1 year ago
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We begin this New Year’s Day with Amanda Marcotte of Salon predicting that the Republican Party will become even more enmeshed in vengeance and “sadism.”
There was a brief moment of hope that the GOP's poor results in the midterm elections might cause Republicans as a whole to "moderate," or at least pull away from noxious MAGA extremism. After all, data demonstrates that entirely accurate perceptions of the party's radicalism led independents — and even a small but crucial number of normally Republican voters — to break for the Democrats. But examples like these and countless others have made clear that the opposite is happening. Republicans aren't backing away from MAGA. They're doubling down. The cruelty that has come to define the party is only likely to intensify in the next year, resulting in more vicious attacks on LGBTQ people, more dehumanizing treatment of migrants, more deranged conspiracy theories, more pregnant people denied medical care with specious "pro-life" arguments, and more winking approval of political violence.
There are many possible explanations for why the GOP is going so dark, most of which revolve around the fact that the party's authoritarian base voters and its big-money donors have a lot more influence than potentially winnable independent voters do. But the unnecessary, gratuitous viciousness of so much of this stuff — seriously, no one asked Ron DeSantis to relitigate the pandemic! — makes that kind of bloodless explanation seem unsatisfying. It's time to ask a different question: Is it possible that GOP leadership is composed of the same unhinged sadists as their voting base?
As Adam Serwer of The Atlantic pointed out, the cruelty is the point for Republicans. Furthermore, Republicans find “community” based on the the ability to be as cruel as possible to their designated Others. It’s the reason why so many right-wingers are very publicly flocking to support an accused sex trafficker like media “influencer” Andrew Tate,
