Staring into the void
By 
This is a followup to Erik’s post on Rick Perlstein’s essay regarding undecided voters. This quote from the essay was so resonant (and frightening) to me that I wanted to highlight it:
I certainly don’t disagree that Trump is becoming more cognitively impaired and out of touch with reality. But might not these impairments render him a better fascist seducer, as his invitations to infantile regression become ever more primal, ever more basic, ever more pure?
This is disturbingly plausible. In other words, Trump’s decompensation is allowing him, either consciously or semi-consciously or even unconsciously, to deliver the uncut version of the ideological meth he’s been selling for nine and a half years now. His anti-immigrant stuff is getting to Heisenberg levels of purity — the crystal red persuasion of revenant fascism in its 21st century American form.
That it’s all completely crazy and untethered to reality is what makes it “work” for so many of his supporters, because the crazier and more untethered it is, the more they like it.
A comment from Bathawk in that thread also filled me with epiphanous recognition and accompanying dread:
Most of [the support from marginal voters for Trump], especially this cycle, is a very specific kind of decision for most of these people: they don’t “like” Trump, they’re not religious nutcases (so pro-choice, pro-gay rights, or don’t care), they don’t think the election was stolen, and they’re not kneejerk nativists, BUT Trump is A Businessman and Prices Were Lower. That’s their struggle–Dems are fighting macroeconomic illiteracy.
“Macroeconomic illiteracy” is a highfalutin way of suggesting, correctly in my view, that these are the kind of people who could not possibly understand the difference between nominal and real prices if you spent ten minutes trying to explain it, with the aid of hand puppets etc.
I mean for a huge percentage of the population, that “prices are higher than they used to be” means “things cost more they used to in the good old days, and that’s bad” because duh. That’s what inflation means to people!
Omigod is right.