The apple doesn't fall far from the tree...

Tru dat.

Okay, I've found a new historical connection to help explain what's happening right now.

So the GOP as we know it--a collection of fiscal conservatives, intellectuals, the military industrial complex, social conservatives, religious fundamentalists and white blue-collar workers--was put together largely by Ronald Reagan during the 1980 election. Reagan was also the politician who included in that collection the people who are now voting for Trump--the racist populists. How did he do this?

Well, it all began with his very first appearance after the 1980 convention in Neshoba County, Mississippi. An area that is famous for one thing and one thing only: the vicious murder of three civil rights workers in the 1960s by a mob of KKK members and the local police. Neshoba County was a symbol of the KKK's resistance to the civil rights movement, and Reagan launched his general election campaign by going there and talking about state's rights.

So this explains how state's rights became a dog whistle for racism. In this context the phrase "dog whistle" means a political tactic of using coded language that means one thing to the general populace (in this case, plain old state's rights) but means another thing to a specific group (in this case, Reagan's speech was received by racists as supporting their resistance to integration).

Ever since then the GOP has been using these tactics to get the racist vote, but they never actually followed through on those hints (because, believe it or not, but racism IS A BAD THING and if you're smart enough to win office you're usually smart enough to know that) and so now all those voters are revolting against the GOP by voting for Trump.

Man. The tangled webs we weave, huh...

Next I'm going to try to figure out how the Democrats (note the capital D) managed to remove the progressive arm from the party, leading to the mass-scale union busting throughout the latter half of the 20th century which in turn led to the stagnant wages and international trade deals that are currently fueling the rise of populism on both the right and the left.

I am on a mission to figure out what's happening! I will do it! Even though I'm doing more research than I ever did for any single school project! I. WILL. FIGURE. THIS. OUT.

Though I might go insane trying...

There's a reason as to why I call this mess poly-ticks

I'd love to!

So there's this thing called the Establishment, and they are the people who have been pulling the levers of power for a long time. They're the donors, the lobbyists, the think tank employees and, of course, the elected officials and their aides. Some of them are awful, some are probably great, but the vast majority are normal people doing their jobs. These are people who individually do not have much power, but are part of an extremely powerful system.

The average voter, however, does not see these Washington insiders as people they can relate to, and with good reason. Unfortunately, this does lead to an impression that there's a lot of nefarious shenanigans behind every single policy mistake when usually it's just incompetence, ignorance and human error. Which is equally damaging, but the correct response to a conspiracy is vastly different from the correct response to incompetence. The news media adds to this narrative and the result has been a large-scale break down of trust between the government, the public and even the media itself.

Remember, a healthy democracy needs all three of those groups in order to function--especially since the media is the main way in our current system that the public and the government can interact. That's bad enough, if only for the reason that media coverage distorts a message, but it's made even worse by the fact that the news media has stopped viewing itself as a public service and started viewing itself as a commercial enterprise. The stories that sell are not always the important stories that need to be told, and news organizations fill empty on-air hours with pundits who scream at each other over meaningless arguments which never go anywhere which further contributes to the break down of the three-way social contract based on trust that once existed between the government, the public and the media.

On the GOP side of things, the Establishment has been employing an effective tactic for the last few years--they've been branding themselves as the Just Like You Man On The Street Party. They talk about the out-of-touch establishment and the Washington elite, and many of their voters are attracted to that narrative. Now, when the insiders said these things they were not including themselves in the Establishment, but rather using "Establishment" as a dog whistle for "Democrat." The only problem being, they definitely ARE Establishment (think Cruz-who may be nearly universally despised but has still been working in the highest levels of government since the 1990s). But there were never any viable alternatives in campaigns, so before now this tactic never got used against them.

Only, this time, there actually IS an outsider candidate going up against the Establishment and all those years the Washington insiders spent convincing their voters that the Establishment was out to get them is coming back to haunt them. The Establishment does not want Trump to get the nomination, mostly because they don't think he can win in November, but some of them because they object to him on moral grounds. The way they see it, he crashed their party and he's stealing the people who in previous elections voted for whoever the Establishment chose as their favorite. The GOP Establishment does not understand why people are voting for Trump.

What takes this into the level of revolution is the fact that many members of the GOP Establishment risk political backlash in their own districts just for being associated with the Republican Party if Trump is the nominee. That also helps explain why they're trying so hard to stop him through the delegate system, because a lot of Congressmen and Senators are terrified that if Trump is on the ticket in November it will hurt down-ballot candidates--the people running for the Congress, Senate and state governments that are also put on the November ballot. They're worried that if Trump is the nominee they'll lose their Republican majority in the Senate and maybe even in the Congress.

The Republican voters are voting AGAINST the Establishment, against the will of the Establishment and in defiance of every effort they have made and despite every resource at their disposal.

My theory is that, by spending so many years hinting that the Washington elite were actively working against ordinary people, the GOP has created a populist movement with a deep mistrust and even loathing of all authority figures (which in American politics is basically just the government and the media) and that the Republicans are just now discovering that they cannot control what they have unleashed. And what they have unleashed is voting for Donald Trump.

That might sound complicated, but it all boils down to the fact that for some reason a bunch of authority figures thought they could maintain their power by encouraging resentment of authority and now they're all shocked that the people they convinced to resent authority now resent THEIR authority.

Not sure why this wasn't obvious to these people before-hand, but then again if they were all competent and intelligent and compassionate we probably wouldn't be in this mess....

And another thought...would we have Trump without Rush Limbaugh?

One of the great mysteries of this election that will surely be debated for decades (possibly centuries) to come by academics, is why are Trump's followers so loyal?

I think a lot of it has to do with the relationship between the mainstream media and conservative talk radio.

Now, I'm not a huge fan of the mainstream media. I can't stand pointless screaming so I never watch television news. However, I do read The New York Times, The Washington Post, Real Clear Politics and Politico daily, as well as listening to NPR, tracking citizen journalists on Twitter and Reddit and reading a couple blogs. And that's not including all the other national and international papers and magazines I check frequently, just the ones I check every morning.

If that sounds like a lot, it is....my fixation on the news is completely neurotic and obsessive, but I've gotten overly fixated on more damaging things in the past, so I'm not overly concerned about the impact it's having on my mental health. Sometimes I think I should be but then Trump does something that's so horrifying I feel like I don't dare look away in case we reach a breaking point in the status quo...

I think a lot of people are upset with the mainstream media because they don't see them as trustworthy. And so when the media reports on Trump saying or doing terrible things, his followers often don't believe the story or think it's been taken out of context and the end result is they are even more loyal to him.

Part of that probably has a lot to do with how many mistakes the media has made over the last few decades.

And part of it probably has to do with how many of those people implicitly trust talk radio guys like Limbaugh who have spent the last couple decades railing against the media every single day.....