40 Percent of Americans Want a Dictator

I was watching the 2024 Republican Debate post-debate analysis on MSNBC on Wednesday. Rachel Maddow and Michael Steele were trying to make sense of the current state of the Republican Party. What emerged was a lightning bolt moment.

40 Percent of Americans Want a Dictator.

Wrap your head around that. Let it sink in. 40 Percent, otherwise known as THE MINORITY, of Americans are so frustrated with the process of democracy leaving them without their way, that they are willing to commit insurrection, violence, even civil war, to put a dictator in power who they believe will give them what they want.

I say this is a lightning bolt moment for the 60 Percent of Americans Who Want a Democracy, otherwise known as THE MAJORITY, who for 8 years have been trying to understand the vote for Trump, and now the post-insurrection defacto Republican candidate. We try to talk sense into our friends and relatives who we assumed just didn’t understand that Donald was going to destroy Democracy.

Now, finally, we get it. They aren’t voting for Donald in spite of the fact that he will destroy democracy. They are voting for Donald because of the fact that he will destroy democracy. And, yes, I do mean “fact”.

Michael Steele, former chair of the RNC, talks with Rachel Maddow about whether the Trump-supporting Republican base no longer sees democracy as the best way to achieve their goals and would prefer a strongman, authoritarian enforcer, and what that means for how the party conducts campaigns and debates and other rituals of politics.

#msnbc #trump #republicans

We in the majority having been saying for years that the Republicans don’t know how to govern. They know how to put judges in place. They know how to gerrymander. We in the majority have been shaking our heads and thinking eventually people will get sick of nothing getting done in Washington and vote for people who do want to govern. We have been so naïve.

How did we get the psychology so wrong?

In hindsight, these were not misguided and foolish unintended consequences of Republican inaction

Even the Republican strategies to destroy mental health care, to allow the opioid crisis to proliferate and the perpetrators to go unpunished, to erode education, in hindsight, these were not misguided and foolish unintended consequences of Republican inaction.

They were an intentional long-game strategy to manipulate both the system and the people into a place where democracy could be toppled in favor of a dictator.

And while these 40 percent minority of Americans believe that Donald will take care of them, the 60 precent majority of Americans know that not only will Donald only serve Donald, but that the Dr. Frankenstein’s out there who set up the conditions and created the monster that is Donald will not get what they hoped.As Michael Steele put it, even Dr. Frankenstein didn’t know how to control the monster he created.