to be found anywhere about how the modern Republican Party spent decades methodically reorganizing itself on a foundation of racism.

There is no mention of the Southern Strategy.  No talk of the GOP's 40 year project to create a safe space for bigots and imbeciles.  No discussion of the Fox News.  No mention of the decisive and fatal role played by the rise Hate Radio and of Newt Gingrich's GOPAC a quarter of a century ago.  And above all, no judgement exercised about things like facts or the truth or falsity of the positions of the two parties.  For example. the word "science" does not appear anywhere in this report.  Nor does the word "climate".  Health care?  Nope.  Obama?  Nope.  

Birth certificate?  Benghazi?  emails?  

Nope, nope and nope.

Apparently this Great Sorting all just...sorta...happened.

Because Trump!

And even though apparently no one know how any of this came to be,  golly, it sure is a damn shame that it did.

...
Third, and most significant, if the Barber-Pope, Broockman-Daniels and Achen-Bartels conclusions are right, American politics is less a competition of ideas and more a struggle between two teams.

In other words, insofar as elections have become primal struggles, and political competition has devolved into an atavistic spectacle, the prospect for a return to a politics of compromise and consensus approaches zero, no matter what temporary accommodations professional politicians make.

Oh no, Mr. Edsall, American politics is definitely a competition of ideas.

They're just ideas that you would rather not talk about in the good, gray pages of The New York Times.  

 * (Title of this post shamelessly stolen from @WattleOfBits from the Twitter machine.)

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