I have often thought that David Frum was prophetic when, back in 2010 following the passage of Obamacare, he wrote this in a column titled "Waterloo" (emphasis mine).
I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination…If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.
The fact that the real GOP leaders were on TV and radio had become even more clear by the time David Hopkins wrote this in 2017:
The turmoil in Republican ranks is often described as pitting the party’s leadership class against an unruly popular “base.” But as scholars of public opinion often point out, few citizens develop strong political opinions or are mobilized to political action without influence from trusted authorities. What’s changed is whom voters are listening to: Unelected elite actors, especially conservative media figures, are gaining influence over the behavior of Republican voters while officeholders and candidates are losing it.
One of the people who was obviously listening to those "unelected elite actors" in conservative media was Donald Trump. He developed such a symbiotic relationship with them (especially Fox News) that the phenomenon of a Trump-Fox feedback loop was documented by reporters.
But something seems to have gone awry. According to documents filed in the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News, the network amped up the Big Lie about a stolen election in 2020 because they were afraid of losing their viewers.
Newly released messages show Fox executives fretting [in November 2020] over an uncomfortable revelation: that if they told their audience the truth about the election, it could destroy their business model.
That all seems to have come on the heels of Fox telling the truth about the fact that Biden won the state of Arizona - something the MAGA crowd didn't want to hear. Viewers had to be won back by spreading the Big Lie - even though everyone from Rupert Murdoch to Tucker Carlson knew it was untrue.
From that, it might seem that the MAGA crowd is more attuned to Trump than they are to right wing media. But I don't think that's the case. You might remember that a few months ago this happened.
'You’re playing right into their hands' when you doubt the vaccine, President Trump says. pic.twitter.com/xJc7JTL0cR
— No Spin News (@NoSpinNews) December 20, 2021
When the former guy told the truth about covid vaccines and admitted to getting boosted, the MAGA crowd booed him.
One of the reasons I've become pessimistic about the possibility of the MAGA fever breaking is that they seem to have welded their epistemic bubble completely shut. Here is what Julian Sanchez (who coined the term "epistemic closure") said about that a few years ago:
So an “echo chamber” just means you never hear any contrary information. The idea of “epistemic closure” was that you WOULD hear new and contrary information, but you have mechanisms in your belief system that reject anything that might force you to update your beliefs…
I bring this up now, because the Trump ecosystem has developed a pretty sophisticated set of epistemic closure mechanisms that work to reject new information that might otherwise pose a problem.
Even when Fox News or Donald Trump tell MAGAites the truth, those epistemic closure mechanisms click in to reject it. To get back into the good graces of MAGA world, even their leaders have to re-embrace the lie.
That's how far down the rabbit hole these folks have gone. I'm not sure how they will ever manage to come back.
"That's how far down the rabbit hole (these guys) have gone...." It seems as if we're saying that these 'rabbit holers' have had no actual choice or role in choosing to jump into the hole. If so, that makes them simply empty-headed actors fulfilling a prescribed role for 'tramp' believers. Do these guys really want to be considered 'empty-headed', no-choice, cartoonish characters with no options to make decisions on their own? Maybe, Nancy is correct in saying that the MAGAts (pronunciation intended) are simply these choice-less, empty-headed, followers who have decided to jump into the rabbit hole because it's there.
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