Republicans Feed Their Persecution Complex
Conservatives see themselves in the scolding eyes of liberals.
Just your average AR-15-wielding neighbors.
Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg
The Republican National Convention may be built around the cult of personality of Donald Trump, who is stronger, faster, smarter, richer, more magnanimous, truthful and handsome than any human in history, but even the unparalleled glories of Trumpism are, in the end, mere reflections of the party’s true obsessions: persecution and aggression.
Those themes shape the rhetoric that conveys conservative values and inform the fantasies that occupy the party’s large and growing cohort of conspiracy theorists. They also reveal how thoroughly American conservatives view themselves as the unwilling subjects of liberal judgment, forever squirming beneath a hostile other’s gaze.