Imho, here's the scary thing.

[Dill]

(12-23-2019, 05:43 PM)hollodero Wrote: Dill Wrote: ... the increase of Trump's power increases his accountability and that of his GOP supporters in ways that stress their capacity to construct alternative narratives to the "Fake news" accepted by the rest of the world.

I get what you're saying. And I totally disagree. Meaning, I really do not see it like an increasing challenge at all. On the contrary, it seems to get easier by the day. Some years earlier, one could see folks actually stumbling to get facts and Trump together. Right now, they (meaning the GOP politicians and pundits) just don't do that any more. They just say whatever and don't care about a bewildered interviewer or a bewildered half of the public. As if they had noticed they don't have to.

I don't see it getting harder at all. They could do that all day. McConnell as a stimulating intellectual challenge probably, the others possibly with the increasing sense that those who know better might just not matter. The sky is red! Doubters are biased! Message delivered. Next!

Why GOP supporters can go along with all their heart, that one is still one of the bigger conundrums for me. American tribalism is beyond anything I ever experienced here.

Well I think you cannot say it's getting easier by the day if "saying whatever" before a bewildered public has finally lost the GOP the House and enabled a vote to impeach. Had Trump never tweeted and listened to his better advisors, his approval might be over 50% per cent now and the election locked.  And yet he has learned nothing from that. He is not done alienating voters and stressing his own party--not by a long shot.

To rephrase what I said above, to CENTER the GOP's power in Trump's unethical and incompetent person of Trump--which is what we see happening now--increases both his accountability and his party's by reducing the number of people who can be blamed for errors, and increasing the number who can be blamed for kow towing to bad judgment.

E.g., suppose it is Trump's judgment, not McConnell's, that finally determines whether the Senate trial will call witnesses and introduce primary documents, and that while Rudy and the DOJ are working disable Trump opponents. That makes it pretty clear to real independents how 1) power formerly distributed across the party has now become wholly concentrated in one man with the power to punish, and 2) how that concentration undoes the autonomy of institutions like the Senate and the DOJ, eliminating their independent power to check.

You are quite right to see in the tendency to craven submission an enabling of authoritarian power, and to see that it is increasing within the party. But I think it wrong to suppose all this has no counter effect, does not create a number of resistance points both within and without both party and government.  All GOP voters are not going along with this--including those members of the "deep state" who understand why it is important that their judgment remain independent of party.

Darn . . . more to say but I'm being called to dinner.  More later . . . .