I’ve been thinking a lot about Tom Clancy Combat Concepts. That was the name that actual long-time military and intelligence people gave the thinking of the Bush administration’s neophytes. After 9/11, these people wanted to be “hard” in their fight against terrorism. And we definitely saw that once the documents about the torture program were released. It wasn’t about being effective and getting intelligence. It was about showing the chickenhawks of the Bush White House than they were “strong” and willing to do whatever was required. It’s pathetic. But it is entirely in keeping with what the Republican Party is all about.

Jonathan Chait made a good point recently, Donald Trump, Affect, and the Conservative Mind. In the article, he pointed out that there are two parts to the conservative mind: ideological and emotional. That can be said about liberals too, of course. The critical issue is what the emotions are. And for conservatives it is mostly anger about their loss of privilege. This is a result of conservatism being backward looking. You can’t stand athwart history yelling stop without resenting the fact that history is, in fact, moving along quite well without you.

Chait argued that Donald Trump appeals to this emotional aspect of conservatism. He noted that the Republican Party has constantly appeased the base with ever and ever greater ideological purity. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter. A large part of the base doesn’t actually care about ideology. They are just mad as hell and they don’t want to take it anymore. But they aren’t mad at the power elite, who are the ones who have actually hurt them. They are mad at the minorities and the Muslims. And the Republican Party is the one that is best at demagoguing these issues. But Chait nailed the effect of Trump’s current popularity, “It must be galling for the party regulars to prostrate themselves helplessly before the base, purging any hint of independent thought, only to watch a formerly pro-choice, libertine if not liberal, Democratic donor waltz into the lead.”

I’m not at all interested in Donald Trump as a candidate. I certainly expect him to flame out. It reminds me of the 1988 Democratic presidential election. Early on (in 1987), I decided that there were two candidates I could support: Joe Biden and Michael Dukakis. I picked Biden. But after he flamed out, I looked at Dukakis and found that he was an excellent substitute and that I could easily have supported him from the beginning. That’s what I expect to happen with Trump supporters. They will find that they don’t like some of his positions and they will move from him to Ted Cruz and eventually to Jeb Bush or Scott Walker. Because that’s the thing: in the end, there isn’t any difference with regard to general outlook.

But early decisions are based more on the gut. You “like” a particular candidate. And the Republican base really likes Donald Trump. He is everything that they want in a candidate: he’s rich, belligerent, and not terribly bright. I suspect that the elite opinion against him is mostly just because they don’t think that he can win the general election. That is to say: they too like his style. And why not? He is “hard” in the sense of Tom Clancy Combat Concepts. If you listen to Republicans on the Iran nuclear deal, you will hear this. The deal is not bad because of any specifics, but rather because of some gauzy idea that a “stronger” or “harder” president would get a better deal.

I hope that the Republicans do nominate Trump. If he happened to win the general election, he would be a far less frightening president than all the “establishment” Republicans — Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker — who we are supposed to think would be just fine.

This last week, there were two episodes of someone shooting at soldiers involved in the Jade Helm 15 war games that many people have worked into a conspiracy theory that claims it is designed to take over Texas and initiate martial law so that the government can take all the guns away from all the real Americans who have been stockpiling them for the last several decades. You would think that some idiot who is taking this all much too seriously and is starting to use violence would cause people to rethink their conspiracy theories. But I’m sure they won’t. I’m sure instead, they will use the old standby of the “false flag” attack.[1] You know, “It’s just the government using violence as an excuse to call for martial law!”

For the kind of people who read Frankly Curious, this is probably bizarre. After all, Jade Helm 15 is hardly a big subject of discussion in the normal world. But in a particular subculture, it’s huge. That subculture is most associated with Alex Jones and his related media. It seems to also be getting some play on RT, but that outlet generally maintains a certain level of responsibility. On the plus side (I guess), Alex Jones actually seems to believe all the nonsense that he pushes. I know Jones and his followers just think that I’m a stooge, so let me address that for a moment.

