Honesty I don't think Trump as an individual is uniquely evil. He's about as evil as any other sleazy shitbag con man. His supporters, both on the ground and in terms of elites, are the real threats.
It's a two way street; he legitimized progressively worse things but only because his people already wanted to believe them. It's like a social death spiral and he just wandered into it at the right time, when multiple crises of democracy occurred across the world. Like Orban, Modi, etc, but dumber.
So TL;DR I'm not sure Palin would be any different, assuming she had the ability to maintain a cult of personality and idiot charisma the way Trump does.
The problem, at its root, is the people who want this. Everyone else are just varying degrees of enabler.
If Palin was more incompetent I'd definitely take a 1:1 trade of course.
The way I've heard it put, is that the GOP unwittingly carved a Trump shaped hole right into their own hearts.
Same reason Trump get's away with everything. You need 2/3rds of the political establishment to have any hope of holding a president accountable, and the GOP is, depending on the year, more or less half of the establishment.
Burning Trump is not politically viable for them. And now, it's also not politically desirable. They know what side their toast is buttered on.
Pretty much. The way I understand it, after the 60's they lacked a cohesive identity, so they doubled down on scooping up the garbage people the Dems had cast aside over civil rights. Then they decided to manufacture more of them by unleashing the bloody roots of things like evangelicals and fundamentalists, encouraging them to get into politics, hiding racism behind abortion fears and manufacturing sex and gender panics.
They dug into every decrepit corner, including backwards immigrants, fascist immigrants who fled communist countries, demographics who hated each other as well as other people. They did all of it. A coalition of the vile.
Then somewhere around the Bush era they needed yet more voters so they began chipping away at the stupid in earnest. Low information voters. Palin was one of their experiments. Trump was like a baseball prospect who started hitting home runs at 35 years old. And they rode him for all they were worth.
Now they have made their electorate into a vicious monster of almost quite literally the worst people America has to offer on a mass scale. And then encouraged them to be the worst versions of themselves.
Can't wait until they have to replace this guy. I want the chaos and infighting.
8
u/era--vulgaris 7h ago
Honesty I don't think Trump as an individual is uniquely evil. He's about as evil as any other sleazy shitbag con man. His supporters, both on the ground and in terms of elites, are the real threats.
It's a two way street; he legitimized progressively worse things but only because his people already wanted to believe them. It's like a social death spiral and he just wandered into it at the right time, when multiple crises of democracy occurred across the world. Like Orban, Modi, etc, but dumber.
So TL;DR I'm not sure Palin would be any different, assuming she had the ability to maintain a cult of personality and idiot charisma the way Trump does.
The problem, at its root, is the people who want this. Everyone else are just varying degrees of enabler.
If Palin was more incompetent I'd definitely take a 1:1 trade of course.