Trump has a level of loyalty from Republican voters that is unprecedented in modern US history. Why is that?

https://www.npr.org/2016/06/07/481137357/the-fractured-repub...

    The fact that Americans are politically divided is self-evident from recent elections. But just how we are divided and why it's proved so hard to get past our differences are questions that admit to many answers. And here's an interesting one from the conservative political theorist Yuval Levin. He says, American liberals and conservatives are both inspired by nostalgia from mid-20th-century America, and they are mired in hopeless efforts to go back rather than focus on the future.

    ...

    The striking thing about the baby boomer's cultural dominance over our country for so long is that we view our own past through their eyes. Our idea of the '50s is this kind of simplistic, childish notion of simple families and everything is possible. We see the '60s as a teenager - idealistic, rebellious. In the '70s, we're somewhat maturing, becoming a little cynical. By the '80s we're settled down. In the '90s everything is great. And now, in this century, it seems like we might be over the hill as a country.

I have plenty of these folks in my family. Perfectly nice people otherwise. But they have this huge conception of the evil liberals and all the bad things they must do. They really do think liberals are commies, for example. Like actually believe that. Never mind that you could probably fit all the communists in the US in a single stadium, but whatever. When I try to engage in a conversation about actual issues, they refuse to engage, just devolving right back into plain old identity politics.

Makes me kind of sad in a way. We could be having much more interesting debates about how to solve the real world problems we face, but instead the argument is about whether or not the problems even exist.

Nor conservative, for that matter, aside from some nostalgic dream of social conservatism, I suppose. My MAGA family members love to talk about conservatism as some noble thing, often describing it in neat, simple, pragmatic terms, and then are dumbfounded when confronted with the notion that they don't act according to those principles at all. They still see themselves as conservative, oddly enough.