The Politics of Bigotry

Most of us who follow politics remember the analysis issued by the Republican National Committee in the wake of the 2012 Presidential election. One of the findings was that the GOP absolutely had to increase its percentage of the Latino vote if it ever hoped to regain the White House.

Needless to say, the outreach to the Latino community advocated in that document did not occur, and if this analysis–based upon research by Pew–is accurate, the incredibly divisive, racist tone of the 2016 presidential campaign thus far is a direct outgrowth of the fact that the Grand Old Party has written off Latinos and other minority voters.

Since the Republicans didn’t pursue the easier path of improving their popularity with Latinos, they have no choice to jack up that 59% number they got with whites. Let’s look at how much they’ll need….

It’s probably a lot easier to get new voters from a group that is generally opposed to you than it is to keep adding voters to a group you’re dominating. In other words, it might be an easier task for the Republicans to get back to the 40-plus percent Latino support that George W. Bush once enjoyed than to grow their white support from 59% to 64%.

But it’s the latter strategy (if we can call it a strategy) that the Republicans are pursuing. They need to racially polarize the electorate in a way that gets them 3-5% more of the white vote.

They can do some of this through turnout instead, of course, so if they can keep lots of blacks and Latinos from voting in the first place, they don’t need to improve quite so much with whites.

I think what’s key to understanding this situation is that the Republicans actually have crossed the Rubicon and they no longer have the option of going back and pursuing more of the Latino vote. They must pursue more of the white vote and there are not too many ways to do that other than aggravating racial consciousness and jacking up the sense of white racial grievance.

And that is what we are seeing–in Trump’s case, from a master of demagoguery. As Josh Marshall writes at Talking Points Memo,

Trump hardly comes out of nowhere. There’s really little about his ascent that is surprising at all if you’ve been paying attention to the direction of our politics in the last decade. I don’t mean that I would have predicted he’d do this well. I didn’t. What I mean is that the nature of his success, the effectiveness of his strategy and message, is entirely predictable. What Trump has done is taken the half-subterranean Republican script of the Obama years, turbocharge it and add a level of media savvy that Trump gained not only from The Apprentice but more from decades navigating and exploiting New York City’s rich tabloid news culture. He’s just taken the existing script, wrung out the wrinkles and internal contradictions and given it its full voice. There’s very, very little that is new or unfamiliar in Trump’s campaign beside taking the world of talk radio, conservative media and base Republican hijinx and pushing them to the center of the national political conversation. If you’re surprised, it’s because you haven’t been paying attention.

Those of us who have been paying attention are terrified.

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A Very Good Question

In an article at The Week, a writer named Damon Linker asked an intriguing question: why aren’t conservative intellectuals disgusted with today’s GOP? (It should be noted that Linker is no movement liberal: he’s edited First Things magazine, been a speechwriter for Rudy Giuliani, and taught political philosophy at Brigham Young University.)

Now, in all fairness, some conservative intellectuals are sounding alarms. David Frum and David Brooks both come to mind, and I recently quoted from an eminently sensible article by the National Review’s Kevin Williamson. But one does wonder what someone like William F. Buckley would make of the current “clown car”–not just the easy targets like Trump, Carson and Fiorina, but Jindal, Cruz, Huckabee and other assorted ideologues and lightweights who currently represent the GOP’s “brand.” As Linker notes:

I don’t just mean the obvious stuff. You know, the unprovoked and petty anti-intellectualism of Marco Rubio denigrating philosophers by contrasting them unfavorably to welders (and presumably people who work at other skilled trades as well). Or Rand Paul’s nonsensical, conspiratorial musings about the Federal Reserve. Or Donald Trump’s xenophobic promises to build a 2,000-mile wall along the U.S.-Mexican border and round up and deport eleven million undocumented immigrants. (If they’re undocumented, how will we find them? House to house sweeps by armed agents of the state through poor and heavily Latino neighborhoods? That’s either absurdly unfeasible, as Jeb Bush and John Kasich pointed out, or a program for American fascism.)

And neither do I merely mean the dumpsters full of dubious assertions that are by now so deeply embedded in conservative ideology that every candidate tosses them out without making even the most cursory effort to bolster them with facts. Like the claim that America’s relatively slow growth rate in recent years is a product of our tax burden (when in fact tax rates were considerably higher during the high-growth decades following World War II). Or the related contention that taxes can be drastically cut without massively increasing the budget deficit because the cuts will spur such enormous growth that tax revenues will actually increase. Or the endlessly repeated alliterative vow that ObamaCare will be “repealed and replaced,” while neglecting to admit, let alone defend, the fact that the replacements favored by the GOP candidates would almost certainly leave millions of those currently covered by the Affordable Care Act without insurance….

I’m talking about specific policy proposals that amounted to nothing more than transparent nonsense. Maybe a credulous viewer with no knowledge of history, public policy, economics, or how the government actually works could respond to these proposals with a nod and a cheer. But informed viewers? Educated men and women of the right? Conservative intellectuals? They should know better — and know enough to realize when they’re being sold, or helping to sell, a bucket of BS.

Linker analyzes examples from the most recent GOP debate to make his case, and concludes that

Intellectual compromises are sometimes necessary in democratic politics. But selling one’s soul should not be…The Republican Party’s 2016 presidential candidates have descended into vapid, puerile bleating. Conservative intellectuals are better than this, smarter than this. The time has come for them to speak up and call the GOP field what it is: ignorant, insulting, and dangerous.

