Tag Archives: Republican Party

Why Many Others Support Him

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If all you care about, and I mean “all”, is making rich people richer, or you’re a “single-issue voter” who only cares about something like abortion or guns, or you’re a stone-cold racist,  he’s your candidate. Thomas Edsall of The New York Times, with the assistance of several studies, explains the seemingly unfathomable behavior of millions of others:

The center-right political coalition in America — the Republican Party as it stands today — can be described as holding two overarching goals: First, deregulation and reductions in corporate and other tax liabilities — each clearly stated on the White House website — and second, but packing a bigger punch, the preservation of the status quo by stemming the erosion of the privileged status of white Christian America. . . .

Last week, I argued that for Democrats the importance of ethnicity and race has grown, not diminished, since the mid-1960s. The same thing is true for Republicans — and many of the least obvious, or least comprehensible, aspects of Republican political strategy have to do with the party’s desire to cloak or veil the frank racism of the contemporary Republican agenda.

Robert P. Jones, the founder and C.E.O. of the Public Religion Research Institute, in his 2014 book, “The End of White Christian America,” described the situation this way:

America’s still segregated modern life is marked by three realities: First, geographic segregation has meant that — although places like Ferguson and Baltimore may seem like extreme examples — most white Americans continue to live in locales that insulate them from the obstacles facing many majority-black communities. Second, this legacy, compounded by social self-segregation, has led to a stark result: the overwhelming majority of white Americans don’t have a single close relationship with a person who isn’t white. Third, there are virtually no American institutions positioned to resolve these problems. Social segregation persists in virtually all major American institutions.

Firm allegiance to the conservative agenda has become crucial to the ability of Txxxx and the Republican Party to sustain the loyalty of an overwhelmingly white coalition that experiences itself as besieged and under the threat of losing power. The time when a major political party could articulate a nakedly racist agenda is long past, although Txxxx comes as close as possible.

“Txxxx goes all-in on race,” declared the headline on a story in Politico just after the close of the first night of the Republican convention on Monday.

While some speakers portrayed Txxxx as a friend of Black America, “others took a harder-edged tack that undercut the message of inclusion,” according to Politico. . . .

In a series of studies published from 2014 to 2018, Maureen A. Craig and Jennifer A. Richeson, professors of psychology at N.Y.U. and Yale, demonstrate how whites, faced with the prospect of becoming a minority, have embraced the Republican Party for institutional protection of their imperiled status.

In their 2014 paper, “On the Precipice of a ‘Majority-Minority’ America: Perceived Status Threat From the Racial Demographic Shift Affects White Americans’ Political Ideology,” Craig and Richeson took a national sample of whites who said they were unaffiliated with either political party and broke them into two groups.

One group was asked “if they had heard that California had become a majority-minority state,” thus making the issue of white minority status salient, and the other was asked “if they had heard that Hispanics had become roughly equal in number to Blacks nationally,” with no reference to the status of whites.

At the end of the survey, participants were asked whether they leaned toward either party. Those who had been informed about the minority status of whites in California said they leaned to the Republican Party by a margin of 45-35. Those who had not been informed of whites’ minority status leaned to the Democratic Party 40.5 to 24.3.

In a subsequent 2018 paper, “Racial and Political Dynamics of an Approaching ‘Majority-Minority’ United States,” Craig and Richeson . . .  reported that “whites for whom the impending racial demographic changes of the nation are salient” endorsed more conservative positions on a variety of policy issues and reported “greater support for Republican presidential candidate Dxxxx Txxxx.”

According to Joshua Greene, a professor of psychology at Harvard and the author of “Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them,” Txxxx is expert at sending “signals that are music to the ears of his base,” signals that ineradicably affirm his membership in the populist right wing of the Republican Party.

