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December 19 - December 20, 2020
What a fool I was. All of these immutable truths turned out to be mere marketing slogans. None of it meant anything.
There is nothing strange or unexpected about Donald Trump. He is the logical conclusion of what the Republican Party became over the last fifty or so years, a natural product of the seeds of race, self-deception, and anger that became the essence of the Republican Party. Trump isn’t an aberration of the Republican Party; he is the Republican Party in a purified form.
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.
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.
It made the endeavor seem far grander than a routine election of a nice-guy banker who had run mostly because he was bored and had a name that still meant something to the older snowbirds in the district.
The majority of all welfare goes to white Americans and always has, but the specificity of a woman in Chicago makes the racial appeal clear.
The modern Democratic Party has fought for civil rights and believes government has a moral role in helping to create racial equality in America. The modern Republican Party has fought civil rights and is very hesitant to assert government has a role in equality of any sort, including racial.
So many Republicans embraced Trump’s view that they were victims, as was he, because they had actually believed this all along. Theirs was a white birthright, and the rise of nonwhites was an unjust usurping of their rights.
But nowhere in the autopsy was there an acknowledgment or even consideration that the reason Republicans were failing with nonwhite voters was policy based, not just a question of demonstrating sincerity or failure to engage minorities.
How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy, and the national debt in a matter of months? You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held. In the end, the Republican Party rallied behind Donald Trump because if that was the deal needed to regain power, what was the problem? Because it had always been about power. The rest? The principles? The values? It was all a lie.
“Family values” was never a set of morals or values that the Republican Party really desired to live by; instead, “family values” was useful in attacking and defining Democrats. It was just another weapon to help portray those on the other side as being out of the mythical American mainstream.
The entire modern Republican definition of the conservative movement is about efforts to define itself as “normal” and everything else as “not normal.”
The Christian right would like the world to believe it was the political arm of Jesus Christ, come to life to save a sinful America. In practice it operates more like a Christian-related super PAC for a white America. The professional politicization of Christianity as a right-wing force was always more about the acquisition of power than a commitment to Christianity. It was where the commercialization of Christianity meets the politicization of Christianity.
Decency, kindness, humility, compassion—all touchstones of a Christian faith—have no value in today’s Republican Party.
In truth the modern Republican Party is the equivalent of Donald Trump: addicted to debt and selling a false image of success.
There’s a language war here that Republicans have been winning for decades. “Welfare” is what the poor get because they are, well, poor, and being poor is a choice because in America anyone can succeed. Or something close to that. But “grants,” “tax breaks,” and “incentives” are the language businesses use to describe the corporate welfare they demand in exchange for doing what they usually have to do or want to do anyway, like build a new data center or factory or, in the case of sports, a new stadium. Often the real description should be corporate blackmail. Big business has mastered the art
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Schlamm saw this as an opportunity to craft a new brand of American conservatism that must succeed not because of a historical tradition but because of “its moral and aesthetic superiority.”
The National Review, as the unofficial intellectual beating heart of the American conservative movement, was committed to the principle that a “white” culture was superior to all others.
The avowed hatred of government that is such a Republican bedrock principle is offensive and alienating to much of the country.
When any political movement loses all sense of self and has no unifying theory of government, it ceases to function as a collective rooted in thought and becomes more like fans of a sports team.
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.
Cowardice, like courage, is contagious, and to be surrounded by cowards is to feel comforted in the knowledge that not only are there others like you but there is probably someone worse.
The American political process with its deep dependence on the need to raise money is a system designed not for the best governance but for the selection of the person who can put up with being humiliated the longest. Those with the lowest standards willing to grovel and beg are often the recipients of the greatest rewards. That’s true across any party lines, but what is unique about the Republican Party is the clear direction in which it has allowed itself to be driven.
The Congressional Directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.
The assumption that the post-Trump American political system will revert to standards of normalcy that existed before Trump is yet another excuse Republicans use to justify their support of him. It’s why Republicans are so desperate to assert that Trump has supported policy that any Republican president would have supported.
This is a view of government as nothing more than the sum total of bills passed or judges appointed, as if it were possible to assemble a human being from a collection of body parts. It completely ignores the true essence of a civil society that reflects the collective values and aspirations of a diverse country.
The premise for voter-ID requirements is to fight voter fraud, but those of us who work in elections know what the court concluded: there is almost no voter fraud in American elections.
But what many Republican politicians actually do believe is that they represent the “real” America, and they are somewhere from uncomfortable to frightened by America’s changing landscape.
It is a cartel that exists to elect Republicans. There is no organized, coherent purpose other than the acquisition and maintenance of power.