Agreed. America needs two adult political parties.

There is a respectable, responsible conservative case to be made–but so long as thoughtful Americans connect “conservative” with political figures like Louie Gohmert, Sarah Palin and the current presidential candidates–reasonable people will dismiss it.

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In Which I Agree With National Review

When a conservative is right, s/he’s right.

And over at the National Review, Kevin Williamson is right. His article, titled: Take a Bow, Species, rejected the constant drumbeat of what is wrong with America and the world in favor of a focus on what’s right. Here are some reasons for optimism that he lists:

* Polio has basically been eradicated from the globe

* Measles and rubella will be next

* The global rate of “extreme poverty,” currently defined as subsistence on less than the equivalent of $1.90 a day, is now the condition of less than 10 percent of the human race. Take a look at how the World Bank recently plotted that change:

* The overall rate of violent crime in the U.S. has fallen by about half in recent decades.

* U.S. manufacturing output per worker trebled from 1975 to 2005, and our total manufacturing output continues to climb.

* General-price inflation, the bane of the U.S. economy for some decades, is hardly to be seen.

Of course, you aren’t likely to hear about any of that from Republican candidates running for office in 2016. Unlike Ronald Reagan, none of them is remotely a “happy warrior.” Instead, they all seem obsessed with the belief that a country headed by Barack Obama must be in extremis.

This striking mismatch between the GOP’s gloom and doom worldview and our considerably more nuanced reality was addressed in a recent post at Political Animal that quoted a warning from another conservative Republican, W’s former speechwriter David Frum.

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination…If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.

Yep.

When folks on the Right are right, they’re right.

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Gotta Give Them Credit for Honesty

Last Sunday I posted about research suggesting the emergence of a “kinder, gentler,” less political Christianity.

The news has evidently not reached Augusta, Virginia.

An ad by the Augusta County Republican Committee touting the need to “Preserve our Christian Heritage” was created to be a reflection of the party’s creed, officials say.

Larry Roller, 87, created the political flier that says, “Preserve our Christian Heritage! VOTE REPUBLICAN” on Nov. 3. The ad ran as an insert in The News Leader Thursday.

God is a foundation of our nation,” said Roller, of Mount Sidney, who is on the GOP committee. “If you read the histories of our founding fathers, (they say) you should not run for office if you are not a Christian.”

Well, I hate to break it to you, Larry, but the founding fathers actually said no such thing. In fact, quite the opposite. That’s why they put that bit in the Constitution about never requiring a religious test for office, and that’s also why the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause prohibits government from engaging in activities that “respect an establishment” of religion.

People like Larry remind me of the caller to a radio show I was on a few years ago, who justified his (unconstitutional) position by informing me that “Even James Madison said we’re giving the Bill of Rights to people who live by the Ten Commandments.” When I politely informed him that the quote had been debunked as bogus–and that it was also contrary to everything Madison actually had said–he screamed into the phone “Well I think he said it!” and slammed down the receiver.

In Augusta county, a follow-up story had quotes from a number of local Republican officeholders defending both the ad and Larry’s somewhat unique perspective on the American founding.

When you live in a fact-free world, it’s easier to understand support for people like Donald Trump and Ben Carson…

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Selling Snake Oil

Following my recent post about Ben Carson, I got an email from my cousin, the cardiologist/medical researcher whose expertise I often cite here. He was livid about an aspect of Carson’s biography of which I’d previously been unaware: his willingness to use his prominence and medical credentials to hawk snake oil.

Carson first spoke out in favor of Mannatech products over a decade ago when he claimed that the Texas-based company’s “glyconutritional supplements,” which included larch-tree bark and aloe vera extract, helped him overcome prostate cancer….

As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, Carson’s relationship with the company deepened over time, including “four paid speeches at Mannatech gatherings, most recently one in 2013 for which he was paid $42,000, according to the company.” …

Mannatech supposedly made $415 million in the last 12 months selling pills and powders made from larch bark and aloe, known as glyconutrients, marketed under the trade name of Ambrotose, a so called “nutritional supplement that helps the cells in one’s body communicate with one another”…

My cousin’s blog has more detail.

During the last debate, Carson denied having a ten-year relationship with the company, which claims its nutritional supplement can cure autism, cancer and other serious illnesses. (Mannatech paid $7 million to settle a deceptive marketing lawsuit in Texas).

Politifact rated Carson’s response “false.” 

Paul Krugman also noted Carson’s relationship to Mannatech, but went on to comment on the GOP’s sale of “snake oil” more broadly, noting

As the historian Rick Perlstein documents, a “strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers” goes back half a century. Direct-mail marketing using addresses culled from political campaigns has given way to email, but the game remains the same.

Krugman listed several examples, from Glenn Beck’s Goldline, to Ron Paul’s book sales, to the recent New York Times series exposing a number of conservative PACs whose fundraising benefits the people who run the PACs, rather than the causes they ostensibly support.

You might think that such revelations would be politically devastating. But the targets of such schemes know, just know, that the liberal mainstream media can’t be trusted, that when it reports negative stories about conservative heroes it’s just out to suppress people who are telling the real truth. It’s a closed information loop, and can’t be broken.

A world of frightened, uninformed and disoriented people is tailor-made for guys selling snake oil.

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