Greene argued in an email that when

Txxxx says that a judge of Mexican ancestry can’t do his job, or attacks women for their physical appearance, or makes fun of a disabled reporter, or says that there are good people on both sides of a violent neo-Nazi rally, or that Haiti is a “shithole,” or that the “Second Amendment People” can maybe do something about Hillary Clinton, Txxxx is very deliberately and publicly excommunicating himself from the company of liberals, even moderate ones.

In Greene’s view, Txxxx offers a case study in the deployment of “costly signals.”

How does it work? Greene writes:

Making oneself irredeemably unacceptable to the other tribe is equivalent to permanently binding oneself to one’s own. These comments are like gang tattoos. And in Txxxx’s case, it’s tattoos all over his neck and face.

At the same time, Txxxx’s “costly signals” make his reliability as a protector of white privilege clear.

John Tooby, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Santa Barbara, described the signaling phenomenon in a 2017 Edge talk as an outgrowth of what he calls a “coalitional instinct.”

“To earn membership in a group,” Tooby says, “you must send signals that clearly indicate that you differentially support it, compared to rival groups.”

This, Tooby notes, encourages extremism: “Practical and functional truths are generally useless as differential signals, because any honest person might say them regardless of coalitional loyalty.” Far more effective are “unusual, exaggerated beliefs,” including “alarmism, conspiracies or hyperbolic comparisons.”

The success of Txxxx’s strategy will have long term consequences for the Republican Party, in Greene’s view:

Txxxx won over the base by publicly sacrificing his broader respectability. Back in 2016, the other Republican primary candidates looked ahead at the general election and thought this was a losing strategy. But Txxxx pulled it off, perhaps because he didn’t really care about winning. But now he owns the party. No Republican can get elected without the Republican base, and the Republican base trusts Txxxx and only Txxxx, thanks to his costly signals.

. . . The Republican Party is now the home of white evangelical Christians and the residents of rural, small town America who see their privilege — what they experience as their values and culture — under assault from a rising coalition of minorities, feminists, well-educated liberals and veterans of the sexual revolution.

“In the context of increased social diversity,” Alexandra Filindra, a political scientist at the University of Illinois-Chicago, writes in a 2018 paper, “portions of the public are willing to support calls for an exclusionary moral community of virtue at the expense of norms and institutions of democracy.”

Filindra argues that . . . most citizens are

prone to understand democracy through the lens of group memberships. When the social position of cherished groups is perceived as threatened, and when trusted in-group elites use narratives of group threat and out-group dehumanization to justify anti-democratic actions, group members become more vulnerable to authoritarian leaders and parties that promise protection or restoration of the group’s status but at the cost of institutional democracy.

Political polarization plays a crucial role here.

As Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer, political scientists at Georgia State and Koç University, write in their 2019 paper, “Toward a Theory of Pernicious Polarization and How It Harms Democracies”:

Growing affective polarization and negative partisanship contribute to a growing perception among citizens that the opposing party and its policies pose a threat to the nation or an individual’s way of life. Most dangerously for democracy, these perceptions of threat open the door to undemocratic behavior by an incumbent and his/her supporters to stay in power, or by opponents to remove the incumbent from power.

The cumulative effect, McCoy and Somer continue, “is a deterioration in the quality of democracy, leading to backsliding, illiberalism, and in some cases reversion to autocracy.” 

. . . Matthew Graham [and Milan W. Svolik, politicial scientists at Yale] published a study this year showing that when voters are forced to make a choice between partisan loyalty and standing on principle, only small percentages of either party’s electorates stood on principle. The vast majority chose partisan loyalty, with little or no difference between Republicans and Democrats.

In an email, Svolik raised the next logical question: “If supporters of both parties oppose/tolerate authoritarianism at similar levels, how come it is the Republican Party that is primarily associated with authoritarian tendencies today?” In reply to his own question,” Svolik writes, “The quick answer is Txxxx.” But

The deeper answer is that the opportunities to subvert the democratic process for partisan gain have become asymmetrical. Because of the biases inherent in political geography and demographic partisan patterns, the two most easily implementable means of gaining an unfair electoral advantage — gerrymandering and voter identification laws — only offer opportunities for unfair play to Republicans.

