Looking at the world one way

An intriguing article from the New York Times:

I Was a Republican Partisan. It Altered the Way I Saw the World.

This is by David French, who is very insightful.  I'm going to connect three excerpted paragraphs.

One:

"I write often about American polarization, including about how the red-blue divide is perhaps less illuminating than the gap between engaged and disengaged Americans, in which an exhausted majority encounters the highly polarized activist wings of both parties and shrinks back from the fray. This dynamic helps explain why our political culture feels so stagnant. The wings aren’t changing each other’s minds — hard-core Democrats aren’t going to persuade hard-core Republicans — but they’re also not reaching sufficient numbers of persuadable voters to break America’s partisan deadlock."

Two:

"In 2020, when I was doing research for my book about the growing danger of partisan division, I began to learn more about what extreme partisanship does not only to our hearts but also to our minds. It can deeply and profoundly distort the way we view the world. We become so emotionally and spiritually invested in the outcome of a political contest that we can inadvertently become disconnected from reality."

Three:

"You see this reality most plainly in the daily Republican theatrics surrounding Trump’s criminal indictments. Rather than wrestle seriously with the profoundly troubling claims against him, they treat the criminal cases as proof of Democratic perfidy. They believe every claim against Hunter and Joe Biden and not a single claim against Trump."

To sum up, there is a solid core of Republican voters who don't care how execrable Donald Trump is. They are partisans, members of the GOP tribe, cultists in the Cult of the Orange Messiah. No matter how many reasons there are to clearly vote against him because of the massive danger he poses to American democracy and the norms of our society, they ignore those reasons and will still vote.

So we are left with hoping that the persuadable can be persuaded when Joe Biden drops out of the race (as I write this, there are increasing indications he will), so there will be a considerably reduced level of concern about the fitness of the Democrat candidate for office, and then the way to run the campaign is all about the dangerousness of the Donald.

Yes, a troubled kid took a shot at him and missed. That doesn't make Donald any less dangerous, and probably even makes him more dangerous, as he appears more "chosen".  But he's really just a con man criminal, sexual deviant, and master manipulator with no fitness to be the leader of this country.