35%

1850 - Irish immigrant in whiskey barrell and German immigrant in beer barrell run off with ballot box in US election. Wikimedia Commons

The same themes seem to crop up in almost all analyses concerning the unremitting turmoil in the White House: Donald Trump is an uninformed nitwit who forms policy based upon the last nitwit he spoke with; he’s a puerile nitwit who succumbs to the last nitwit who flattered him; he’s an evil genius nitwit who is masterminding the collapse of our 241 year old democracy; he’s a rapacious nitwit who’ll cut any deal with any autocrat who’ll give him a piece of the action – and so forth.

Maybe he’s all of those things. But in the game of predicting what’s next, it seems important to recognize that Donald Trump’s only real power derives from his control of about 35% of the Republican Party – his vaunted base. These are his beloved “low information” voters: those who believe in the alt-right poetics of American Carnage and the vivid imagery of immigrants with calves the size of cantaloupes bringing drugs and rape. This is his base of supporters who adore the antics of a comic book hero who alternates between the screaming spandex of worldwide wrestling, and cynical portrayals of populist heroism.

But with his constituency constantly rallied, he controls Republican politics simply because his base turns out to vote. And the GOP can’t win an election unless this activist base isn’t fed with legislation that fills its craw. This minority distinguishes between entitlements that go to “hard-working” contributors to US society like themselves - and “handouts” believed to go to freeloaders. Thus, we get legislation that cuts off healthcare to poor children, laws that criminalize non-white immigrants, and of course, this latest government shutdown.

I find it interesting that Democrats remain stigmatized by the old Republican trope that they have no guts, when the Republican Party hasn’t had the guts to kill off this corrosive right-wing anarchist movement in their own party - a movement that has turned the establishment wing of the GOP into a rump party that can no longer govern.