Slava Malamud has a thread where he makes the analogy that being a Republican is like being a sports fan. It moved from " my team, right or wrong" to "my team, and your team must be ground into paste and dispersed to the four winds."
This bit makes sense:
Sports fans don't care who plays for their team. The guy can be a major asshole or a criminal, but if he can whack the thingy into the doodad and help beat the guys in differently colored clothes, he is good and opposing him is bad. Sports fans are cultish, irrational and shrill.
We see this perpetually with players like Antonio Brown who literally had to disrobe on the field to get bounced from the Tampa Bay roster.
I do think he places too much blame at the feet of Rush Limbaugh and other RW media types. Mainstream media has turned politics into sports journalism for years. In fact, it's called "horse race journalism" for a reason. It's so much easier to do sports reporting on whether a team is winning or losing than assess what the impact of whether a team is worth the $2B stadium taxpayers will have to pay to keep the team from moving to Charlotte. Reporters will absolutely write the stadium story, but people will skip over that for the box score.
The reason clickbait journalism is imperiling representative democracy is not - at its core - about the journalists; it's about how we consume that journalism. We like horse races more than detailed policy arguments, because we're vapid and/or exhausted.
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