Revisiting "Russians, Straussians, soft landings, and hamburger emojis"

Here's what we were saying nine years ago. The second, and possibly more dangerous problem is that a propaganda-fed base has no capacity to self correct, rather it continues follow unsustainable paths that only gain momentum, often exacerbated by ratcheting mechanisms. Soon you reach a point where, even if the leaders accurately perceive the situation and realized the best solution, they can no longer reconcile that reasonable course of action with what the vast majority of their supporters have been told to believe for decades.This is not the post I'd write today -- parts of it have aged badly, some even seeming a bit quaint ("you thought that 2017 was bad?") -- but my take on the larger dynamics, particularly how feral disinformation was damaging the GOP remains basically the same.Here's what I said in 2016: With misinformation systems as with plumbing, when the flow starts going the wrong way, the results are seldom pretty. This has been a problem for the GOP for at least a few…

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