Txxxx, in Svolik’s view, has presented

his supporters with a stark choice between his conservative accomplishments (immigration, judicial appointments, tax cuts) while portraying the Democrats as the extreme left (something he did successfully with Hillary Clinton, and why I believe he often brings up Portland, AOC, and Sanders). By doing so, Txxxx is effectively raising the price his supporters must pay for putting democratic principles above their partisan interests.

Other political scientists and psychologists argue that there are differences between Republicans and Democrats that are deeper.

Hyun Hannah Nam, a political scientist at Stony Brook University argues in an email that “there is some evidence that Republicans and Democrats respond differently to information that violates their political beliefs or allegiances — that is, cognitive dissonance in the political domain.”

A 2013 paper, ‘‘ ‘Not for All the Tea in China!’ Political Ideology and the Avoidance of Dissonance-Arousing Situations,” which Nam wrote with John Jost and Jay Van Bavel, both professors of psychology at N.Y.U., provided data from an experiment in which

supporters of Republican presidents and supporters of Democratic presidents were either asked or instructed to argue that a president from the opposing party was a better president than a president from their own party.

Nam and her colleagues

found that 28 percent of Obama supporters willingly engaged with the task of writing an essay favoring Bush over Obama, whereas no Bush supporters were willing to argue that Obama was a better president than Bush.

This suggests, Nam continued in her email,

that there may be something special about Republicans when it comes to an unwillingness to criticize their own leaders or to praise the opposition’s leaders. Although this research preceded the Txxxx era, it could be that Txxxx supporters may now similarly double down on their expressed loyalty to Txxxx, in spite of various moral and ideological violations exhibited by Txxxx — or even because of them through processes of rationalization.

In her email, Nam added,

It appears that a neural structure that guides our perception of salient threats and understanding of social group hierarchy also underlies political preferences and behaviors to keep society as it is. If voter suppression efforts are perceived as helping to maintain the existing power structures, then it is possible that our neurobiological predispositions support the legitimation of such endeavors to protect the status quo.

The emergence of a right-populist, authoritarian-inclined Republican Party coincides with the advent of a bifurcated Democratic Party led, in large part, by a well-educated, urban, globally engaged multicultural elite allied with a growing minority electorate.

Structurally, the Democratic Party has become the ideal adversary for a Republican Party attempting to define political competition as a contest between “us the people” against “them, the others” — the enemy. The short- and medium-term prognosis for productive political competition [or cooperation] is not good.

Joshua Greene, the Harvard psychologist, closed his email with an addendum: “P.S. I think that Biden will probably win and will probably be the next president. But the fact that I can’t say more than ‘probably’ is terrifying to me. . . .”

One More: All We Need to Know About the Republican Convention, Part 3

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A few more thoughts from Paul Waldman of The Washington Post (I’ve removed several of the most painfully ridiculous quotes from last night’s horror show):

No one doubted that the Republican convention would be filled with insane fearmongering, bizarrely dishonest attacks on Joe Biden, and tributes to the party leader’s magnificence so over-the-top that they would not be out of place on North Korean state television. But watching the first night’s proceedings, something else came into focus: an entirely different President Txxxx from the one we all know, one whose actions and character are completely at odds with what we’ve watched over the past four years.

To put it simply: This is Txxxx fan fiction.

For the unfamiliar, fan fiction allows fans to take well-known entertainment properties and write their own scenarios into them, creating everything from brief stories to entire novels. What if Kirk and Spock were lovers? What if you threw Harry and Hermione into the “Star Wars” universe? What if the singers from “Pitch Perfect” had to fight zombies?

Or what if Txxxx were a caring, compassionate, totally non-racist person who saved America from the coronavirus pandemic? Wouldn’t that be an interesting twist?

So Republicans decided that the way to handle the crisis affecting all our lives was to present an alternate timeline, a bizarro-universe story in which rather than spending months denying the coronavirus would affect the United States and claiming it was about to disappear, Txxxx was in fact the only one who realized how serious it was.

