Live from the Roasterie: Who Are the Trumpublicans, really?
: What Really Made the Right Nuts: "The places where Trump has done well cut across many of the usual fault lines of American politics...
...North and South, liberal and conservative, rural and suburban. What they have in common is that they have largely missed the generation-long transition of the United States away from manufacturing and into a diverse, information-driven economy deeply intertwined with the rest of the world. ‘It’s a nonurban, blue-collar and now apparently quite angry population,’ said William Frey.... ‘They’re not people who have moved around a lot, and things have been changing away from them, but they live in areas that feel stagnant in a lot of ways.’... It may even be a perverse form of progress that the current objects of their strongest derision are Republican elites like John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and the Bush family. Donald Trump is their way of saying ‘fuck you’ to a lot more people than just the president....
A population that makes up the core of the Republican base has been committing suicide, overdosing on opioids, and drinking itself to death at a rate comparable to the AIDS epidemic. And the Republicans not only spent zero time trying to help them during the Bush and Obama years, they didn’t even seem to know that this was happening to them. It seems to me that this is a tremendous failing....
I believe that we’re not just seeing a reaction against the president. We’re seeing a wholesale rejection of the Republican party establishment that decided to oppose everything the president would seek to do even before he was inaugurated.... You can say Obama drove people nuts with his bloodless Mr. Spock routine... but that is a very partial explanation for what we’re witnessing. When the Republicans cannot even identify an AIDS-size epidemic in their communities and give up on the political process as a way to help their people, their people turn to an anti-political movement. You cannot expect people to remain dedicated to democratic institutions when their representatives are unwilling to use those institutions to better their lives. What you get, then, is support for fascism. You get people semi-rationally calling for a strong man who will smash the weak legislature and stick a boot on the necks of their elites who have abandoned them.
: How Donald Trump Happened: Racism Against Barack Obama: "We’ve learned, by now, not to underestimate Donald Trump...
...but we’re still struggling to understand his rise.... How is Trump—who has been described as a proto-fascist, if not an outright fascist—just a few steps away from leading the Grand Old Party?... The Republican Party does have a tradition of harnessing white racial resentment to win elections, from the infamous ‘welfare queen’ rhetoric of Ronald Reagan to Newt Gingrich labeling Barack Obama the ‘food stamp president’ during the 2012 presidential election. GOP elites have failed to offer solutions to struggling working-class whites, who have suffered keenly from the collapse of the industrial economy. And it is true that rapid, disorienting economic and cultural change has led a substantial group of Americans to turn to someone who disdains feckless politicians and pledges to restore the country’s strength. But none of these theories answer the question why now....
We’ve been missing the most important catalyst in Trump’s rise. What caused this fire to burn out of control? The answer, I think, is Barack Obama.... Obama is a conventional politician—well within the center-left of the Democratic Party. Or at least, he’s governed in that mode, with an agenda that sits safely in the mainstream.... We can’t say the same for Obama as a political symbol, however. In a nation shaped and defined by a rigid racial hierarchy, his election was very much a radical event....
For millions of white Americans who weren’t attuned to growing diversity and cosmopolitanism, however, Obama was a shock, a figure who appeared out of nowhere to dominate the country’s political life.... Obama’s election felt like an inversion.... Coupled with the broad decline in incomes and living standards caused by the Great Recession, it seemed to signal the end of a hierarchy that had always placed white Americans at the top.... The Obama era didn’t herald a post-racial America as much as it did a racialized one, where millions of whites were hyperaware of and newly anxious about their racial status.... ‘I think he’s divided this country in many ways,’ said Lori, an older white woman, of Obama. ‘I know in a lot of places in America there’s a divide in color... like, when I walk up to someone in the stores’—she looked at me to emphasize what she means—‘I feel that they’re wondering if I like them.... I didn’t feel that before. I was accepting of everyone, and I hate that he brought that.’...
What does anti-black racism in the Obama era have to do with Donald Trump, who crashed the 2016 campaign with a wave of anti-Latino rhetoric? Trump may have started this campaign by denigrating Latinos and Muslims, but his first appearance in the Obama era was in the context of anti-black racism. In 2011, Trump took the ‘birtherism’ conspiracy—the belief that Obama is foreign-born and thus an illegitimate president—and turned it into a full-fledged movement.... More recently, anti-black racism has returned to the fore....
Trump reflects specific choices by Republican and conservative elites. From indulging anti-Obama conspiracy theories to attacking him as an enemy of the United States, conservatives chose to nurture resentment and anxiety and distill it into something potent. You can draw a direct line to the rise of Trump from the racial hysteria of talk radio—where figures like Rush Limbaugh, a Trump booster, warned that Obama would turn the world upside down. ‘The days of [minorities] not having any power are over and they are angry,’ said Limbaugh to his audience. ‘They want to use their power as a means of retribution.’...
The good news is that movements like Trump’s tend to fade away. The bad news is that, even in defeat, they are influential. One antecedent to Trump—Alabama Gov. George Wallace—never won a national party nomination. But he had massive impact on the direction of national politics, giving Richard Nixon raw materials for his ‘Southern Strategy’ of racial resentment that would shape and define American politics for the next four decades. For Americans opposed to Trump, it’s tempting to believe that his base is a shrinking part of America; that these are the death throes of racial reaction. Eventually, goes the thinking, they’ll fade from view too. That is wishful thinking.... Trump the person might have an expiration date. But Trumpism will enter the firmament of modern politics...
: Donald Trump Is Bad. But Karl Rove And David Brooks Are Worse: "We can... thank Donald Trump and his supporters for doing the country a service...
...There is little Trump or his backers could do that would outweigh the blessing they are providing by disempowering and humiliating the traditional Republican establishment. No matter how uncomfortable Trump’s crowds may make us, they pale in comparison to the disgust we should feel at the politics of Karl Rove and David Brooks. It’s not just that Rove, Ailes, Krauthammer, Podheretz and even ultimately Buckley himself laid the economic, social and media foundations for Trump’s racist nationalism. It’s that unless carried to its farthest extreme, racist nationalism isn’t as damaging as corporatist objectivism....
While modern conservatism depends politically on the prejudices of large swaths of the public, its controlling donors and legislators enforce an agenda of ruthless objectivist philosophy. When one looks at the laws it actually passes, the Republican Party is in truth far more Ayn Rand than Strom Thurmond. Its prejudiced public policies are less for their own sake than in the service of ensuring that the super-rich take an even greater share of the wealth. Its policies toward the poor are less a function of institutional racism than of an ideological sickness that assumes the poor simply lack adequate threats of desperation and starvation to work harder to survive. It is a form of economic royalism and just world fallacy that explains the injustices of the world by asserting that they are not injustices at all, but rather that the strong dominate the weak by virtue and right. Unlike simple prejudice, that worldview isn’t a sin of ignorance. It’s a sin of moral corruption....
Trump’s supporters are more interested in the advancement of their own tribe than in the promotion of an ideology of pure greed. Neither are laudable, but the former is at least morally understandable within the context of fearful ignorance. The latter is a deep seated character flaw.... The victory of the nationalists over the corporatists in the GOP will likely be beneficial to our character as a nation.
