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this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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This is the actual interesting point here. Framing with some epiphany about "extrinsic" and "intrinsic" values is just putting a psychology-friendly label on things we've been saying since 2015.
On the other hand, I fully admit I thought that Trump being elected would backfire big on the GOP, and that America, seeing how awful he was and how readily GOP members of congress flipped on democracy and embraced fascism, would recoil. I thought after a horrible 4 years, the GOP would be done in the country. And at first, it was true. The "Muslim ban" and his other nonsense always triggered 5-10% drops in polls, which then recovered thanks to Fox News and other news orgs normalizing it. And then...it just stopped. It became fully normalized around 2018. After that, nothing impacted his polls.
Now we're staring down 2024 with Trump at all-time highs and the right-wing base is just getting worse and worse. Trump's supporters have abandoned their moral standards, abandoned actually testing their candidate (Trump) against any values they previously held. So now, I at least find that this explanation makes sense.
It's a nihilistic view of humanity - that people will just get worse and worse if people like Trump continues to be allowed to make the behavior "acceptable." - but at least it explains the data.
It's the normalisation that disturbs me the most, the gradual slide into what would once have been seen as abhorrent.
Show some of the headlines from just this last week to people in 2015 and I expect most would recoil in horror. The GoP's presumptive nominee openly using racist dog whistles; a court case where the judge warned jurors to never reveal their identify because of the fear of reprisal from the GoP nominee and his followers; the raw fact that he sexually molested a woman in the 90s; his instigation of civil war on the border in Texas... To name but a few.
All of this stands shoulder-to-shoulder with articles discussing his political prospects, his strategy to win over voters, how he is polling among white, middle-class women... as if he is in any way a normal candidate.
We need to take a step back, to think about what is happening here. Sadly, the very people who need to listen are the very people who can't listen, people for whom any negative discussion of this candidate would merely serve to strengthen the narrative and reinforce the reality they've conjured into being.
There would seem to be no way out of this situation that won't take decades, and which doesn't stand every chance of being derailed whenever an election goes the wrong way.