Driftglass on the occasion of Ted Cruz declaring his candidacy for President of the United States:

Life forms like Ted Cruz are the inevitable price the country is paying for the sin of Lee Atwater and the Southern Strategy — the day the GOP decided to go went all-in the crazies, and all the respectable people in town reacted by looking the other way and/or finding a hippie to punish. Of course, fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of  raving idiots running the Party of Lincoln may speedily pass away.

But I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

The amount of time and money plutocrats have sunk into turning America’s yokels and snake handlers and dimwits and bigots into a Great Big Fucking Hammer has been mind-blowing, and what they have built with their money and influence is really a political engineering marvel: a self-contained, proudly ignorant, red-white-and-blue fascism, assembled right out in the open while being conspicuously ignored by virtually our entire elite American political media persons.

ADDENDUM:  Read that 1961 article by Alan Westin, The John Birch Society