Don's Home Politics Political Polarization Republican Hardball: Gingrich to McConnell and Trump Contact

"Few figures in modern history have done more than Gingrich to lay the groundwork for Trump's rise. During his two decades in Congress, he pioneered a style of partisan combat--replete with name-calling, conspiracy theories, and strategic obstructionism--that poisoned America's political culture and plunged Washington into permanent dysfunction."

In the 1994 midterms his "Contract with America" 10 bills Republicans promised to pass if they took control of the House. 300 candidates signed it.
As Election Day approached, they maneuvered to block every piece of legislation they could--even those that might ordinarily have received bipartisan support, like a lobbying-reform bill--on the theory that voters would blame Democrats for the paralysis. It worked voters frustrated with Congress voted for change and the republicans picked up 54 seats in the house.

Meanwhile people in rural areas have flatter incomes, decimated families, dissolved communities.
People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers. The evangelists of distrust, from Donald Trump to Alex Jones [An American far-right radio show host and conspiracy theorist] rose up to give them those stories and provide that community.

"Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set. He and his media allies simply ignore the rules of the epistemic regime and have set up a rival trolling regime. "

"The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking. That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it. And second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree."