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Basically, the Republican Party now needs every single vote every time- the math is a bit tedious to explain, but in numbers the national Republican electorate (conservatives+conservative-leaning voters) dipped below 50% in late 1998 or early 1999. The decrease in that percentage is about 2.5%-3% per four years consistently. Around 47% support they can't count on third parties (Reform, Green) sucking off enough votes for them to win pluralities anymore. The basic Republican strategy is to subvert or suppress as many poor and minority votes as possible, but they have realized that at least as important is that they need ever greater efficiency of turnout of their own.
So, to drive the efficient turnout the leaders of the Right have very much suppressed internal dissent and need a running agitation/propaganda campaign to distract the unhappy (but disorganized) portion of their electorate. The way to make such a campaign effective is to break effective dialogue with the Other Side, create a level of cognitive dissonance with it, then keep on making meaningful communication impossible by a running bombardment with emotional but unresolvable challenges. Unresolvable emotion-manipulating problems lead to a kind of hysteria in the intended audience, which then in turn demands simplistic answers and wants to be relieved of the difficult responsibility of solving the things they get confronted with. It makes for a group of people who will vote, at close to 100% participation, in conformity with that one (often counterfactual) source of information and interpretation they feel dependent upon.
Anyway, the side effect of this scheme is that you have a lot of people who are told that the Left works by "intimidation" (we call it truthful/fact-based argument) and who have all kinds of feelings that their lives are miserable and constrained but don't dare question their own leaders or their own political choices. They also live in a curious alternative reality where things never really change, where people never really move on or grow to wisdom or escape a certain kind of mental/spiritual patheticness. Mediocrity.
And the more the agitprop grinds at them, the more desperate their leaders become in the face of poll numbers and disparate facts, the more their mental fortresses get shelled to bits by media exposure, the more raids into their rear their opponent makes...they lash out anywhere and everywhere.
They'll get even more incivil for the next year at least. Decisive defeat of their masters is what it will take for the whole thing to go utterly bitter and then suddenly implode. Here's hoping that November 2 2004 will do most of the trick.
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