This is related to a thesis I've been forwarding for a decade.
Quote:There are many recurring themes that help explain what’s happening in the United States under Donald Trump: incompetence, cruelty, racism, self-dealing, misogyny. But the perpetual campaign rally gives shape to all the others. The Trump presidency is the result of politics organized around unending partisan aggression, which has driven out even the pretense of other aims. The only goal of power in the Trump era is to own the libs.
Slate
Though Trump is the apex of this phenomenon, it has been a broad and consistent tendency of the modern American right, particularly in its messaging, for many years. I think we can see a real shift in the mid to late 80s with Limbaugh, followed by other talk radio shows that took him as a model (there was big money in this model for stations and hosts). At around the same time or slightly later, Regnery Publishing was pushing writers like Ann Coulter and Newt Gingrich, two individuals who perhaps most clearly saw that trolling - communicating in a manner that was designed to offend liberals and which was entirely open about that goal or strategy - could build an audience of angry and disaffected conservatives. There is hardly a sentence Coulter has ever uttered or written which did not have the goal of making "liberals' heads explode". Each of these people (and many, many others who followed) have made many millions of dollars for themselves playing this troll game.
But because modern American conservatism is grounded far more deeply in (and is far more familiar with) Coulter and Limbaugh than in Burke or Strauss or Buckley or even Goldwater this trolling model of political discourse has mostly displaced anything more scholarly and intellectually rigorous. That's why facts don't matter to Trump's supporters and why, though to a lesser degree, they didn't with Reagan or Bush/Cheney. Will it piss off liberals to deny climate change? Of course. So that becomes more important than the facts of the situation.