I know you are, but what am I?! Really. Because the worst thing about the conspiracy theorists is that they totally miss the very real dangers that the power elite pose to us in their fanciful ideas about black helicopters and martial law. Really, what do these people think is going on? Do they really think that their guns have to be taken away or that the “patriots” have to be sent away to FEMA camps for the power elite to get everything it wants?! I have no idea how they can think that given that those in the power elite already have what they want. Why cage people when they are willing to do it themselves? And the InfoWarriors are caging themselves in a network of nonsense. The power elite don’t have a thing to fear from them!

At Salon Bob Cesca put the whole Jade Helm 15 conspiracy into the context the Alex Jones’ longtime prediction of a civil war between the US military (and police) and the “patriots” with their little gun stockpiles. Check out this little bit that Jones was ranting about a year ago:

God, do I ever know where this guy is coming from — and the people who listen to him. These are people who think it would be fun to have a nice little guerrilla war against the forces that are destroying America. In this case, these forces are, well, America itself. But wouldn’t that give these guys a feeling of purpose in the world? In decades past, they would have been members of a union — they would have felt part of something. Now, they are just adrift. You can hardly blame them. But this is a pathetic way to express it. It’s a kind of virtual treason — hoping that your country will turn fascist so that you can fight against it. How about doing a little political organizing?

But no. That’s because the vast majority of the people who listen to Alex Jones are conservatives. So the last thing they want to do is counter the powerful. Instead, they plays these games, just like they played war when they were children. And that’s the problem: they haven’t matured. They probably also fantasize about capturing Bigfoot and becoming Carl Kolchak — two things I was very keen on when I was 10 years old.

[1] I wrote that before learning from Bob Cesca about this InfoWars article, Marines Fired on Near Jade Helm Training Site: Training Exercise Gone Awry? Or as Planned? Because, you know, it couldn’t be some InfoWars loon doing it.

Greg Sargent tried to get to the bottom of an important political question, What Does the American Public Really Think of the Iran Deal? He took on two recent polls. One, by Quinnipiac, found that by a 57%-28% margin, Americans disagree with the Iran nuclear deal. But an NBC News poll came out the same day that found that by 35%-33% margin, Americans agree with the deal. Is one poll an outlier? Not really. As Sargent pointed out, in the NBC News poll, respondents were allowed a third choice: “don’t know enough.” Another 32% chose that option.

This goes along with an article that Zack Beauchamp wrote that I discussed last week, Public Opinion and the Iranian Nuclear Deal. In that case, the difference was priming. If respondents were give a little information about what the deal was, they were much more likely to support it. Conservatives have cried foul in both cases. They claim that Americans must be polled in their natural state of ignorance and must not be allowed to admit that they do not know enough.

I think that’s hooey. Polls are supposed to tell us something. Snapshots are all fine. But when one-third of the population is fine with admitting they don’t know enough to form an opinion, it tells us that it isn’t an issue that they care much about. Are we supposed to base our policy about what Americans think regarding a subject on which they will only give an opinion if forced? Clearly, the Iran deal is not going to be an issue in the presidential race for a third of the people. And I doubt it will an important issue for the other two-thirds.

Let’s face it: any deal with “Iran” in the title is going to sound bad to Americans. After the deal came out, my father told me that he did not like it. After a heavy sigh, I asked him why. He said, “I just don’t trust those people.” I immediately thought that American media had been completely successful in their propaganda campaign. My father had fully absorbed the idea that the Iranians were some kind of nefarious “other.” So I pointed out that we had made deals with the Soviet Union when we didn’t trust them. And that what is currently said about Iran — “They aren’t rational!” — was said about the Soviet Union.

