It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump
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— In my first race I had stumbled onto a truth as basic and immutable as the fact that water freezes below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit: race was the key in which much of American politics and certainly all of southern politics was played. It was really very simple: the Democratic candidate needed 90-plus percent of black votes to win. If a significant portion voted for a third party, the Republican would win.
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What happens if you spend decades focused on appealing to white voters and treating nonwhite voters with, at best, benign neglect? You get good at doing what it takes to appeal to white voters. That is the truth that led to what is famously called “the southern strategy.” That is the path that leads you to becoming what the Republican Party now proudly embraces: a white grievance party.
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So the Nixon White House laid out the path to electoral success by maximizing white grievance and suppressing the African American vote through a combination of manipulation, lies, and legal challenges. It was this road that the Republican Party took to the Trump White House. There is nothing new about Donald Trump. He hasn’t invented a new politics or executed a brilliant and novel strategy. Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and even Ronald Reagan played the same race-based politics of resentment. It is precisely Trump’s predictability and, alas, inevitability that is so ...more
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the Republican Party continues to push tax cuts the same way the Roman Catholic Church uses incense for High Mass, as a comforting symbolism for believers that reminds them of their identity.
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The same political reality is tied to the deficit, and the two are linked in a deadly embrace of a dangerous status quo. Being against “out-of-control federal spending,” a phrase I must have used in a hundred ads, is a catechism of the Republican faith. But no one really believes in it any more than communicants believe they are actually eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ. It just makes the members of the Republican Church feel closer to their political God. In reality, the Republican Party isn’t serious about deficit reduction, because politicians know their voters don’t feel ...more
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The most likely scenario is that the deficit will continue to pile up until there is a financial crisis that forces the country to feel debt pain. Then the odds are that it will give renewed energy to a tax plan that greatly increases taxes on the wealthy. This would be a fittingly ironic fate facing the so-called fiscal conservatives of the Republican Party. By pretending to care about an issue without the courage or will to act, they will have set in motion a scenario that is among their worst nightmares: an activated left with the moral authority to soak the rich with taxes. It will be the ...more
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Does this mean Alabama is pro–child molesting of underage girls? Does Trump’s winning mean that America is pro–sexual harassment? There’s certainly an element of lack of concern about women and the sense that women are fair game for men, even fifteen-year-old girls. But mostly it shows an ability of many conservative voters to live in a self-reinforcing bubble that has little to do with objective truth. From denials of child molesting and sexual harassment to the overwhelming science of global warming, an element of American conservatism has grown over decades in an environment distinct from ...more
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The dystopian Shangri-La that so many on the right inhabit was years in the making. If it often seems that the Republican Party is living in a world disconnected from reality, that’s because it is. Large elements of the Republican Party have made a collective decision that there is no objective truth. Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics, published in 2018, is the most extensive comparison of the Democratic and Republican Parties’ relationship to the media and a concept of verifiable truth. Its analysis highlighted the differences between ...more
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The charge that Barack Obama was not born in America is a quintessential conservative media moment, an attempt to provide some factual basis for bigotry. The birthers “felt” that a black man named Barack Hussein Obama could not truly be an American, so a cottage industry was born attempting to “prove” a lie. That it was demonstrably a lie backed by hospital records was quickly brushed aside in pursuit of the “larger” truth that Barack Obama wasn’t “really” an American because an America that could elect a man with the middle name Hussein is not really America. The