We’re overthinking this: ideology, policy, corruption, etc.
It is ALL about white supremacy. ALL. (Except maybe there’s a little greed mixed in, but that can be traced to white supremacy, too.)
White Christians ran this country for 200+ years, at which point they saw correctly that the demographics firmly predicted that at some point in the next 30-50 years they would be outnumbered by non-white, non-Christian people and would lose their power.
Rather than accept an inevitable loss of white Christian dominance, they decided to reject democracy.
Trump is just a vehicle. If not him, some other thug would have risen up to wave the White Supremacy banner. If not in 2016, then by 2020 or maybe 2024. But we would be in the same exact spot we’re in right now if Trump had never been born.
I agree with the posters stating that TFG made it OK for Republicans to come “out” as racists, misogynists, fascists, and other deplorable types - he also energized these feelings in a lot of people, and made their feelings legitimate. I recall discussions about McCain/Palin, and after Romney/Ryan - conservatives were hankering for someone more extreme - since their milquetoast ticket did not get the job done: “go harder right, or go home”. TFG, with energizing large blocs of grievance voters, delivered them in spades to the R column. And that’s why they embraced him - he delivers energized voters to their column like no one else in recent history. In their quest for power, he’s like crack, and they will hold their nose at some of his hijinks, but do what it takes to keep the hits (votes) coming.
The republican party has been trying to drum up the sort of hatred, ignorance, and conspiratorial thinking that define our current age, but they overestimated the moral and intellectual integrity of their own base. They thought they had to do it relatively quietly and to put it all behind a veil - to use dog whistles to stir up hatred, to twist reality rather than make it up out of whole cloth, to gradually and slowly turn their base into being outraged and living for nothing but hating liberals.
Trump came along and just brought it all to the surface. He said the quiet part out loud. He basically yelled what previous republicans/fox news/that whole echo chamber only tried to say quietly.
At first, a lot of republicans thought that was going to sink them. They thought, basically, “this guy is taking all of the evil shit we’re doing and putting it out in the open where no one can mistake it for what it is - and it’s going to lead to a backlash against us.” This was what people like Lindsay Graham were getting at when Trump was on the rise.
But it turns out that they overestimated the decency and integrity of their own base. They thought that they had to take years to make their base start to doubt that the sky was blue, what really is blue anyway, do we all see the same thing when we look at the sky? But instead you can just say “the sky is red and liberals want you to think it’s blue”, and their base will whole heartedly embrace the idea that the sky is red.
They didn’t have to be gradual or subtle or use any sort of veil about their hateful message. You could just come out and scream it from the rooftops and American conservatives are so vile that they’ll whole-heartedly love you for it.
So previously fringe candidates started to battle for who could out-crazy each other, with the republican base flocking to whoever the most toxic and detached from reality was. “Conventional” republicans either got on board that train or got left behind. The party elite started losing control of the direction of the party and the inmates were now running the asylum.
It became a purity contest of how willing you were to disbelieve reality. Anyone still attached to reality (like Liz Cheney) gets excommunicated and it became a race into crazyland. We are here.
Yep, that was always the explanation for a loss. Which is of course why the 2020 loss is just inconceivable, there’s no way you can go more hard core.
That is part of what made the Established GOP vulnerable. The other viable contenders in 2015-2016 should have just nuked DJT from orbit at the foot of that escalator. But they all were counting on that “of course” he was a joke candidate who would eventually wash out “and then since we did not hit him hard, we will harvest those voters he energized!” Little did they realize the Deplorables were saying now finally it IS our time. I agree that absent the galvanizing figure of Trump it may have taken another four or eight years, but eventually you would have had the “at last! Someone that can’t possibly be further to the Right and will say the quiet part out loud!” moment.
The only thing that would have convinced the GOP to pull out of the self-reinforcing feedback look when it could have was if it had not been working, but it had worked all this time. Meanwhile the *&^%$ Democrats spent 30 years running from being called merely “liberal” and all it has gotten them is now being called socialists.
Plus, there was a bit of fork in the road there. Remember the “post-mortem” report after 2012, that called for greater inclusivity of hispanics, more openness on migrant issues, etc?
If no Trump and someone like Jeb! had got the nomination - he was pretty hard-core, looking at his wikipedia page, but not the blatant white supremacy of “good people on both sides”. He might have been able to at least pretend to rely on the post-mortem.
If you want to think they are ALL ignorant or self-haters, that’s your right. But, even though I am a Democrat, I find that hard to believe.
I’m in favor of trying to achieve an ideal of public policy color-blindness, even knowing it’s against human nature to expect perfection there. That’s not my number one political issue, but if it was, I’m not sure which party would be be my favorite.
This is almost exactly my view, with one nuanced distinction that leads to slightly different conclusions. I don’t think the GOP’s dog-whistling was about carefully soft-selling racist authoritarianism to their unprepared base. Their base has always been racist assholes and they needed no preparation. I think the cautious, veiled language was about maintaining deniability for the centrists, the low-information swing voters, and the casually liberal mainstream, in order not to alert them to the true anti-democracy agenda and energize an opposition they wouldn’t be able to overcome until all the pieces were in place. The intelligent progressive had known for years the GOP was clearly the American Baathist party, building toward an objective of permanent rule by a tribal minority, but it was sufficiently sneaky that their warnings were seen as alarmist and dismissed.
