People who stan politicians always confuse me, an ex-fundie raised in an environment where we distrusted all our politicians and held their feet to the fire with regular calls, letters, etc.

We never trusted that our politicians had our best interests at heart.

Which is always why I just shook my head at all those polls saying things like "half of Evangelical voters have negative view of Trump" or whatever, because (a) he still has their vote, and (b) if anything that's a really high number for the culture.

So it's been really weird coming to the other side and finding people who are, like, really defensively into insisting that their favorite politician never stumbles and that even their apparent fuck-ups are genius 11th dimensional chess moves that will pay off in the long run.

Or finding people don't want to vote if they're not enthused by the candidate, which is just such a foreign attitude to the fundie "vote on everything, take every inch" incrementalism approach that has worked so brutally for them.

To an extent this is true of media personalities too. One of the reason the media is so hesitant to say anything negative about Republicans and fundies is decades of angry phone calls and letters from viewers. "Distrust and police" was the fundie position for pols AND anchors.

Then you come over to this side and it's a very different paradigm of stanning one's favorite though thick and thin, and maybe just quitting their show if they cross a line too many times.

We don't really angry-call enough, I think.

Probably some of that is that people who are anxious about phone calls tend to be the Dem demographic overlap, and even the ones who do call are probably a lot more polite than the "threatening hellfire and brimstone" stock I came from. So there's that.

But it feels like there's got to be an effective ground where we can generally LIKE a politician or media personality, but also get loud and noisy at them (note I said "AT THEM", as in effectively targeted, and not just on our general Twitter feed they never see) when they fail.

Anyway, I feel like the non-rightwing side of the political spectrum has embraced a South Park view of cynicism in that we feel cynicism == disengagement,

and that's entirely false. You can be cynical about politicians and very, VERY engaged with them.

That's basically how we have to operate in "red" states: electing flawed people we don't love, and holding their feet to the fire, because the alternative is worse people who will kill us.

And here it occurs to me that the fundie martyrdom attitude probably helps them w/ this.

As in, because the fundie mindset pretends their faith is constantly under attack, they can politically operate in that mindset of "take every inch, stay always vigilant" with pols/media rather than falling into fandom and disengagement when their idols disappoint or are beaten.

In normal circumstances, normal people can't out-engage fanatics (a Douglas Adams principle) but we have such larger NUMBERS that it seems like we could make this work if more of us would just be willing to call and criticize as needed.

Anyway, I'm going back to bed and indeed am only awake because my cat felt it vitally important that I know there was a dollop of poop outside the litter box and I guess she wanted to apologize.