AMANDA MARCOTTE – Conservatism turned toxic: Donald Trump’s fanbase has no actual ideology, just a nihilistic hatred of liberals

The horror show that was the 2016 election will be examined and reexamined for years, and depending on how bad things get, quite likely decades to come. There were, of course, a lot of factors: Cultural change, economic change, racism, liberal complacency after Barack Obama, the FBI manipulating the election, the Russian government manipulating the election, hatred of feminism and so on.

 But it’s also important to notice that Donald Trump’s election is the culmination of decades of right-wing media teaching its audience that liberals are subhuman scum, and that hating liberals — whatever their stereotype of a “liberal” looks like — is far more important that minor concerns like preventing war or economic destruction.

Friday morning, the phrase “preparing for Trump” started trending on Twitter. It appears to have started with liberals tweeting out an article by Peter Dreier laying out a 10-step process to resist Trump’s attempts to turn our government into a kleptocracy at best, and a fascist state at worst. But of course the meme was soon taken over by right-wingers eager to exclaim how excited they were about the Trump presidency.

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