The big argument against the Iran deal is based on a flat out lie. It took almost two years of intensive negotiations to make this deal. What do opponents think? That everyone was just enjoying the expense account? The P5+1 just came in and gave Iran everything it wanted and then they spent the rest of the time sipping drinks by the pool? The deal itself is actually rather clever, with a mechanism for automatically reinstating the sanctions. All any of the involved countries has to do is accuse Iran. Personally, I find it hard to believe that Iran accepted that. It shows an amazing amount of trust in the other countries.

I think Sargent sums up what is really going on regarding public opinion:

I believe in democracy. But this is not democracy. Clearly, democracy is more than voting. But even just looking at voting, there is a lead up to the vote. People hear from both sides. And in this case, I believe the pro-deal side has a much more compelling argument. But there is also a question of why we have a republican and not a straight democracy. And that is because of issues like this. I know infinitely more about the Iran deal than most Americans. But I haven’t read it. I’m no expert. To a large extent, my support for it is based on broader issues: the fact that war mongers always claim that the enemy can’t be trusted; that we have a long history of these kinds of deals working out; and so on. But I think this deal deserves to be tried. And in a decade, no one will know what the big deal was.

I guess the big news from last night’s debate is that there isn’t any big news. Ed Kilgore provided a great overview of the whole thing in six parts: one, two, three, four, five, and six. But at the end of the second part, he wrote, “Hard to believe there’s another hour of this!” That was just what I thought at the end of the first hour of the Monday forum. And you can see the effect. The later live blogging is less dense, because it all becomes so exhausting. The main thing that comes out of it is that nothing big happened. In fact, reading it, the most consequential moment seems to be one of the few things I saw in passing.

The only real question for the debate was whether Trump was going to do something that really damaged his standing. As I see it, that could have happened in two ways. He could have been caught flat footed and said something that was stupid even by the standards of the Republican Party base. Or he could have been too staid and non-Trump like. Well, he seemed to avoid that. What’s more, The Toronto Star reported, Donald Trump Hogs Airtime at GOP Debate. They noted that, “No clear winner in debate of top 10 Republican candidates for US presidential election, but front-runner Trump kept focus on himself.” Indeed. The Washington Post provided the times. Trump got ten and a half minutes. Bush got less than nine. And the rest all got less than seven — Rand Paul only five!

If you read this blog with any frequency, you cannot be surprised to learn that I think this is all hooey. Regardless of who the Republicans nominate, he will win the general election if the economy tanks. And regardless of who they nominate, he will lose if the economy stays strong. But that’s just an overview. The candidates do matter on the margins. And Democrats have a built in advantage. All else equal, they will win presidential elections. And the worse the Republican candidates, the better it is for the Democrats. So I am interested in what the Republicans are doing to themselves. And I think that it is great for the country — but awful for themselves.

Just after the debate, Brian Beutler wrote, The Republican Party Can’t Escape Its Past. In the article, he noted that the fundamental problem is that the Republican Party has not gotten over Romney’s infamous 47% video. That was where he said that 47% of the people took no responsibility for their lives. This was based upon the fact that they didn’t make enough money to pay federal income taxes. It was an extremely vile thing to say. The problem with it is that the Republican Party believes that it’s true: 47% of the country are “takers.”

This isn’t just the politicians or even the base. The conservative media is totally behind the idea. This is ironic given that the listenership of conservative media is mostly angry people on Social Security and disability. They are the biggest single part of the 47%, but they don’t see it that way. It’s basically just a racist dog whistle: “those people” get it and they don’t deserve it. So is it any wonder that Donald “I’m very rich” Trump is so popular with the base?

But the rest of the party has a hard time countering him, given that what he says in blunt ways is all that they say more carefully. They can’t say, “Donald Trump is wrong about immigration!” They have to say, “Donald Trump is wrong to talk about immigration in that way.” It isn’t the same. In fact, it sounds bad to base voters who think that the only thing wrong with politics is that politicians won’t “tell it like it is.” So it doesn’t look like the debate changed much of anything. And that’s great for the Democrats.