Thus the right’s initial reluctance to embrace Trump was not about risking offending and alienating the GOP voters — it was that he was giving the game away, which would potentially activate the center and left to stand against him as a unified bloc. Previously, the right’s flurry of wedge social issues had successfully broken the opposition into subgroups of political infighting, but the rise of American tyranny in our lifetimes? That would be a unifying battle cry, and the GOP had to avoid giving the left a powerful organizing weapon.
But not only did Trump immediately win over a Republican base that had been primed for years to appreciate his message — his bullhorn brought out millions of people who had not previously been typical voters. He wasn’t just acceptable to the base, he expanded it. And what’s more, the mainstream left was not energized by Trump’s untempered intentions the way they feared — the Dems stuck to the game plan and nominated their established heir apparent, who was unable to call Trump what he really was (for many reasons: a different post) and could not unify and energize the left against him.
It took probably a year after inauguration for people to really understand what Trump was. After that, the left was ready to stand against him in subsequent votes. Hence the blue shift in Congress in 2018, followed by the record turnout for Biden. But memories are short, and wedge issues work, so 2024 is maddeningly uncertain, in a way it shouldn’t be in a sane, healthy country (viz. France’s convincing rejection of Le Pen).
But the bottom line is, Trump didn’t change the GOP. I definitely agree about that part: they are what they always have been, from at least 1980 and probably earlier. They’ve just just discovered that it’s to their benefit to be open about it, because the millions of new voters who are energized by this more than outweigh the miniscule number of legitimately moderate Republicans who actually have political honor and are repelled by the notion of tearing down democracy and installing themselves as a permanent tyranny. The vast, vast majority of Republicans have shown that they would be ecstatic at precisely this outcome.
Now, of course, they have a tiger by the tail. The distinction between someone who is a true believer in Trumpist authoritarianism and someone who is feigning faith to be elected is irrelevant because they are all so fiercely policing one another for any perceived deviation from the cult. It is now an absolutist orthodoxy and it is taking American democracy off a cliff.
Exactly. That is my right, and I’m right to think so. Some, of course, may not be ignorant as much as they are deluded, or crazy one-issue morons (on abortion, say, or terror of the deep state, i.e., having a federal government at all) but they’re all fringe lunatics who suffer from more problems than I could name here.
95% of Black voters in Georgia are supporting Senator Warnock over Herschel Walker, which means that 5% are supporting Walker over Warnock. I’m happy to dismiss those voters as people with severe psychological problems, and as anomalies that are evidence of nothing significant. I can understand a cynical white GOPer preferring Walker for the reasons I name above, mainly that Walker will harm the Dems’ chances of winning the Senate, but I can’t think of a reason that a sensible black voter would decide that Walker would make a better senator than Warnock, and neither can you. It’s all racism, and despite all the people you can cherrypick who vote against their own interests, that explains the GOP completely.
Googling, I can’t find a poll with, as you apparently have, zero undecided, but could be missing it.
In as much as very few Georgia African Americans are likely to vote for Walker, It does not prove that they are almost all agreeing with your race-centered view of American politics. It means they realize Walker is, even compared with Trump, a weak general election candidate.
The Walker Senate nomination also shows that there is no ability of “the Republicans” to allow, or disallow, candidates, due to our primary system. If you want to see an example of someone, on the right of her party, being allowed by the party to run and probably win a primary, read about Liz Truss.
When LBJ upon signing the Civil and Voting Rights Acts said “we’re losing the South for a generation” he was being optimistic. Once the Wallaceites failed to assert themselves, the Southern Strategy kicked in and just kept rolling. The supremacists, plus rural populists after the 60s culture clashes, plus (after Roe) the Evangelical Right, became convinced the rest of the country was imposing on them that they could no longer be allowed to do their own thing and live their own way in their own turf. So the conclusion was not “oh, well, we gotta give up our ways and change to accommodate the new normal” it was “Oh yeah? Time to impose OUR way nationwide.”
Establishment Republicans of the time were looking to grab on to those groups as foot soldiers to build up voter numbers, but what “Movement Conservatives” were up to was what we have seen in other mergers: the “acquired” company’s culture is what takes over the “acquiring” company that holds the brand name.
Yeah, I think people underestimate how ignorant, selfish, racist, xenophobic, backward, and basically just stupid a large number of Americans are. Especially as you get further from more liberal urban areas (or IMHO increase in unearned familiar wealth and privilege). And if there is one thing they hate more than anything else in the world is being asked to do something that is not in their immediate best interest.
Which message do you think resonates with Middle American voters:
Democrats: We need to make drastic lifestyle changes to deal with issues like climate change, social injustice, income and wealth inequality, education, health care, this pandemic thing, and so on.
Trump: Those stupid liberals with their fancy degrees and decades of experience don’t know what they are talking about and are just trying to take away your Freedom to live bigly in the Greatest Country on Earth so they can give it to illegals, homos, junkies, and other people too lazy to succeed in America!
It is very much an outrage of people being born on second or third base being told they need to give other people a turn at bat instead of just walling the bases off and calling the game “won”.
I have read about Liz Truss. The UK does not have a primary system in which everybody votes. The decision is made by official party members who pay for that right. There are only about 186,000 and they are richer, older, and more conservative than even the regular Conservative party voter and far more so than non-Conservatives. Truss is ahead in the polls now because she is pandering to every thing they want to hear, no matter how harmful to the country those policies might be.
That sounds to me like an intensification of exactly why the Republicans here are voting for so many extremists. The long-run implications of such pandering are horrific. Why would anyone favor this behavior?