"White Votes Don't Matter" And Other Republican Fairy Tales
by Justin Rosario
To be a white Republican voter means to live in a bubble of unreality. This has been true for longer than I've been alive but it's gotten worse over the years with the last 20 or so being a particular assault on their ability to discern fact from absolute fiction. Politicians lie and political movements have their mythologies but the modern Republican Party has taken it to an extreme not seen outside of cults.
This divergence from observable reality has meant the right wing of this country is no longer operating from the same set of facts as the rest of us. They're not even operating on an internally coherent set of facts. They hold diametrically opposed beliefs with little to no effort and this, ultimately, is the triumph of the right wing effort to reduce their base to a mob of easily manipulated puppets.
The inevitable result of this is the rise of a demagogue like Trump. The GOP assumed it would a demagogue of their choosing but that's not how things worked out. Unfortunately, for Republicans, Trump has accelerated the mental collapse of the right to the point where their entire worldview is essentially gibberish to anyone not indoctrinated into the cult of Trump.
With Fox, AM Hate Radio, and right wing hate sites blasting out pro-Trump propaganda every minute of every day, there is literally nothing the right will not believe from one minute to the next.
For instance, here's a handy graph explaining how white Republican voters think about the last decade and change of the stock market:
You or I see this as a joke but this is the actual reality for white Republican voters. They will tell you, with a straight face, that the stock market under Obama was terrible and it was only when Trump was elected that it took off. The same goes for unemployment:
As far as the right is concerned, everything that happened from February of 2010 until the second Trump was inaugurated does not exist. Unemployment was through the roof, the economy was terrible, everything was the worst it's ever been and then, just like magic, unemployment hit record lows and the economy was the best it's ever been. And Trump did it all on his own.
This is true because Trump tells them it's true every day.
If you ask a Republican voter what Trump did to create this amazing economy out of thin air, you'll get answers like "he brought back American jobs" and something about opening new steel and coal plants. None of that is true as natural gas continues to kill the coal industry and Trump's trade war and impending recession pummel the steel industry. Generally speaking, they won't credit Trump and the GOP's massive tax cut for billionaires because they're not popular with the base (and anyone else besides billionaires).
The reality is that they won't be able to name specific policies that Trump has implemented. Partly this is because most people don't pay that close attention to policy, especially economic policy, but mostly it's because Trump hasn't actually done anything except brag about what an awesome job he's doing. Like many rich white men, he's coasting off the accomplishments of other people who did all the hard work, in this case, President Barack Obama.
But you cannot tell that to a white Republican voter. They "know," with every fiber of their being, that Obama was a disaster for the economy and Trump, and only Trump, was able to fix everything.
The coming recession
These fairy tales will be more necessary than ever when the impending recession lands like a nuclear bomb.
On the one hand, a recession is inevitable. Our economy cycles up and down and has for as long as we've tracked it. Whether that's good or bad is debatable, but the fact that it happens is not.
What is also not debatable is the fact that Obama carefully built a strong foundation for the US economy. This is one of the reasons we've had the longest periods of sustained growth in American history. It wasn't fast growth but it was extremely stable, riding out a number of financial shockwaves stemming from China and Europe so smoothly that most Americans weren't even aware of the overseas turmoil.
That was, of course, before Trump and the GOP took over and immediately undid much of the regulations to keep the financial industry from punching holes in the economy again. Then there was the massive tax cut for billionaires that exploded the deficit. Then there were Trump's trade wars that crippled large swaths of the economy and cost us billions. Then there were Trump's erratic trade negotiations that injected huge amounts of uncertainty into the markets. Then there was Trump's assault on the Federal Reserve as he tried to use it to pump up the economy at exactly the wrong time in order to boost his election prospects.
Trump took a solid economy and blasted it with dynamite. At the same time, he used most of the tools to offset the worst effects of a recession to boost his popularity, ensuring he has few resources to handle the real recession when it comes. But when things go bad, Trump will still be telling his cult that everything is great and that anything bad that's happening is someone else's fault. Maybe the immigrants. Maybe the Chinese. Possibly the Fed. Probably the Democrats.
After all, wasn't the economy terrible until Trump personally fixed everything all by himself? How could it ever possibly go wrong under his expert watch unless...it was sabotaged by the globalists (aka The Jews)?! If you don't think that particular fairy tale is coming, you have not been paying attention to anything the right has been screaming at the top of its white nationalist lungs for the past 4 years.
