I brought up Kansas because it is a recent example of realizing a Republican supply-side theocracy based purely on the magical thinking of the Laffer Curve.

Let’s be fair to the Laffer Curve. The concept of the Laffer Curve is solid. Revenue gained from taxation intercepts the origin line at two points, 0% taxes and 100% taxes, and rises in the middle. That’s easily provable in any economic model.

The “magical thinking” comes in when someone thinks they can identify the inflection point, and thinks they can know with certainty that we’re on one side or the other of that inflection point. And I wouldn’t call that “magical thinking” at all, merely very unsupported and possibly quite convenient speculation, used to push a policy position.

Trump is a product of Republicans having run out of religion so badly, that their voters have joined a cult.

There is definitely a cult of personality thing going on with Trump, but don’t make the mistake of attributing all his success to that. He benefited from running against one of the worst candidates in history.

It’s of note that lefties only won in districts where Republicans had no shot. I think the only casualty might have been Heitkamp, who went downhill after hooking her wagon to #MeToo over Kavanaugh. This went over badly in conservative North Dakota. Elsewhere, you have not seen national Democrats embrace Black Lives Matter. They ran conservative Dems in Alabama and PA’s 12th District, and lefties in blue bastions like MA.

What you’re saying here has a nice ring to it, and it’s the ring that I would find intellectually appealing on some level, but I’m not sure it’s true necessarily. I’m in GA06, where the shadow of Newt Gingrich still looms low, and the trees are still shaking from the money thrown for (and against) Ossoff in the special election not too long ago. This district quietly flipped blue last week, to an African American lady who ran on gun control and was a former Everytown spokeswoman. This would definitively count as a “leftie who won in a district where Republicans almost always win.”

I think each of these races has their own story, and different pundits are going to tell different stories about any of them, so we need to take care before believing any single one of them. From my unaligned perch, I suspect the GA06 story is “Republicans were too aggressive with their gerrymander when they scooped up north Dekalb into it a while back,” blended with “suburban women bought X narrative over Y narrative during Kavanaugh,” and a dash of “Karen Handel was a relatively weak candidate.”

So you have to think about all this stuff.

Or, don’t.

My intent with this writing project of mine isn’t to try and figure out politics, or figure out who’s going to win, or even who should win. I honestly think I don’t care that much. I’m much more interested in figuring out the mechanics which make society itself work or fail. That’s much more interesting. I also want to keep my eyes on the horizon for potential signs of large scale violence. I think (and write) about that quite a bit.