Must-read: Tod Kelly: “Broken Elephants, Part I: Donald Trump and the Triumph of the Conservative Media Machine”
Must-Read: The key question: How is one to attempt to do technocratic politics in the face of a massively dysfunctional Republican primary electorate and legislative right wing?
: Broken Elephants, Part I: Donald Trump and the Triumph of the Conservative Media Machine: “If the only candidates willing to support rather than disparage their own political party…
…can’t muster a quarter of that party’s potential votes, then that party is broken–period. Not necessarily broken permanently, but broken nonetheless. Arguments to the contrary are some combinations of smoke, mirrors, and wishful thinking.
So how did the country’s most powerful political party transform, in the space of a single decade, from the basis for a presumed ‘permanent majority’ to a state of chaos, its leaders actively conspiring against their own candidates in hopes of said party not permanently imploding? The answer… is that the GOP’s growing reliance on feeding a ratings-driven propaganda machine has led it to this state of disrepair….
Despite the fact that this Presidential campaign has likely already lost the GOP its 2016 White House bid, that defeat will matter little to the principal players…. These calculating rabble-rousers will be lucratively rewarded by the same Media Machine that created them… [and] be more venerated as losers than the past two actual Republican Presidents, and will… hog the Party spotlight…. The GOP’s upcoming 2016 White House loss will not be used as a cautionary tale to future conservative Presidential hopefuls… [but] as a road map…