The Depths of Cynicism

 One of the pervasive puzzles of the Republican electorate is why they persist in voting for a party that really only wants to cut taxes for the top 1% of Americans. That should not be a winning electoral formula. OK, you can add on the fact that - as WEB DuBois explained so long ago - white supremacy brings psychological and social benefits, even if it does not bring economic benefits.

However, the GOP makes rhetorical and actual nods towards various social issues like abortion to motivate certain parts of the electorate. They ride their perverse version of "pro-life" (which means anti-abortion but pro-death penalty) to victory. The fact that they are embracing various forms of deregulation that will necessarily impact working class Americans in ways that will actively kill them is just removed enough from direct causality to let the GOP off the hook. If the GOP deregulates a chemical plant, and the people downwind get cancer...whose to say why that happened?

As Greg Sargent notes, the recent Trumpist tilt of the GOP has removed even that thin line of plausible deniability. The Trumpist Party is throwing massive doubt about vaccine safety, even while the same elites who are peddling this shit have themselves been vaccinated. So, Trump gets the virus, it nearly kills him, he gets state of the art treatments unavailable to his cultists, he's probably still been vaccinated just in case, and he is going around telling his cultists not to get vaccinated.

As I mentioned the other day, I think the primary focus for the Biden Administration is working with rural churches. Black or White or Hispanic? Doesn't matter. The White evangelicals will reject the outreach. But if you can get vaccination rates in the Black and Brown communities above 80%, and the members of Cult 45 continue to avoid getting vaccinated...let them. Fuck'em. 

If Trump and Tucker Carlson and the rest want to kill their supporters, I don't see how that is something that should keep me up at night. They have a choice. Both the elite opinion makers and the cultists are making a choice that flies in the face of evidence and common sense. Fuck'em.