How did this monster get created?

[Uncle Joe]

6. I agree, yuiyoshida, it is important, fear trumps reason, reason trumps faith and faith trumps fear.

The Republicans had mastered the propaganda art of inducing or magnifying the emotional feelings of fear, hatred and suspicion, doing so would reduce or eliminate rational thoughts of we the peoples' true calling by making it suspect.

"Goverment became the enemy," reason, rational discourse and compromise were taboo.

In keeping reason subdued and the concept of "faith" placed exclusively in the religious corner; much of which was towing the Republican line, the peoples faith in government was diminished as a result, thus fear ruled the land.

Then it was just a matter of divide, distract and conquer.

Simple answers to complex problems were the order of the day and for that matter still is.

“Voters are basically lazy,” one Nixon media adviser wrote. “Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we… seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable….” Nixon’s people hired advertising executive Harry Treleaven, who believed the new medium of television had changed the nature of politics. For him, politicians were no longer policy wonks; they were actors with a narrative.

Under Treleaven, Nixon’s people ignored policy positions and instead used television to create a candidate with a simple message: America was on the brink of disaster, and only Nixon could save it. They hired a brilliant young photographer to put together a series of television ads from stock photographs strung together to create a sense of doom; at the end a voice intoned “Nixon” over an iconic image of the nation. At the end of every ad ran the words: “Vote like your whole world depended on it.”

(snip)

It did. And so, after 1968, Republicans increasingly relied on their apocalyptic redemption story. America was in terrible trouble, because grasping minorities, women and workers wanted government policies that would suck tax dollars from hardworking white people. Democrats backed those policies because they would do anything to buy votes. It was up to Republicans to restore America to its former glory. In a time of dramatic economic and social upheaval, this story reassured voters left behind in the new conditions that the answers to their problems were simple, and that coming up with those answers required no great education or thought. It simply required the right principles.

http://www.salon.com/2015/07/19/how_did_this_monster_get_created_the_decades_of_gop_lies_that_brought_us_donald_trump_republican_front_runner/

Peace to you.