Contrarian opinion: it might not work, but the Trump White House gambling that US voters will become numb to ongoing, needless death as a fact of life even in the face of other countries largely solving the problem is not just some wild, desperate idea they had out of nowhere.
It's been the Republican approach to guns, poverty, and pre-pandemic health care, among other things, and while it might eventually drive their party off a cliff it's been working out well for them so far, in terms of holding power.
H.L. Mencken wrote: "No one in this world, so far as I know-and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me-has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby."
And I don't want to position this as a question of anything as nebulous as "intelligence", but certainly it doesn't pay, politically, to bet *against* the capacity of the human spirit to numb itself to pain and loss and death.
And while I point out that grinding souls into dust under their heels might eventually drive the Republican Party off a cliff, I don't think they are ignorant of that possibility. But if the country itself goes over with them, that counts as a win in their books.
Because the Republican Party is not interested in having the strong hand in shaping the policy of a republic of plurality. If they control the government half the time or two-thirds of the time, that's losing, in their eyes. They must be the only legitimate power.
A complete societal breakdown is not a bad thing in their eyes because they don't actually like our society. It's too messy for their tastes. They don't like our system of government, which allows for other opinions to sometimes win out over theirs.
If the whole project of American governance finally breaks down, they're confident that they will win the fight that follows, as they've won most of the fights leading up to the breakdown.
And this time they can win for good.
And this time they can win for good.
An underexamined aspect of 1984, in terms of how people apply it to our modern politics, is that the Inner Party held onto its power forever by fomenting the idea of a constant revolution. Not only was the nation always at war, the party was always revolving. A treadmill.
That is the Republican culture war in a nutshell: always a battle to be fought, always a crisis, always they are the underdogs who are winning, never are they the victors who have won.
And yet, paradoxically, in "always winning and yet never having won", there lies the only route to an eternal victory. Because victors can be toppled in turn.
When Democrats win control of the government, when any non-conservative party wins, the first order of business is setting up a government they know is only theirs to borrow. Every action is made with an eye towards how to work with an opposition that may be in power later.
George W. Bush lost the popular vote and won a narrow electoral victory elevated to the the Supreme Court by dubious mans. Most question mark question mark asterisk presidency in our lifetime up to that point, and he *immediately* declared he had a total mandate.
I meant "dubious means" in the preceding tweet, obviously, but yeah, they were some dubious mans who did that.
The Republican Party plays for all the marbles and they're playing for keeps. Every time. What they lack, they take, and what they have, they keep.