White votes don't matter
And if you haven't been paying attention, you'll have missed the right's sudden overwhelming need to defend the Electoral College. Part of this is that the Left is tired of losing presidential elections due to arcane technicalities designed to keep power in the hands of wealthy elites. The real problem for the right though, is that they think doing away with the Electoral College will mean the white vote will magically cease to matter:
"Urban" in this context meaning "Those People." The thinking here is that if we make it a majority vote, candidates would only campaign in the biggest states with the largest population centers, said centers being the most liberal.
Matt Yglesias pointed out the obvious flaw in this rationale.
The danger for the GOP isn't that white votes won't matter, it's that right wing votes won't matter. After decades of turning the Republican base into a concentrated cesspool of angry white imbeciles motivated entirely by hate and spite, there is no way to expand the GOP's electorate. It can only shrink from here on out as the Boomers die off.
Nationwide elections based solely on the popular vote means Republicans will never win the White House again. They need the Electoral College to preserve even the possibility of squeaking out future wins; a possibility that dwindles with every election and the ongoing loss of the Boomers. And now that the courts have declared that electors are not bound by the popular vote in their state whatsoever, don't be overly surprised when Republican-appointed electors decide that it is their "constitutional duty" to keep Trump in office, or hand a close EC election to a Republican regardless of how badly they lose the popular vote.
All the while, white Republican voters will tell themselves that they're the "true" defenders of democracy and seriously believe it.
White genocide!
If that sounds insane, try to remember that these are the same people who believe, like, really believe, that the white race is under threat of extinction.
This was the direct and explicit motivation of the white Republican voter who killed 22 people in El Paso and wounded 24 others. Among the injured were children aged 2 and 9 years old. The youngest fatality was 15.
The shooter was quite clear about his reasoning. White people are an endangered species:
It begins by praising the manifesto of the gunman who killed 51 Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand earlier this year. That document cited a white supremacist theory known as “The Great Replacement,” which postulates that a secret group of elites is working to destroy the white race by replacing them with immigrants and refugees.
“This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” the manifesto says.
The "elites" in this scenario are Jews because Jews are the supervillains of white nationalist fairy tales. But even the less insane racists of the GOP's base really do believe that the white race is under assault. There is no group that feels more persecuted than your average white heterosexual Christian Republican.
Of course, in this context, "persecuted" means "told they can't persecute all of the people they hate," but to their mind, not having the freedom to stomp on the civil rights of everyone else is the worst oppression imaginable. One shudders to wonder how quickly they would crumble under actual tyranny that wasn't designed to benefit them directly.
It's not much of a leap from "I can't use racial slurs in public" to "They're going to replace me" for white Republican voters because, for them, the ability to put their boot on the necks of others is their entire identity.
You'll recall this quote by President Lyndon B. Johnson?
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
What the right is facing is a world in which society no longer tells them that they are better than the best colored man. We might as well be putting them all in the gas chambers because without someone with darker skin to treat as inferiors, who are they as a people?
The answer, of course, is nothing special. And now you know the source of the right's absolute rage.
Fairy tales are much more comforting
Faced with the reality that their time at the top of the pecking order is coming to a close and all of their unearned privileges will be lost, white Republican voters have sought refuge in fairy tales. Here, there is no racism unless you count racism towards white people. Here, they are the victims of a vast conspiracy to make their lives miserable. Here, there is no accountability for decades of Republican policies that have lead to financial disaster for white Republican voters (and everyone else). Here, all of their hate and violence is justified because the left "made them do it."
White Republican voters would happily cancel the 2020 election and declare Trump president for life while proudly touting their love for America and democracy. Very few white Republican voters understand how warped their view of reality has become and those that do, don't care. Trump enjoys over 90% support among the GOP's base, and they live in a fairy tale that will most likely end violently with the swearing in of a Democratic president in January of 2021.
How we prepare for what's coming is up to us.
(image via the HuffPost)
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I wrack my brain night and day trying to imagine a way out of this dual-reality situation and I just don't know what it would be. The only thing I can think of would be for Tom Steyer to quit trying to buy standing in the primaries and get together with other extra rich people to put together a consortium to buy Fox News. It could continue to have a conservative angle, but one based on facts. Good and smart people can take the same set of facts and reach different conclusions and that's a good thing. But without an agreed-upon set of facts it looks like our future is going to boing back and forth with one side asserting power over the other based on who can get and hold the majority. And that would still leave the other side seething in rage.
"Of course, in this context, "persecuted" means "told they can't persecute all of the people they hate,""
Indeed. Their problem is they see the way things have been as the right, proper and <b>fair</b> way for things to be. Because that's how things have been.
The idea that things have NOT been fair, that some groups of people (like the one they belong to) have had privileges not granted to members of other groups of people, is completely incomprehensible to them. They just cannot see it.
And trying to explain it to them is like trying to explain green to a blind person.