Distinguishing between a party and a cult

 It has become worse than a cliche to say that the Republican Party is a Trump personality cult rather than a normal political party.  Yet, it's still true.  Also, breaking news:  bears really do shit in the woods.  Yet, the response of the Republican Party to Trump's 2020 loss actually demonstrates a lot about this difference.

I write frequently about the concept of valence traits, as they have evolved in game theory since that seminal article by Donald Stokes, "Spatial Models of Party Competition."  Rather than merely distinguishing between a positional issue and a valence issue, as Stokes did, we place the candidates somewhere in some policy space, or rather, most of the time, they strategically select locations.  Each voter also has an ideal point somewhere in that policy space, and prefers a candidate to be as close as possible to his ideal point.  Grammatically, "his" is the neutered form, and one is supposed to use "his" to reference a non-specific person, but politics have changed, and in academic print, one is now required to use, "her."  It is grammatically incorrect because it is not the "neutered form," but that way, you signal your virtue, pay gaps disappear, the 99% of rapes that go unpunished cease to happen, and kumbaya, right?

Anyway, voters want ideologically proximate candidates.  However, a candidate is more than a location in the policy space.  A candidate also has "valence" traits-- traits that voters just intrinsically want, like competence and honesty.  The higher a candidate's score in some valence dimension, the more utility any given voter receives from that candidate's victory, because traits like competence and honesty are just good.  Period.  Moreover, the valence dimension is assumed to be separate from ("orthogonal to") the policy space.

Basically, this means that I want a candidate whose policy positions are close to my own, but I'll sacrifice some proximity for the sake of traits like competence and honesty.  Those traits, then, complicate the process by which candidates would strategically select their locations in the left-right dimension.

There are tons of papers, and lots of unnecessarily complicated mathematical models about this, and I apologize for having contributed to this morass.  But, I needed tenure.  What else was I gonna do, get a real job?  Get real.

In fact, let's do that.  Right now.  Let's get real.  Let's talk about the real process of assessing traits like competence and honesty.  As... they... relate to the rapist who is about to get kicked out of the White House.  (Really, there's someone out there who would get into a rage about my "neutered form" grammar lecture, when there's a fuckin' rapist in the White House.)

But this isn't a lecture about Trump's rapiness.  After all, the literature on valence never bothered to address it before, because we never needed to address it before.  That is the central problem of Trump.  He is so horrible that he introduces anti-valence traits that we never knew we needed to include in our models.  Like... "rapist."  Presuming that's a negative, rather than a positive, given that there may be assholes out there who look at a rapist and say, hey!  A rapist!  I like that about him!  Which... oy.  [But oh no!  That professor used, "he," as a neutered form!  Antiquated grammar nazi!  Get him!]

Anyway, competence and honesty.  I know y'all are sick of the phrase, "the lying-est liar who ever lied a lie," but I like it, and it is apt.  Donald Trump is the most dishonest politician in American history, by far.  Not close.  No human being in the history of the species surpasses him in the cravenness, nor egregiousness, nor consistency of his lying.  And he has always been a bad liar.  Only an idiot could fail to see through his lies.  As for competence... Donald Trump is astonishingly stupid, willfully inept, and the result is a death toll currently over 300,000, with the US leading by example of what not to do.

For years, I excoriated my political scientist colleagues for rating Donald Trump as a worse president than James Buchanan.  Donald Trump took the title.  May this level of presidential stupidity never be surpassed.  It was always clear that Trump was, to quote Rex Tillerson, a "fucking moron," but now his idiocy has a body count.

Valence.  Trump is the lowest-valence president or presidential candidate in US history.

And yet...

The political science "defense" of Republican assessments, prior to the events of last month, was the universal answer to all questions relating to public opinion and voting behavior:  party identification.  Voters don't actually assess valence.  Instead, they observe the nominee, or in the case of a president, president of their party, and form a point estimate of where that candidate scores on the valence dimension based on party ID.

In other words, "he can't have a low valence score!  He's my party's nominee/president!"  (Or alternatively, "he must suck because he's the other party!")

This is why I regularly implore you to learn how to recognize cranks and charlatans on your own side.  It is difficult, but necessary.

Here's the rub.  What happens when your candidate loses?  Normally, he goes away, and without party identification signaling to you that you need to defend a candidate, you either have no opinion, or you form it on some other basis.  (And plenty of Republicans had qualms about Trump before he became their living god, chopping off enough of their... to force their worship and their children's worship for generations to come.)

If the Republican Party were a normal party, upon Trump's loss, he'd go away, and the base would no longer have their opinions of him dictated by party ID.

OK, you're thinking.  They have this whole "stolen election" thing.  And yes, it is a lie, but they're doing it anyway.  Yet, in 2000, Gore had a legitimate claim to having "won."  As I wrote a while back, y'all have the 2000 election wrong, but had every vote been counted as each voter intended, Gore would have been president.  That pesky butterfly ballot...  And Democrats took with them the sentiment that Gore was robbed, and that Democrats were robbed.

Yet Democrats did not take with them the belief that Gore was their living god.  Why?

Part of it was that Gore went away.  (The other part, of course, is that the Democratic Party was never a Gore personality cult.)  Trump isn't going away.  That motherwannabe-daughter-fucker won't go away until he croaks, and even then his spawn will continue to grift and defile America in every way they can.  Why?  There's a dynamic.  His followers aren't forming an assessment of his valence based on his status as the Republican nominee or President.

It's him.  That's the difference.  That's how you know it's a personality cult rather than a conventional party.  This is all ass-backwards in political science terms.

The Republican Party, at the mass level, has not rationalized their support for an incompetent, lying, rapist, racist con man because he's the Republican nominee/President.  Instead, they belong to a personality cult, organized around an incompetent, lying, rapist, racist con man.  Take away his status as the Republican nominee/President, and their loyalty to him, and their blinkered assessments of his valence score, remain.

Yeah, it's a cliche to say that this is a personality cult.  Yet, it is important to note that we have observed a fundamental change in the Republican Party.  It does not operate like a party, and the way that its voters assess Donald Trump does not comport, either with the mathematics of game theoretic valence models, nor with empirical responses to those models which assume that party takes primacy.

Because it isn't a party.