Where do they get this stuff?

What seems to have happened is that GOP base voters feel betrayed and disillusioned because they voted for a Republican Congress and that Congress has failed to deliver the agenda on which they ran. First of all, they failed to remove President Obama from office, either through impeachment or at the ballot box in 2012. They also failed to repeal Obamacare,”close the borders,” ban abortion, stop gay marriage, or end political correctness, just for starters.

Someone forgot to tell Republican voters that there are three branches of government regulated by checks and balances, and other people in their own party, as well as the opposition party, who have different agendas competing with their own. If you listen to right-wing media and follow what’s being said in the conservative bubble, it’s understandable. They were told that they won a huge mandate, and now they quite logically blame the people who have been making promises they don’t keep.

When they listen to these professional politicians running for their party’s nomination, they just hear more of the same — and they don’t want to hear it anymore. They want someone who will assure them that this creaky government system with all those checks and balances, and all the resultant gridlock, will not be a hinderance to achievement of their agenda. They are tired of waiting. And right now they have two presidential candidates who are promising a different way of doing things.

Donald Trump is running to be a strongman. It’s all about him “getting the job done” because he’s smarter and tougher than everyone else. (This is a familiar archetype and Trump’s specific relationship to it is fascinatingly explored in this piece by Rick Perlstein, called “Donald Trump and the F-word.”) Ben Carson is a little bit more complicated. He’s running as a quasi-religious leader who will be able to overcome all these obstacles through the same miraculous process that has characterized his life story. (The recent questions about some details of that very famous life story have only resulted in adding martyrdom to his mystique.) In both cases, the people who like them are not merely attracted to the fact that these men are outsiders, but also by qualities that will ostensibly allow them to transcend the normal process of democratic government. Despite their professions of love for the constitution, these voters no longer believe in the system of government that constitution sets forth.