Fearlessness is valued over content.
That's the fundamental takeaway from the latest CBS News poll of the Republican primary base in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina (and beyond, one assumes). The conservative zeitgeist is elegant in its simplicity: thoughtfulness inhibits popularity, imbecility is a crowd-pleaser, and outrageous imbecility confers frontrunner status. What J.M. Keynes saw in the mid-1930s as a positive force in economics, "animal spirits — a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction," others, such as Orwell, saw as a malevolent force in politics: the animalistic id of "drums, flags and loyalty-parades."
In brief, the more vicious the lead hund, the more vicious the pack. See previous post. And viciousness, says my elementary psychology as well as experience, is typically an admixture of fearlessness and stupidity. Re-enter the rhetorically fearless and strategically stupid Donald Trump, then, as the undisputed frontrunner.
"[W]hen Trump backers are asked their favorite thing about him, the top answer is that he says what others are afraid to say." They don't much care what he says — he can be a de-facto isolationist one day and a pillaging militarist the next — as long as he says it with fearless conviction and in the most simplistic, dimwitted manner possible, so that the pack may comprehend.
This is still paying off for Trump, indeed it is paying off more than ever. He "has returned to the lead in Iowa [30 percent]," reports CBS, "while Ted Cruz [21 percent] has now surged past Ben Carson [19 percent]." (Marco Rubio is at 11 percent; Bush, a steadily pathetic 5.) In N.H., Trump is at 32 percent (Rubio is closest, at 13). In S.C., Trump is at 35.
At all this, I revel. The angry little guy with the funny little mustache never presidentially polled better than what Trump is polling in South Carolina. Yet the United States has no parliamentary system in which unlike, moronic minority factions can unite into a majority, and it has no appointed chancellorship. And that means only one thing for the long haul: Trump is taking the vicious GOP down — one fearless imbecility at a time.
Stay well, Donald. Stay well.