Why do Republicans have unlimited tolerance for Trump’s unprecedented corruption?
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This is a followup to the last three posts,two fromScott and one from me, about Trump’s amazingly flagrant and lucrative corruption, far exceeding in both respects anything any other president has even dreamed of doing.
Just throwing these possibilities out for discussion:
(1) A significant number of Republicans are total moral degenerates, who actually have no objection to the most extreme venality and corruption from high government officials, beyond not liking it when their opponents rather than themselves profit from the bezzle in all its almost infinite contemporary forms. These are the criminal nihilists.
(2) Another significant number are in theory appalled by this sort of shameless corruption, but rationalize it away via some crazed theory about how God works in mysterious ways, and his abundant grace is made evident by his miraculous use of the most contaminated of earthly vessels to accomplish his good works. I think a lot of fundie evangelicals are in this category.
(3) A large proportion have absolutely no idea how bad the corruption is, because they are epistemologically sealed off from all actual information. These people sincerely believe that Trump either isn’t corrupt, or is no more corrupt than the average political, although maybe he’s more “honest” about it. This is the “they’re all the same” contingent.
(4) The most interesting subgroup to me personally are the Calvinists, using that as a cultural descriptor rather than a literal category. The Calvinists truly believe in the T in Tulip — that’s total depravity for you in the back. This theology basically asserts that human beings are impossibly corrupt compared to the Perfection of God, and that in God’s eyes there’s therefore no meaningful difference between taking a dubious tax deduction and being a serial killer or Hitler for that matter. This has always been a strong undercurrent in American culture, and I think it’s playing a particularly perverse role here, for obvious reasons.
Other explanations are possible, but these are the ones that suggest themselves most powerfully to me at least.