“One leader took decisive action to save lives: President Dxxxx Txxxx,” said the narrator of a video laying out a fantasy in which Txxxx personally wrestled the pandemic into submission.

Speakers were brought in to testify to how fantastically Txxxx performed and how much America benefited. . . .

You’d never know that over 174,000 Americans have died of covid-19, or that while many of our peer countries, such as Germany, Canada, and South Korea, have the pandemic largely under control to the point where their daily death tolls are in the single digits, America is still ravaged by the virus.

But not in the GOP fanfic. “Just imagine what 2020 would have looked like,” said cancer survivor Natalie Harp, had Txxxx not done such a magnificent job. “Millions would have died. Millions more would have been infected.”’

Just like in all those countries unfortunate enough to lack the benefit of Txxxx’s leadership, like … um … well, anyway, the pandemic is pretty much over, right?

Then there was the rewriting of Txxxx’s character. That Txxxx we all know, the petty, vindictive, crude, selfish narcissist who only seems comfortable around other humans when they’re telling him how great he is? Forget that guy. The convention gave us a fan-fiction version of Txxxx, one brimming with kindness and compassion.

“I’ve seen up close a man who has a deep love for family,” said RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, who literally was forced to change her name because Txxxx found the “Romney” in it displeasing. (She’s Mitt’s niece.) . . .

Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan told us “how much he truly cares about people” . . .

Former football star Herschel Walker testified too to Txxxx’s boundless love for ordinary people. . . .

Walker also insisted that Txxxx — he of the racist birther lie, “s—hole countries,” and too many bigoted remarks to mention — is actually a great friend to Black people. . . .

Four years ago, the Republican Party said to America: Why not the worst? What if we searched far and wide to find the most corrupt, immoral, ignorant, narcissistic, impulsive, childish, bigoted demagogue in all the land, a guy who cheats on his taxes and has been accused of sexually assaulting women and is a literal con artist, and made him president? Which we did, and we all know how it worked out.

So now they ask: What if we imagined that none of that actually happened? If we imagined a Txxxx who is kind, gentle, and compassionate, and the worst disaster of his presidency, the one that has destroyed so many families and left the economy devastated, never occurred? What if that spectacular failure was actually a tremendous success? Wouldn’t that be great? . . .

Sorry, All We Need To Know About the Republican Convention, Part 2

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I thought we already knew all that we needed to know. But there was a bit more today.

From Charles Pierce of Esquire:

You may not have noticed [I sure didn’t], but the president* was renominated early Monday afternoon. Then he accepted the nomination and spoke for almost an hour. So that means the Republican National Convention is over now, right? Right?

Right?

Damn.

I watched the Roll Call of the States. . . With every vote, a small but noisy claque . . . would hoot and holler in a ballroom in Charlotte that was gussied up and looked like a student’s civics-project facsimile of a national convention. I swear they stuck the loudest yahoos they could find next to all the C-SPAN crowd mics.

And then, to everyone’s apparent surprise, Himself showed up to say thanks and to speak…and speak…and speak. Almost a full hour’s airing of all the usual grievances, and a serious emphasis on what is going to be the theme of this week’s festivities—namely, that any result in November that does not result in his winning will be illegitimate.

They are trying to steal the election like they did the last time with the spying…This is stealing millions of votes. We’re in courts all over the country and hopefully they give us a fair count, because the only way they can take this election away from us, is if this is rigged election.

Earlier Monday, at the House Oversight Committee hearing at which Postmaster General Louis DeJoy proved himself to be one of the smuggest SOBs ever to appear before Congress, Rep. Jim Jordan gave away a little more of the game away. It is clear that, if there’s one second in which the president appears to be ahead after, say, 10 p.m. Eastern time, they will declare victory, demand Joe Biden concede, and then run to every courthouse they can find to stop the counting of legitimate ballots after election day:

. . . We all know what this is about. This is about these guys [Democrats] wanting chaos and confusion. . . I think you know this. They know that, on Election Day, President Txxxx is going to win. They know come the Election Day vote count, President Txxxx is going to win and they want to keep counting six weeks, four weeks…That’s what they want.

