From driftglass:
But to be willing to be played for absolute chumps decade after decade, can’t be a half-ass thing. You have to really commit to it. You have to go all-in on being a voluntarily brainwashed meathead, which means as you inevitably sink deeper and deeper into the ravages of lies and depravity that your lifestyle demands, you not only have to burn down and wall off everything that might cause you to catch an unflatteringly reflected glimpse of your malignant idiocy, but you have to learn to take a kind of smirking delight in being seditious, paranoid asshole.
It’s got to get good to you, as the kids say.
And a mob of 63 million who are just that far gone — who laugh as they set everything on fire because at long last the only thing that can assuage their contempt for Reality is inflicting misery on others — is what the GOP has become.