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If your political prospects depend on a shrinking majority of almost solely white voters, and you keep losing the popular vote in elections, how do you win? One way? Never allow white Americans to feel comfortable in a modernizing world. Keep them angry and fearful and riled up.
. @RonBrownstein has repeatedly made the point about the shifting demographic realities for the Republican Party and how it influences the way they communicate about democracy and frankly, their declining support for it. https://twitter.com/RonBrownstein/status/1325993552594132992
As @davidfrum has also repeatedly stated: âThe Republican Party has a platform that canât prevail in democratic competition.â This is true because their priorities don't appeal to people of color, or increasingly to college educated white women. https://www.vox.com/2018/1/18/16880524/donald-trump-democracy-republicans-trumpocracy
Trumpocracy is literally the substitution of pure racial grievance for politics. And it goes inherently with a core belief that only white people's votes can possibly be legitimate. https://twitter.com/AriBerman/status/1325913194041397249
And the incentive structure for Republicans (ie Mike Pompeo) who want to be president or to hang onto Senate seats and the perks thereof, or House seats or governorships, is the same one that exists for right wing media. To keep white Americans watching/listening keep them angry.
Why else did Republicans do everything in their power to delegitimize popular, perfectly non-radical president Barack Obama? It was all about preventing him from successfully satisfying the huge majority of voters who either elected him or just liked him. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/republicans-admit-everything-they-said-about-obama-was-a-lie.html
People had to remain angry and unsatisfied. And that wasn't going to work on Black voters, clearly. Or on Latino voters, for whom the economic recovery and DACA provided incentives to stay loyal, even when Obama was tough on things like deportations. White voters were the target.
And Donald Trump, with his overt white grievance, hatred of non-white immigration (and BTW anti-undocumented sentiment also exists among some working class non-white Americans) and hatred of the modern "woke" world and "political correctness," was an ideal vehicle for the GOP.
It's why they stay devoted to Trump. Bush with his "wanna have a beer with him" thing was good for them too, especially the war hawks who might not otherwise have been able to sell a war against a country, Iraq, that had nothing to do with 9/11. But Trump is even better.
With Trump, they got more huge tax cuts for the rich, polluters got lots of land to mine and drill on and huge amounts of deregulation, and Mitch McConnell and the far right got 200 or so young, right wing judges. But unlike Bush, Trump also made explicit white grievance open.
That's a new thing. And a dangerous one at that. And it's not just because it emboldened the spawn of David Duke -- these open white nationalists -- it eased white nationalism into government itself. https://www.vox.com/21313021/trump-white-nationalism-supremacy-miller-bannon-immigration
And if these numbers are accurate, God help us. President-elect Joe Biden is going to need broad, if not unified support to tackle this pandemic that's now racking up 100,000 new cases a day. Republicans are openly and deliberately harming the country. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/09/republicans-free-fair-elections-435488
It's unbelievably cynical. They know Trump lost. And they know what they're doing to this country in the midst of a pandemic. But it's all about power. Stop expecting these people to put country before party. Clearly they never will. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/us/politics/republicans-trump-concede-2020-election.html
Bottom line: an angry white base of voters who are convinced the election was stolen from Donald Trump works for the Republican Party, for the Georgia runoff and future elections. This is about their ambitions, their goals and their thirst for more financial and political gain.
Better said than I have, by @anneapplebaum: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/trumps-forever-campaign-is-just-getting-started/617021/
