"the warm heart of the Republican party"

Had to use that quote for the post title because it's not the sort of idea I would ever see expressed anywhere.

They can't admit it. It goes against all their conditioning, all their training. They simply cannot admit that, for going on 40 years now, the warm heart of the Republican party—namely, the conservative movement and the fundamentalist Protestant right, both of which rose to power in the late-70's—has converted that party into an identity-based cult, and now the reactor's gone super-critical and nobody can remember which buttons to push and which dials to spin. At this point, their identity is their ideology—an ideology of victimhood, and of the fantasy oppressors that people outside the cult see merely as evidence of a changing world. They look at the country's shifting demographics the way that the Heaven's Gate people looked at the Hale-Bopp comet. It's going to take something seriously awful to shake them to their senses and, frankly, I'm not sure I want to live through whatever that has to be.

Thanks for writing me a post, Mr. Pierce. Might as well steal the rest of it. I feel like DD doing this.

 It's because they've become moronized by the weaponized ignorance that spews forth every day from their favorite radio hosts and their favorite TV news stars, and their crazy drunk uncle who can't stay off the Internet, and Alex Jones, and the prejudices and meanness that every human heart is heir to and to which Frank Luntz has made a career of appealing, and the awful journalistic malpractice that has allowed the ignorance to run unchecked simply because it wins elections and the country gets worse, and there's always somebody else to blame.

That's how professionals write.