COVID-19 & US healthcare system: Flattening the Third

[Bob Schroeck]

The part that doesn't make sense is why the party hasn't cut ties to Trump to save their own skins.

Well, that's simple.  The post-2012 election self-examination/post-mortem the Republican Party did of itself (and promptly ignored) raised the warning that the party was starting to become the party of old white people, and was increasingly out of touch with the United States as it exists today, to the point that its own youth generally regarded the some of the party positions as irrational and antique.  There was a core of the party that heard this and didn't think "we need to get with the times", but "we're losing the culture war and need a nuke to take out all those inconvenient people on the other side".

And they got that with Trump.  They're supporting him because as long as they have a narcissistic lunatic who doesn't give a fuck about laws and the Constitution in office, they can get what they want just by flattering him and playing up to his dreams of being the next Vladimir Putin or Kim Il Jong. 

There's also another angle.  I once quoted here ... ah, I forget who, but they said that the core of the difference between the left and the right was their attitudes toward change.  The radical wants tomorrow's change today, the liberal/progressive wants selected bits of tomorrow's change now, the moderate takes change as it comes, the conservative wants to manage change so it happens at a comfortable pace, and the reactionary wants all change outlawed and undone so nothing is different from what it was in his father's day.  The core of the modern American Republican party wants to turn back all change and does not react well to change it can't undo.  And a pandemic is such a profound change from the status quo that they profit from and need to preserve at all costs that the only way they can cope with it is to deny it entirely, even as the bodies stack up.  And Trump's ability to lie himself into his vision of a perfect world helps them in that, because there's a strong current of authority-worship in modern Republicanism, and if the man at the top says it then it's easier to delude yourself that it's true.

Pity self-delusion doesn't make you immune to disease.  Even more pity how many of the people around them they're likely to take down with them.