There is a ratcheting effect in US conservative politics whereby the social conservative voting bloc needs to be cultivated with ever more extreme positions jus

There is a ratcheting effect in US conservative politics whereby the social conservative voting bloc needs to be cultivated with ever more extreme positions just to keep them interested enough to vote for the Republican party. This has mostly manifest through increasing racism but is also manifest by increasing hatred towards intellectuals and thinking people in general. The pattern of social conservatives demanding increasingly extreme positions from their leaders is not dissimilar to how addicts become desensitized to their drug of addiction and need increasingly higher doses to get their high. In the 1960s, using dog-whistles to pander to anti-black racism (through the Southern Strategy[0]) was enough to bring out the social conservative vote for the Republican party. Over time, the demands of social conservatives have made the dog-whistles less quiet and the number of targeted groups has expanded from only African-Americans to Hispanics, people who live in urban areas, to scientists and other intellectuals, and now to all Democrats. By 2016, it took Trump's level of vile xenophobia--directed against anyone who wasn't a willfully ignorant racist--to motivate social conservatives to vote in large numbers. In 2020, the social conservatives are demanding fealty to QAnon, a conspiracy theory that is at odds with objective reality. Whatever degree of racist anti-intellectualism social conservatives demand in 2020 and 2024 will be worse. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy