An entertaining opinion piece in The Guardian by Ben Fountain (“Isolated from power, the Republican party has turned inward and driven itself insane on a toxic mix of fear and rage. Trump is its natural figurehead”) features this from Norman Mailer on the GOP in 1968:
They had been a damned minority for too long, a huge indigestible boulder in the voluminous ruminating gut of every cow-like Democratic administration, an insane Republican minority with vast powers of negation and control, a minority who ran the economy, and half the finances of the world, and all too much of the internal affairs of four or five continents, and the Pentagon, and the technology of the land, and most of the secret police, and nearly every policeman in every small town, and yet finally they did not run the land, they did not comprehend it, the country was loose from them, ahead of them, the life style of the country kept denying their effort, the lives of the best Americans kept accelerating out of their reach. They were the most powerful force in America, and yet they were a psychic island. If they did not find a bridge, they could only grow more insane each year, like a rich nobleman in an empty castle chasing elves and ogres with his stick.
Of course, the contemporary GOP is not, and has not been, isolated from power, so the thesis of the piece is weak: they control, among other things, the Congress and, until very recently, the Supreme Court. Still, Mailer’s quotation is a fine morseL.
Trump is already floating names.
Haven’t had as much fun reading about a convention since Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.
“They say America First, but they mean America Next”, as relevant today as it was in 1940 unfortunately