"...The problem isn’t that Republicans don’t win legislative victories. It’s that legislative victories can’t answer the party’s underlying discontent, which is less about government policy than about American culture. Democrats worry about voting rights, gun control, climate change and abortion — enormous challenges, but ones that congressional leaders can at least try to address. What Republicans fear, above all, is social and demographic changes that leave white Christian men feeling disempowered, a complex set of forces that Republicans often lump together as 'wokeness.'
"Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, who had voted against the last two Republican speakers before initially opposing Mr. McCarthy as well, claimed last year that the United States was imperiled by Democrats who 'hate America, they hate people who love America, and they hate the religion and the descendants of the people who built America.' That’s not the kind of problem a Republican speaker can fix.
"Conservatives often quote an aphorism by the right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart: 'Politics is downstream from culture.' The point is that passing laws and winning elections don’t ultimately matter if your opponents control the entertainment Americans consume and the values they learn in school. And for many conservatives, it’s self-evident that the big shifts in American culture — fewer Americans identifying as Christian, more Americans seeing gender as fluid, a growing focus in universities and corporations on diversity, equity and inclusion — are creating a society hostile to the values that conservatives prize..." -- Peter Beinart, in the New York Times, concerning the causes of the "discontent" in MAGA world, and why nothing the Republican/ Seditionist/ White Nationalist party and its new "Squeaker" could do can stop the cultural and demographic changes its MAGA base loathes.
