Ted Rall for December 27, 2019

First thing, avoid taking the advice of “helpful” conservative pundits. Secondly, pretty much ignore news media analysis.

Of course it wouldn’t happen. Centrists are fine with being challenged from the right, because giving in to the far right will ensure their corporate donors get what they want while the Republicans take the blame. They won’t genuinely fight back because it might jeopardize their corporate donors’ agenda. After all is said and done, it’s more acceptable to lose to the far right than to risk allowing progressives ending the time honored tradition of selling votes for legalized bribes under the guise of campaign contributions.

A generation ago, The Republican establishment failed to temper the religious zealot vote with the result being the evangelical mess we have to live with now. Credit to today’s Democratic Establishment for trying to calm down the revolutionary elements within for if they seize power there will be bloodshed and economic ruination.

This happened with Romney, and to a lesser extent McCain. Hardcore conservatives thought they were too moderate and complained about them constantly, but couldn’t prevent them from winning the primaries.

Anti-Trump Republicans also made some effort to change the delegate rules in 2016, though they didn’t get very far.

For at least the past two generations, Republicans have depended on the Religious Right types to support them, and they have been very dependable, despite the fact that very few of them have enough money that they were not working against their own best interests. For them, it didn’t have anything to do with economics or social welfare, because they were convinced that the Republicans believed in the Family Values agenda- anti-gay, anti-abortion, etc. Somehow they managed not to notice that once Republicans were elected, they completely ignored that agenda, or made it a trade-off for securing the goals of the 1%ers who were controlling the Republican party. In fact, they rarely mentioned those issues unless they were using them as a bargaining chip—- until the next time they needed volunteers, when it again became their mantra.After at least 40 years, the Religious Right finally figured out that the Establishment Republicans were playing them for fools, so they voted against Establishment Republicans, which created the current situation. They are continuing to prove they are fools by supporting Donald Trump, who has the Family Values credentials of an extremely active tomcat. It is amazing to see how many of these people who are, in their own minds at least, a moral shining light actually are able to overlook the fact that they are avidly supporting a person who has no morals at all.

The dynamic is definitely different on the GOP side: Fox is enthusiastic about right-wing challenges, because it’s what their audience loves. (More drama, more anger, and they’re fine whoever wins.)

But you might have missed the huge wave of ever-more-reactionary Republicans since the Tea Party in 2010, and the massive number of relatively centrist GOP politicians who either were beaten by primary challengers (remember Eric Cantor?) or just retired. This is one of the glaringly obvious sources of the current Democratic strength in the House, and particularly why the GOP has no chance to win that chamber back in 2020: their average member has moved substantially to the right, and is out of step with the country.

So: hardcore conservatives have been surging in the primaries. For a decade now. And strategists on the GOP side have been trying and failing to manage that dynamic the entire time. (Remember Roy Moore? The Dems got an entire Senate seat out of a GOP own-goal. Remember Bevin? Remember Kobach? Remember a few hundred like them at all levels of government?)

It would be difficult to miss that, unless you were viewing the world entirely through a Bernie-shaped lens, but I feel compelled to mention it.

Lessons from that actual recent history in the real world are left as an exercise for the reader.

Joe Biden could turn Republican.

Nuclear war will be fun.

Touché!

Because folks don’t get as emotionally riled up with kindness as they do with hate and anger. But yeah, certainly saw a LOT of the same behavior from the (cough, cough) “pure progressives” as we did from the Tea Party types. Yuck.

MSNBC Wash Post?

The Republicans keep pushing Biden and Tulsi Gabbard – let them run in the Republican primary.