Republican Melodrama

We could call this "tempting fate with Trump" but there's a broader concern, the Freudian melodrama of the American electorate and impatient regression not to the mean but into the ditch. There's no explaining this irrationality (sine qua...) other than by racism. It isn't growing-pains but a death wish. 

Conservatives don't want to wait for their reckoning until the end. In a collapse racial minorities will suffer more and the aggregate might be purified of their distasteful presence, incidentally validating everyone's existential insecurity by the principle of comparative disadvantage, the inverse of the law of "more better." 

They don't want for us to live together and they think that by disempowering minorities their civilization might be saved. Thus they, these lunatics, are liars and cowards, asserting that their beliefs are universal and divine but then that they depend on human enforcement. They must suspect that they made it all up.

Everything happens fatalistically anyway so nothing really matters. Most essentially they are taking a hell of a lot for granted and getting presumptuous with God, which is sinful as hell. Again, it means that they don't believe in anything at heart except that the world is irredeemably shit and they want to see this verified.

That's a lack of faith but there is a kind of sick belief imbedded in it--tacit assumptions about salvation, power and redemption--and that life in the ditch will be familiar and not streaming with their own corpses and nuclear waste. If they don't even care about this then it's nihilism and not only a failure of moral imagination.