Pandering as art form

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty

The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology, penned by Tom Payne, challenged organized religion and the political "correctness" of the French Revolution in a crisp biting style totally different from the insane rantings of Trump & company in modern day America. Self-serving and dangerous, the rush to avoid reason and nuance in order to gain power goes beyond anything seen in US politics in this writer's opinion.

These Shameless Republicans Desperate to Outlast Trump Know Better, but They Don’t Care

Trump lives in fear of the vapers and lunatics who support him, and ambitious GOP politicians live in fear of Trump.

Trump Republicans—who, at this point, are almost the only Republicans left. Yet, as the recent political fortunes of Florida’s Ron DeSantis demonstrate, their cynicism could well end up having the better of them.

You can see that cynicism, and the lack of shame, in the likes of JD Vance, a Trump critic now running for Senate as a loyal MAGA man, and first-term Rep. Nancy Mace, two of the party’s smartest and most shameless young politicians, willing to abandon their own stated positions and embrace morally repugnant ones if that’s what it takes to be a member in good standing of the Republican Party. The pandering of Mace and Vance reflects the fact that the Republican Party remains under Trump’s sway, even after he decisively lost the popular vote in 2016, then cost his party control of the House in 2018 and then the White House and Senate in 2020.

It turns out that Joe Biden was right to predict that Trump’s defeat would induce an “epiphany” in the Republican Party—but terribly wrong about what that epiphany would be. A party that’s lashed itself to a proven loser and his most devoted supporters is rapidly becoming ever more enthusiastic in its appeals to racism, nativism, conspiracy theories and frontal attacks on democracy itself.

It’s an approach that is as politically nonsensical as it is morally abhorrent, a descent into overt fascism that is the product of two complementary dynamics: Trump’s fear of losing the support of the extremists and bigots he invited into the party and its seats of power and the fear of the party’s “leaders” of losing the support of Trump himself.

Read the Daily Beast's piece in its entirety to see how how pandering becomes a dark art in the land of the free and home of the brave. 

George Cruikshank's The Radical's Arms (1819), 

pillorying the excesses of the French revolution