re: #153 Decatur Deb

Think of the virtue in making the religious right and the Republican Party an ashen plain.

My fear is that’s not at all what’s going to happen.

The GOP might be weakened, but that will be temporary. It will reconfigure to accommodate Trumpian rhetoric while advancing more orthodox GOP positions. And if you don’t think that’s possible, just look at how often Trump fans have accommodated his flips (immigration), or failed to recognize the incoherence of Trump policy and GOP policy (protectionism versus free trade). That’s the beauty of this conspiracy spinning lunacy: it’s anti-skepticism, anti-rigor, anti-analysis, all aestheticism and sentiment. As long as you can hit the tone right—which is about mastering the medium, not about content—you can pull people in.

The Religious Right is basically *ahead* of Trump in gaming the episteme of its followers. Scripture is close to meaningless already, having been run through Burroughs’s cut-up procedure to generate any convenient meaning. Morality is similarly cut-up, though the fattest shares of forgiveness seem to always fall to the people at the top (and their appetites for borrowed funds and vulnerable young people). Donald Trump hasn’t yet figured out how to co-opt sanctity to cover his groping: his god-pimp game is weak.