As an aside, excluding the long-term unemployed from the unemployment rate is a huge scam that was almost certainly designed with the specific goal of obscuring the true scope of the problem.
What Mr. Pierce said. The saner elements of the GOP may recognize that the party has an image problem, but they’ve conditioned their base to believe, expect and demand so much hateful madness that they can’t back away from it.
All they can do is talk about how they’re not really as crazy as all that and they’re going to rein in the loonies, and hope that that sounds enough like responsible maturity that normal people won’t be appalled by them anymore.
There’s also up & down, and inside & outside (although they tend to correlate with each other pretty closely). Which is why you can have a bipartisan consensus among the outsiders at the lower income levels that has absolutely zero influence on the bipartisan consensus among the elite insiders at the higher income levels.
Unfortunately, the 1% (or .1%, or .01%) are the ones who get to set policy, and they don’t have much interest in what the rest of us think, except insofar as they desire it to conform more closely with their own Beltway/millionaire worldview.