The CNN Republican presidential debate last week looked more like an episode of Jersey Shore than a contest of political skill and policy expertise. For anyone who endured the excruciating three hours of bickering and backbiting, you will never get those minutes back.

Carly Fiorina won the debate, and has jumped up to second in the polls because she seemed to be throwing the hardest punches at the Trump piñata. Even still, the plurality of debate watchers, despite saying Fiorina won, still said they would vote for “The Donald.” Trump is still the frontrunner and is just background noise to the people who have been fighting to overtake him.

There have been two distinct consistencies in the primary contest thus far. The first is that no gaff is big enough to take down Trump, and that whoever attacks him the loudest is second. Both of these phenomena illustrate the depths to which the Republican base has fallen.

The pattern is that the loudest, most obnoxious candidate grabs the attention and the support. A few of the pragmatic Republicans, or whatever is left of them, criticized the CNN moderators after the debate for letting the affair devolve into a screaming match, but the blame for this should land far beyond CNN. For years, possibly even decades, so much of the conservative agenda has been carried by a lack of civility and decency.

The idea has been that if you shout the loudest, you win, facts be doomed. The conservative end of the news media has created an environment that only grants the spotlight to divisive voices. Think about the conservative media for just a few seconds. Who comes to mind? Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Hugh Hewitt, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Megyn Kelly and anyone else that yells really loud. Commentators like George Will, once a stalwart of conservative thought, have been drowned out so thoroughly they hardly have any influence.

This venomous speech is what voters on the conservative end have come to expect from their politicians. The result is a system where the only way a candidate can get any traction is by bashing someone or trying to incite panic. If they don’t, they won’t get any support. It has been ingrained into the minds of most Republican voters that a good politician is a confrontational one — that you have to start fights to be a good conservative. This was poignantly displayed in the CNN debate.

This has gotten so out of hand that even Glenn Beck, who was one of the worst offenders, had an awkward moment of clarity in 2014, “I think I played a role, unfortunately, in helping tear the country apart.”

The biggest problem among voters is the perception that yelling the loudest makes you right. Volume does not equal veracity, but facts seem to have lost a place at the far wing of the Republican Party.

The most painful part about all the yelling is that conservatives have so completely convinced themselves that they cannot be wrong that they think an embarrassing situation must be a conspiracy. After someone asked Trump about our Muslim president who isnt even an American (a beleif stil held by way too large a constituency) breitbart.com said the man was obviously a liberal, planted there to make a scene.

That response is far too common to be plausible, but it feeds into the narrative that has put the party where it is now. If conservatives can convince their base that liberals are planting themselves in conservative causes to create an embarrassing situation then they, in their minds, proven that everyone is out to get them and that they must be combative of necessity. Even the Great American Embarrassment himself, Mr. Donald Trump, has been accused of being a liberal plant.

But let’s put the facts aside, as this group of conservatives so often does, and assume that these people are liberal plants. Even if that is the case, these liberals make everyone think that conservatives are the culprits. The base has lost so much sanity the rest of the world assumes they are to blame. Even if they are plants, the right wing is guilty by association; the solution is to change whom they associate with. If a lack of civility is upsetting in a debate, voters too should look at with whom they associate with; it certainly wasn’t CNN who caused it.

Matt Young is a journalism and political science senior.

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