De gustibus
Michelle Goldberg cites a disquieting statistic:
Whatever Trump does, most Republicans will probably go along with it. In 500 days, Trump has managed to turn much of what remains of his party into an authoritarian cult. Among Republicans, he has an 87 percent approval rating; the only modern Republican president who was more popular with his own party at this point in his term was George W. Bush, and that was mere months after Sept. 11. A recent poll of voters in congressional swing districts found that 71 percent of Republicans “mostly like” Trump’s handling of F.B.I. and criminal justice officials.
Among Republicans he has an exceptionally high approval rating.
That’s appalling. That terrible mean bullying venomous vindictive obscene man is what they like best.
I can’t tell if this is the case for the poll being quoted, but one hidden variable to watch for in these stories about Trump’s support among Republicans is that generally these polls also show that fewer Americans identify themselves as Republicans. Or at least, fewer in the polling sample do, which gives pollsters headaches trying to figure out if their sample is skewed (in which case they should be weighting Republican responders more heavily), or if this reflects that there really are fewer Republicans.
The Republicans have been a feckless, destructive and deeply hypocritical player in American politics since at least Reagan’s days. They’ve been without morals. ethics, or concern for this country for many decades, now. It’s certainly nothing new.
The rank-and-file basically uses ‘Are the liberals pissed? / Are the Democrats angry?’ as their primary metric for whether something is good or not. This depressing statistic is a natural outcome of that.
For many years I have kept my brain in check and often verbally defended Republicans, when my or my peers instincts were to hate them for all the harm they caused. I rationalized and made excuses for individual Republicans voting against their own best interests. I really don’t feel up to maintaining that moral standard anymore. 87% of a group of people lack all empathy and intelligence. 87% of a group of people are amoral hypocrites. They are succeeding in destroying my life, the lives of my neighbors, the lives of foreign peoples who will never even visit this country. It’s just too much. Republican individuals will have to vociferously disavow their president and their party for me not to default them to bitter enemy status.
I am actually married to a Republican, but he is a RINO. He wants to change to Democrat in his registration, but for some strange reason feels compelled to vote in Republican primaries locally in the hopes that he can keep some of the worst of them out of office. It hasn’t worked so far, so I’m not sure why he continues on that hopeless quest. (And no, he isn’t needed to get the best of the Democrats through the primary; we’ve been pretty good at doing that so far, we just can’t get them through in the general election, where anybody can vote Democrat or Republican…we are very outnumbered and outgunned, but neither of us plans to give up and stop voting for the better candidates).
I don’t think we could ever have gotten together if he was a Republican out of more than habit.
Oh, and Nan, my husband definitely lives up to this standard – every single day. More than once a day. From the moment the man declared his candidacy. My husband was a vocal Clinton supporter, and wailed as loudly as I did when…that…Cheeto…won the presidency on a technicality.
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1937102016308250/?type=3&theater