It's less than a month till the Iowa caucuses kick off the presidential nomination voting and Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump continues to defy repeated predictions by Republican insiders of his impending big fade. The phenomenon of Trumpism remains ascendant in the Republican Party, though the paunchy bully boy has yet to win a vote. And unless someone like Ohio Governor John Kasich, a moderate conservative and rare rationalist in the field, wins, which is highly unlikely, the nominee, even if not Trump himself, will be a voice of aggressive yahooism in the devolutional national debate.
Making this all the more likely is the literal structure of the Republican race, which is clearly organized to make the old Confederacy -- the true bedrock of the modern, as it were, Republican Party -- the shaping venue of the contest.
Iowa and New Hampshire are first as always, followed as February's only other contests by South Carolina, which literally launched the Civil War with the attack on Fort Sumter, and Nevada. But Iowa is dominated in its Republican caucuses by religious fundamentalists who help shape the party's rejection of the Enlightenment principles which animated the American Revolution and most of any advanced society today. And Nevada has just seen the secretive takeover of the state's biggest newspaper by arch neocon Sheldon Adelson, the multi-billionaire gambling magnate pushing the most right-wing anti-Islamic agenda as a media magnate in Israel, where he is a bulwark of the most right-wing government in that country's history.
Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump has released his first 30-second TV ad, repeating his greatest hits of wild claims. He'll reportedly spend heavily on the ad in Iowa and New Hampshire.
All of which points to heavy anti-Enlightenment/pro-Confederate influencers in all four of the supposedly diverse February contest states.
The neo-Confederate dominance becomes even more obvious as soon as February ends, for March 1st brings the so-called "SEC Primary" featuring states which host universities belonging to the football powerhouse Southeastern Conference.
But the SEC primary is really an updated version of a Confederate primary, for the six Old Confederate states (of the 12 which vote on March 1st) don't all have SEC schools. And the rest of the Old Confederacy votes in the next two weeks after that.
This great shaping concert of Trumpism and Old Confederacy almost certainly means that whomever makes it through the funnel by the Ides of March will be a hard right figure, whether they like it or not. That's good for the anti-Enlightenment hard right, which is disproportionately powerful in America, and thus in the advanced industrial world.
But it's also good for the Democrats, especially Hillary Clinton, by far the most likely Democratic presidential nominee. She faces big hurdles in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two contest states, where Bernie Sanders's democratic socialist challenge has gained great traction. But the path gets easier after that, when Clinton encounters large Latino and black primary electorates in Nevada and South Carolina who have much more experience with her and her husband.
And Hillary may well win one or both of the first two contests even before getting to more congenial territory out west and down south. She has a decent lead in Iowa and is highly competitive in New Hampshire, which is very familiar with her Vermont senator rival and has tended to favor the neighboring pol.
Sanders has real money and the ability to keep getting it with a very impressive mass small donor program. But Hillary simply appears more presidential than either Sanders or the trailing third candidate, former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, and has done a good job of coopting some of Sanders's themes. And her fundraising is very strong -- besting her goal of $100 million for the primaries in 2015 -- giving her a decided edge over Sanders in cash on hand.
The former secretary of state is also more plausibly presidential than any of the challenging Republicans -- the aggressively know-nothing and lying Trump, the colossally ignorant Ben Carson, the belly-flopped Jeb Bush, the right-wing Obama Lite Marco Rubio, and the would-be Joe McCarthy Ted Cruz.
She sure ain't perfect, but she's far more credible than what the Republicans are coming up with. Still, assuming her nomination, her election is not assured, not in a country in which more than 40 percent of the voters don't believe in evolution science.
Why are the Republicans rolling so far right, much further right than any other mainstream conservative party in an advanced industrial nation?
The Republican Party has been prepped for the emergence of a truly dangerous ultra-demagogue like Trump for many years. And our media culture is a perfect Petri dish for it.
While promoting Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Harrison Ford dissed Donald Trump after the Republican presidential frontrunner said he wants to be a president like the one Ford played in Air Force One. "Donald, it was a movie. It's not like this in real life. But how would you know?"
First the neoconservatives, who have got to be some of the dumbest imperialists in world history, spun up their nitwit designs on the Middle East, leading to the ultimate non sequitur response to 9/11, the disastrously destabilizing invasion of Iraq. Which empowered Iran and created proto-jihadists around the world.
Then Fox News went from a sometimes intriguing conservative network, on which I occasionally appeared, to all right-wing/all the time, consciously aggregating and constantly agitating a hard-core right-wing constituency. Whatever Rupert Murdoch may think about this now, he's laughed all the way to the bank.
Then, desperately trying to win a presidential race that was never in the cards, my old fave John McCain -- surrounded by some friends of mine who've since had, er, second thoughts -- put an attractive but obvious know-nothing, as I wrote at the time, named Sarah Palin on the national ticket.
And poor McCain, having trolled for votes in the sewer, found himself confronted at one of his own town halls by a supporter so terrified of the rather moderate Barack Obama that she could barely even say what he was: "He's an, an ... Arab!"
So Trumpism is no surprise, and the party is further enshrining it with the very structure of its contest.
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