At this point there must be a halt to pointing out how upside down the world must look now to Trump supporters: his Christian supporters turn out to be dishonest perverts; he disparages the military so many of them have served; his wealth is ephemeral, being based on invented income and quite illegal tax evasion; his patriotism is in thrall to a KGB agent (no such thing as a ‘former KGB agent’); his vaunted prowess with the ladies derived from his ability to pay cash; his business acumen (“he’s a bidness man!”) went up in the smoke of numerous flaming bankruptcies years ago; and his promise to make America great again faltered when it came to including “losers and suckers and ‘My Black.'” Most of all, his promise to kick out all the Mexicans aka brown people devolved into pure child abuse.
So why do they continue to support him? Because, Stupid, this is exactly what they voted for.
And then came Corona.
Now here comes my little “let’s go back into the history of this country to see where this might be coming from and where it might be going” exercise:
Elsewhere the Southernization of America has been introduced here as a theme. The GOP has been a major spreader of this “way of life” that produced the Confederacy. Part of that was a straight-forward patriarchy with Daddy so-and-so or Colonel so-and-so (I like to fill in the blanks with ‘Culpepper’) dominating the entire town. That extremely hierarchical, caste and class ridden social environment has been fiercely adhered to since the first Cavalier set foot in what was to become Charleston. Ned Sublette has written some books that describe that culture.
And it is that culture that has cast its shade over a good deal of America because a good many people are comfortable with it even if they did not come from the South.