It is imperative that we keep an eye on this through line all week and throughout the 60-odd days remaining until Election Day. It’s what they have.

Unquote.

So the Narcissist-In-Chief was nominated early in the proceedings, not near the end, and they don’t want all the votes counted in November. Ok, that’s all we need to know.

All We Need to Know About the Republican Convention

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In olden days, the presidential nominee would appear on the convention’s last night, after having been celebrated almost ad nauseam by previous speakers. He (almost always he) would finally walk out on stage to an ecstatic welcome. “I accept your nomination”. More ecstasy bursts forth.

All we need to know about this week’s Republican convention is that the party’s dear leader will speak every night. It wouldn’t be like him to pass up a chance to be on TV. But why have other speakers? Why doesn’t he simply ramble on for two hours each night. I mean, give the boobs at home what they want.

This is more sober pre-convention analysis from Paul Waldman of The Washington Post:

Much more so than the Republican convention of 2016, when there was at least some drama and dissension — remember when Ted Cruz got booed for refusing to endorse Dxxxx Txxxx? — the one that starts on Monday night will have a much more unified and consistent message. In fact, it will be so unified and consistent that the [Grand Old Party] has decided that it doesn’t even need a new platform.

Policy proposals and an agenda for the future are apparently for the weak. The Republican Party is President Txxxx, and Txxxx is the Republican Party.

To that end, the Republican National Committee adopted this resolution on Saturday, which includes lots of bellyaching about the media being unfair, then reaches its conclusion:

. . . RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda;

RESOLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention;

The Republicans still have their 2016 platform, which you can read if you’ve forgotten just how much they loathe Barack Obama. But four years later, they can’t muster up the energy to debate among themselves whether anything in the world has changed, what the party wants to stand for, or what policy proposals ought to be at the forefront of their agenda going forward.

It’s not just that Txxxx doesn’t care about that kind of policy statement. Nobody else in the party does, either.

After enduring mockery over the weekend — and after weeks in which interviewers would ask Txxxx to describe his second-term agenda, to which he’d respond as though he’d been asked to explain Fermat’s Last Theorem — the Txxxx campaign hastily released a list of  second-term priorities. [e.g. making life harder for immigrants, criminals, terrorists and members of Congress, i.e. term limits].

The truth is that the resolution [not the priorities] more clearly describes today’s Republicans. They have some things they want to do, sure — cut taxes, gut environmental regulations, restrict abortion rights — but mostly, what unites the party is that they hate Democrats and they worship Txxxx. That’s about all you need to know.

There was a time when the GOP fancied itself “the party of ideas,” a place where serious people seriously considered serious questions of policy and society, working to devise creative plans that would move the country in a conservative direction.

And when it offered itself to the electorate, the GOP could boil it all down to a few declarations of principle that could be repeated by candidates for every office from dogcatcher all the way up to president. What do Republicans believe in? Small government, low taxes, traditional values and a strong military. This was a source of great political strength; some people even wrote books telling Democrats they should learn from their rivals and come up with their own easy-to-grasp summation of their ideology.

But no more. Like so many other things, this intellectual impoverishment of the GOP is of its own making, the seeds sown long before Txxxx came along. The party always knew most of its voters couldn’t care less about tax cuts for the wealthy and corporate deregulation, so it fed them a steady diet of race-baiting and cultural resentment so they’d keep pulling that Republican lever. It was inevitable that sooner or later a demagogue would come along and distill it all down to just the nasty parts. . . .

On the vast majority of issues, Txxxx has been more conservative than any [establishment Republicans] dared to hope, in large part because he doesn’t really care what his administration’s policies are, outside of a few areas such as immigration that capture his interest.

