Both sides don't do it

From Driftglass:

I believe that trying to analyze the Right using a leader/movement template is misleading, which is why I began this longish explainer about the Right with this quote from William Burroughs:

The junk [heroin] merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.

Instead of ideologues, the Right created an army of junkies with a socially acceptable addiction. It's not a movement, it's a market: an incredibly lucrative and politically useful one.

Like any other drug market, there will always be people more than willing to supply what the market demands. And like any other junkie who lives scrambling from fix to fix, Republican voters don't much care about who they follow or the degraded state of the merchandise they are buying or the long-term price in blood and treasure and national reputation this is costing them and everyone around them. 

To them, the Worst Thing In The World isn't selling the country to thugs to feed their habit. The Worst Thing In The World is to be publicly exposed as junkies. Exposed as fools who have been terribly wrong about almost everything for decades.

Because to admit that they're wrong---even a little bit---is to admit the possibility that everyone they have trusted for decades really has been a liar and a fraud. That they really have been played for chumps all along. That the Dirty Libtards may have been (gasp!) right about them all along.

And that revelation would destroy them, which is why it must-must-must be kept at bay at any cost. Which is why they hired Donald Trump. He's not their "leader" -- he's just the most brazen pusher of the lies they need to believe. 

This is also why their ludicrous and ever-changing "talking points" don't need to make any sense or follow any ideological consistency: they just need to be shouted long enough to keep Reality from crashing in on them for one more day.

This is also where the deeply complicit Both Sides media gets their cut of the lucrative junkie market. 

The Both Sides media already profits from feeding a different kind of addict: the cynical, aloof, “everyone is corrupt” voter and the pathologically fence-straddling “independent” voter who are both desperate not to believe that the Right has lost it's mind and has become so dangerous that they must actually Pick a Fucking Side and fight for it. 

But in addition to these types, every now and then the lies of the Right collapse (think 2007/8) and for a moment there seems to be no place for the Republican junkie to go but into the grave or into rehab. 

And then along comes a phalanx of Respected Beltway Media Persons who reassure them that none of this was their fault because the pushers they were following were never "real" Conservatives/Republicans to begin with. 

They weren't bad people---they had just been bamboozled by Corrupt Washington Insiders!

And anyway, they need not feel any special shame for the catastrophe they created because...(wait for it) somehow (wait for it) Both Sides are Equally To Blame!

That's where David Brooks comes in.

See also Every Tenet of the Conservative Movement's Philosophy Was a Sham.