I've been fascinated by the wackos for a long time, and writing about them for a long time. That linked paper was from 2011-- five years before Trump's improbable victory, which tells you something important. Trump is a symptom of a greater problem here, and that was kind of the point of yesterday's post. Trump's victory was the result of the GOP's inability to prevent him from winning.
But people voted for him. And we need to address that. The final component of the "party," in Key's conceptualization, is the "party-in-electorate." We don't have formal party membership in this country. You can register with a party, and depending on your state laws, you may have incentives to do so. If your state has a "closed" primary, then you can only vote in a party's primary if you register with that party, so you have incentives to register with a party. But, you can change that registration to vote in another party's primary, if so inclined. And nobody checks your loyalty. There's no oath of loyalty or any of that shit. In surveys, you can tell people whatever the hell you want. What it means to be affiliated with a party in this country is... amorphous. It means feeling some sort of attachment, although these days, according to research by Alan Abramowitz & Steven Webster, partisanship is more about hatred of the opposing party than positive assessment of one's own party.
Either way, party affiliation affects how people process information, assess policy, and vote. The GOP "party-as-organization" wants functional people in office so that the "party-in-government" can govern. They don't have that. Why? The party-in-electorate keeps nominating and electing fuckwits instead. Case in point: Roy Moore rather than Luther Strange. Or... Trump rather than... anyone else.
If the party-in-electorate won't nominate functional people, and instead insists on nominating people like Donald Trump and Roy Moore, then John Kasich isn't going to get any happier because a party-in-government consisting of dipshits (or even one that just has a critical mass of dipshits) will continue screwing everything up. The party-as-organization right now can't stop the party-in-electorate from nominating the dipshits. Why not?
The problem is the electorate. At this point, does anyone remember Landshark? It was a stupid bit from the very early days of Saturday Night Live in which Chevy Chase would knock on peoples' doors, in a shark costume, pretending to be a delivery person, or something, hoping the person would open the door and become dinner. Explaining the bit later, Chase said that the point of the bit was that the landshark was rather stupid, but just ever-so-slightly less idiotic than the people who opened the door.
I wrote a long series right after the November election on something like that point. Trump University. Trump promised people courses from hand-picked experts in real estate, and gave them schlubs who told them that they needed to pay more money for the next courses, which were taught by more schlubs who also told them that they needed to pay even more money for the next courses. It sounds like a stupid scam, right? It was. That's why only rubes fell for it. Fortunately for Trump, there are enough rubes in this country for him to make money off of them. (And do a hell of a lot more than that...) During the election, Trump was facing a class action lawsuit for this, although he bought off the Florida State Attorney General to try to avoid some fraud charges, and people still voted for this obvious fucking con man who inherited his money, couldn't figure out how to make money running a fucking casino, and only pretended to understand business on a "reality" tv show. And that's before we get into birtherism, pussy-grabbing, or the fact that he didn't even know what the nuclear triad is.
Rex Tillerson understands that Trump is a "fucking moron." The "fucking" part has been omitted from most reporting, but I'm going with Stephanie Ruhle on this. If the party-in-electorate doesn't get what Tillerson does, that's the core problem. That's why you wind up with Donald Trump, Roy Moore, Louis Gohmert, and way too many other mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging dipshits to list here, but who make the party-in-government incapable of governing because they're just too fucking stupid.
John Kasich wants intelligent governance. I'm pretty sure he misses John Boehner. So do I. I praise John Boehner a lot here, but he was driven out of government. He was driven out by the party-in-government, whose party-as-organization couldn't stop the party-in-electorate from nominating fuckwits who can't govern, and drive out those who can. That's why John Kasich is pissed.
The question this raises, then, is why the party-in-electorate, within the GOP, is doing this. There is a pattern here. In my 2011 paper, my "batshit list" did skew Republican, but mostly that was simply the result of asymmetric polarization. The Republican Party was becoming more ideologically extreme than the Democratic Party. This... isn't that. Sorry, Grossman & Hopkins, there's more going on here. Conservatism isn't stupidity. Even resistance to deal-making or a preference for ideological purity isn't stupidity, intrinsically anyway. John Boehner was a really, really conservative guy. His problem was that he was too smart and practical for the direction of the party, so he was sent packing. What is going on here?
More to come, I guess...