The trouble is that Txxxx also doesn’t care about the future of conservatism or the Republican Party. It’s all about him. And as it has remade itself in his image, so too is the party all about him. If that’s the case, why bother putting together a platform?

It’s perhaps fitting that this comes at the same time as the GOP’s opponents have engaged in the most vigorous and passionate internal policy debate at least since Bill Clinton dragged Democrats to the center in 1992. It isn’t just that their presidential primary campaign produced enough policy papers to encircle the earth; it was also a very self-conscious argument about who the Democratic Party is, whose voices it represents and where it wants to go.

Health care, immigration, climate change, the size and scope of the welfare state, policing, civil rights, political reform — all that has been subject of extensive argument among Democrats over the past year, and the Democratic platform wound up reflecting both the center and the left of the party.

It still resists easy summary, because hey, they’re Democrats. But none of it depends uniquely on Joe Biden: He could withdraw from the race tomorrow and hand the ticket over to Sen. Kamala D. Harris, and it would be the same agenda.

Likewise, while there are people who love Biden, there are no Biden cultists. On the other hand, while not everyone in the Republican Party thinks Txxxx is a demigod walking among us, perfect in his every word and deed, it’s pretty much the official position of the party that he is just that. . . .

As If the Future Wasn’t Scary Enough

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The science fiction I used to read often depicted the future as very weird, culturally speaking. It was the kind of place where nutty celebrities would rise to high office and strange cults would be born. It was like the Sixties and Seventies but more so.

If you don’t find climate change or the next pandemic scary enough (or a visitation like what killed the dinosaurs), read this long article by Adrienne Lafrance in The Atlantic. It’s about QAnon, the conspiracy theory that now looks like a new religion. A few paragraphs:

If you were an adherent, no one would be able to tell. You would look like any other American. . . . You may well have an affiliation with an evangelical church. But you are hard to identify just from the way you look—which is good, because someday soon dark forces may try to track you down. You understand this sounds crazy, but you don’t care. You know that a small group of manipulators, operating in the shadows, pull the planet’s strings. You know that they are powerful enough to abuse children without fear of retribution. You know that the mainstream media are their handmaidens, in partnership with Hillary Clinton and the secretive denizens of the deep state. You know that only Dxxxx Txxxx stands between you and a damned and ravaged world. You see plague and pestilence sweeping the planet, and understand that they are part of the plan. You know that a clash between good and evil cannot be avoided, and you yearn for the Great Awakening that is coming. And so you must be on guard at all times. You must shield your ears from the scorn of the ignorant. You must find those who are like you. And you must be prepared to fight.

You know all this because you believe in Q.

The origins of QAnon are recent, but even so, separating myth from reality can be hard. One place to begin is with Edgar Maddison Welch, a deeply religious father of two, who until Sunday, December 4, 2016, had lived an unremarkable life in the small town of Salisbury, North Carolina. That morning, Welch grabbed his cellphone, a box of shotgun shells, and three loaded guns . . . and hopped into his Toyota Prius. He drove 360 miles to . . . Northwest Washington, D.C.; parked his car; put the revolver in a holster at his hip; held the AR-15 rifle across his chest; and walked through the front door of a pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong.

. . . As parents, children, and employees rushed outside, many still chewing, Welch began to move through the restaurant, at one point attempting to use a butter knife to pry open a locked door, before giving up and firing several rounds from his rifle into the lock. Behind the door was a small computer-storage closet. This was not what he was expecting.

Welch had traveled to Washington because of a conspiracy theory known, now famously, as Pizzagate, which claimed that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of Comet Ping Pong. . . .

While Welch may have expressed regret, he gave no indication that he had stopped believing the underlying Pizzagate message: that a cabal of powerful elites was abusing children and getting away with it. Judging from a surge of activity on the internet, many others had found ways to move beyond the Comet Ping Pong episode and remain focused on what they saw as the larger truth. If you paid attention to the right voices on the right websites, you could see in real time how the core premises of Pizzagate were being recycled, revised, and reinterpreted. The millions of people paying attention to sites like 4chan and Reddit could continue to learn about that secretive and untouchable cabal; about its malign actions and intentions; about its ties to the left wing and specifically to Democrats and especially to Clinton; about its bloodlust and its moral degeneracy. You could also—and this would prove essential—read about a small but swelling band of underground American patriots fighting back.

