What will happen to the GOP when Trump kicks the bucket?

 While the most evil among us seem to live beyond their allotted times, even Donald J. Trump will die.  Ideally in prison, but I am no idealist, and the legal system is filled with Trump-sized loopholes that are less "loopholes" than cartoon-silhouettes created by a caricature running through a wall rather than using a door because doors are for the little people.  But even Trump will bite the big one.  Eventually.  For as long as he draws breath, he will remain the cult leader and godhead of the Republican Party, yet for all of the Biden age jokes, shall we remember that Trump, too, is old?  He'll die.  What then?  Specifically, what happens to the GOP?

I am prompted this morning by one of the more dramatic examples of the Eastasia/Eurasia phenomenon that America has seen.  Prior to the Trump era, 1984 read as far-fetched in the American context.  We are at war with Eastasia.  We have always been at war with Eastasia.

We are at war with Eurasia.  We have always been at war with Eurasia.

What, do I have the memory of a goldfish?  OK, buddy, nice story.  Next you'll be telling me about talking farm animals, and it'll be just as realistic!

And then some people decided it would be a good idea to take the most obvious liar in history, and worship him as their living god, so this week, we went from the mainstream of the left having spent a few years running, screaming in terror from the far-left's "Defund the Police" bout of developmental disability, to a rather large portion of the Republican Party openly embracing "Defund the FBI."

We're at war with Defund Law Enforcement.  We have always been at war with Defund Law Enforcement.

We're at war with Law Enforcement.  We have always been at war with Law Enforcement.

Quite literally, I have read this book before, and unfortunately, we have seen it play out in real life a few times.  Yet in order to see it play out this crassly, it has required the GOP's cultish devotion to the man I call, "the lying-est liar who ever lied a lie."  Donald Trump.

I really don't want to say, "this is not normal," but... "this is not normal."  This is a cult.

So what happens when the godhead dies?

As I have written on many occasions, Donald Trump is both a cause and an effect.  A healthy party would never have nominated someone like Trump, much less turned him into an object of slavish worship.  The party started going the way of lies and conspiracy theories long before he hit the stage, yet he is an accelerant to every dangerous impulse that made him somehow appealing to a certain type of voter.  He feeds his base resentment and anger, while pointing the finger at various "other"s who are ostensibly responsible.  He lives above accountability, promising the same, either explicitly or implicitly through vicarious example, making him the perfect vessel for negative partisanship.

And never does he offer a hard truth.  Anger is stressful, but the anger that Trump reinforces is a cognitively easy anger.  What Donald Trump offers is a life without cognitive dissonance.

As long as you can forget what he told you five minutes ago, which strikes me as an impossible bargain, but maybe that's just me and my non-goldfish-like memory.

Oooh, castle.

Oooh, castle.

Oooh, castle.

Hmmm?  Oh, right.  Write...

Memory, and cognitive dissonance.  That's actually my point for today, because everything else?  That's the easy part.  Conspiracy theories?  Those are easy.  Resentment of an other?  Easy-peasy.

The hard thing?  That's the Eastasia/Eurasia thing.  Never mind what I told you five minutes ago.  What I'm telling you now is the truth, and has always been the truth.  Defund law enforcement?  That's not evil, commie anti-Americanism!  No, it's the most American thing ever!

Can that happen without a leader worshipped as a god?  I'm not asking about other crazy shit.  Lies, or conspiracy theories.  Can that stuff happen?  Of course.  It did.

But there is something that seems to require an autocratic cult.  Truth is what I say it is.  That doesn't work without "I."  Without a cult leader to be the "I" who dictates truth.

Let's not get optimistic here.  When Trump dies, the Republican Party is not suddenly going to develop a taste for empiricism, science, objectivity or a willingness to accept uncomfortable facts.  They just won't have a central figure to pull the Eastasia/Eurasia thing on them.

What will be left?  In the absence of a new cult leader, what will be left is a decentralized web of conspiratorial bullshit.  Tucker Carlson spouts one lie, a thousand corners of the dark web spout ten thousand more, and a cult of paranoid conspiracy theorists are united by nothing except fear, hatred and resentment.

Political scientists tend to be institutionalists.  I'm talking about the real scholars here, rather than the bullshit, ivory tower, faux-revolutionaries who know nothing except leftist virtue-signaling.  Armchair-Marxists, critical theorists and the rest?  They barely count as scholars, if at all.  No, I mean actual political scientists.  Why are we institutionalists?  Institutions check exploitative impulses, as the Federalist Papers said.  We are, in a sense, mostly Burkeans to one degree or another.  If you want to tear down a system, with what will you replace it?  The American Revolution?  Thumbs up, because they had a vision towards a working system.  The French Revolution?  Nope.  Hence, the Reign of Terror.

What happens when a group adopts a mentality of paranoia and anti-intellectualism, combined with all-encompassing trust of one person, or that person's emissaries?  They have no capacity to handle information when that person is no longer around.  No capacity to interact with facts, but even centralization around an institution becomes a problem because the primary thing that has served as an organizing principle is anti-institutional.  Trust in the godhead, not any institution.

Functioning institutions prevent not only an individual from exercising that kind of exploitative power, but they prevent chaos afterwards.  Institutions create stability.

Donald Trump is a whirling vortex of chaos, who leaves nothing but wreckage in his wake.  No platter of crudite from Wegner's (sorry) will allow him to live forever, even if the dumbass did decide to start eating his vegetables.  What happens when the inevitable happens?

There is no coming back for the Republican Party.  It is unsalvageable, but that's not my question.  My question is about the Eastasia/Eurasia switcharoo.  Does that particular trick require more centralization than the post-Trump GOP will manage?  Perhaps.  It may require not only a base that has abandoned the idea of truth, but a cult leader who tells them what to believe from day to day.  Whether or not a new godhead emerges, post-Trump, will be interesting/terrifying to see.

How about a classic Dr. John track, from Goin' Back To New Orleans?  While most consider Gris-Gris to be his masterpiece, I think this is actually my favorite of his albums.