… this is what it looks like:
“The Republican Party under Donald Trump has become a party wandering aimlessly in the street talking to itself and responding to itself, and all the rest of us have become the pedestrians trying to avoid that guy.” – Patrick Gaspard
In other words, the epistemic bubble that so many pundits identified and worried about so many years before I started writing a blog (but I’ve been reading blogs since 2000 or earlier, when the BBSes dried up) are now getting to see the endpoint of those worries – a sclerotic Party in which the members are terrified of grabbing the wheel and not grabbing the wheel. (For those with a historical bent, here’s a reference to concerns about epistemic closure, an equivalent term, from 2007.)
I am so glad I’m not a Republican, because the Party sounds like just another chamber in the insane asylum in Hell. A President who can only divide, not lead; he may be, medically speaking, demented; madcap messages and actions such as The Confederacy deserves to be honored! (oh, maybe that very first one back in the late 1700s), foolish religious tenets (the Laffer Curve); demands for 100% support of the leader; zombie elected officials who cannot envision being rid of their leader; & etc.
This is toxic team politics at its worst, folks. Study, distill, and put the results in a textbook about how not to run an American political party.