All of this, taken together, defined a worldview that would soon have a name: QAnon, derived from a mysterious figure, “Q,” posting anonymously on 4chan. QAnon does not possess a physical location, but it has an infrastructure, a literature, a growing body of adherents, and a great deal of merchandising. It also displays other key qualities that Pizzagate lacked. In the face of inconvenient facts, it has the ambiguity and adaptability to sustain a movement of this kind over time. For QAnon, every contradiction can be explained away; no form of argument can prevail against it. . . . 

QAnon is emblematic of modern America’s susceptibility to conspiracy theories, and its enthusiasm for them. But it is also already much more than a loose collection of conspiracy-minded chat-room inhabitants. It is a movement united in mass rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values. And we are likely closer to the beginning of its story than the end. The group harnesses paranoia to fervent hope and a deep sense of belonging. The way it breathes life into an ancient preoccupation with end-times is also radically new. To look at QAnon is to see not just a conspiracy theory but the birth of a new religion.

Unquote.

Joseph Smith said he was visited by an angel in upstate New York. There are now more than 17 million Mormons. William Miller claimed Jesus would return in the 1840s. There are more than 20 million Seventh Day Adventists. America has done it before and can do it again.

One more paragraph from The Atlantic:

The Seventh-day Adventists and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are thriving religious movements indigenous to America. Do not be surprised if QAnon becomes another. It already has more adherents by far than either of those two denominations had in the first decades of their existence. People are expressing their faith through devoted study of Q drops as installments of a foundational text, through the development of Q-worshipping groups, and through sweeping expressions of gratitude for what Q has brought to their lives. Does it matter that we do not know who Q is? The divine is always a mystery. Does it matter that basic aspects of Q’s teachings cannot be confirmed? The basic tenets of Christianity cannot be confirmed. Among the people of QAnon, faith remains absolute. True believers describe a feeling of rebirth, an irreversible arousal to existential knowledge. They are certain that a Great Awakening is coming. They’ll wait as long as they must for deliverance.

The president has spoken highly of QAnon and provides publicity on Twitter. All he claims to know is that they are patriots who “like him” a lot (that’s all that matters). It’s easy to imagine QAnon playing a bigger and bigger role in the Republican Party after a difficult election, with less crazy office-holders being replaced by crazier ones.

From Charlie Warzel in The New York Times:

For almost three years, I’ve wondered when the QAnon tipping point would arrive — the time when a critical mass of Americans would come to regard the sprawling pro-Txxxx conspiracy theory not merely as a sideshow, but as a legitimate threat to safety and even democracy.

There have been plenty of potential wake-up calls. Among them: a 2018 standoff at the Hoover Dam with a QAnon believer, the 2019 murder of a Gambino crime family boss by a QAnon supporter who believed the boss was part of a deep-state cabal, an August 2019 F.B.I. report that warned that QAnon could spur domestic terrorism, a West Point report calling the movement “a security threat in the making,” and the April arrest of a QAnon follower who was found with a dozen knives while driving to “take out” Joe Biden . . . 

Then, on Tuesday, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia who has been vocal in her support of QAnon, won a primary runoff. (In recently uncovered blog posts, Ms. Greene said that Hillary Clinton had a “kill list” of political enemies and questioned whether the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting was orchestrated in a bid to overturn the Second Amendment.) Given the deeply Republican makeup of Ms. Greene’s district, she is widely expected to be elected to Congress in November.

This week’s news is a sign of QAnon’s increasing influence in American cultural and political life. What started as a niche web of disproved predictions by an anonymous individual has metastasized into a movement that is now too big to be ignored.