Personally, I don't think any of these answers are entirely correct, so I'll mostly reiterate what I said the other day, which boils down to 'tribalism uber alles.' There's more to it of course, but let's start there. My belief is that at one point, the GOP was in fact some kind of big tent, or at least contained several different groups…
Personally, I don't think any of these answers are entirely correct, so I'll mostly reiterate what I said the other day, which boils down to 'tribalism uber alles.' There's more to it of course, but let's start there.
My belief is that at one point, the GOP was in fact some kind of big tent, or at least contained several different groups who all mostly wanted to go in the same direction. You had your nationalists, you had your racists who were fleeing the democratic party, you had your fiscal conservative types, you had your gung-ho MURICA types, and all of these existed in some kind of harmony because in general, everyone had the same end goal, which was to win.
Culturally speaking, there is always some kind of belief around what is and is not acceptable in 'polite' society. These things move around of course, but they exist, and they were stronger in the past than they are now. Which meant that your white grievance types and nativist types couldn't simply sit on top of the ticket and speak openly, they needed someone like a Reagan or a Bush to carry the torch and protect them from the slings and arrows of their enemies. Which they did.
As a result, two groups formed. You had the voters, who in general aren't particularly well informed no matter what party they vote for, and you had 'Conservatism Inc' which put gloss on the ideas so that voters would go for them. What this meant was dressing up the ideas on top for the people on the bottom. Reagan spoke out against 'welfare queens' despite his cuts to the poor hurting white people just as much. Bush wanted his wars, and it was rural military families that were pushed into the fray by their communities. But you can't sell cutting things people like without making it seem like you're not doing it.
My favorite point on this is that conservative voters overwhelming want to repeal 'obamacare' while also favoring the 'Affordable Care Act' by a wide margin, despite these two things being the same. This is basically how it is for the entirety of the conservative movement writ large.
So there's some truth to that idea that white grievance was behind it all, because voters would accept anything so long as it hurt the right people. But it's also wrong because the voters did in fact believe in things like cutting entitlements... just not for them.
And here is where we get a bit theoretical, but bear with me for a moment. The Conservative view of the world is that everyone is an individual, and any force that exists to push you in a direction is violating your autonomy. Ergo, if the state is trying to make you do something, it's wrong, even if it's good for you. Reagan's idea that 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help' boils down to an idea that the government can only hurt you, it can't benefit you.
But that's just a bud of an idea. Consider that most ideas are not used and abused by their creators, but by the generations that came after them. Now let's infuse a little Gingrich and Limbaugh inspired hatred, and some 9/11 inspired xenophobia, and let it percolate for about a decade or so, before throwing in a financial crisis. What do we have?
We have an electorate that has been trained for almost twenty years on the idea that government is bad, mixing with the idea that government only helps 'those' people. Government is against you, the conservative voter. Of course, the elected class picked up on this; that's how you get guys like Ted Cruz claiming to be salt of the earth tea party people. The point is that slowly, the people who got elected were willing to speak a lot more crassly about things like the government, and who it helped.
When things fail, it's usually slowly, then suddenly, and that's how it went with the GOP in terms of falling to Trumpism. See, there's a limit to how far that Rand Paul's of the world are willing to go. Oh, they want to cut government, but not so much that they might lose money. They want to remove waste, and they want to run government like a business, but they'd never actually think of themselves as part of that. Or every just come out and say that those 'other' people are the problem.
Until Trump. Trump said everything out loud. Trump revealed the great lie, which wasn't that voters didn't care about things like shrinking the government, they just wanted it shrunk for other people. They'd happily accept a police state so long as that state attacked the right people. Trump didn't change the nature of the GOP, it simply revealed that the GOP voter had become openly distrustful of the GOP elected class, who no longer resembled them. You can't wean a generation on the idea that government is bad and that everyone is against you, and then just not do anything you said you wanted.
The thing about the Trump years, and now really, is that they've moved many conservative priorities along far more than they ever did before. Want to control immigration? We'll build concentration camps at the border and ban muslims. Want to deal with abortion? Roe V Wade is gone. Guys like DeSantis are showing that yeah, the GOP could have done all the things the voters wanted years ago, they just chose not to.
Now, that's because they're bad ideas. But that's not the point. The point is the voters got fed up of the lie that the GOP elected class was actually doing what they said they wanted to do, and put in people who actually wanted the same things. So far as there has been a 'transformation' it's been that the people who used to be considered 'electable' have all been shown to be the minority in their own party.
Thus, the 'lie' is the one that GOP elected officials told their own voters, who believed in what they said, having been raised on a diet of paranoia and delusions.
Now of course, I could be completely wrong. I must admit that it's entirely possible that it's racism all the way down. It's also possible where it's a cargo cult, where the people in charge are hapless fools who can't decide who or what their party actually believes, and they'll go with whoever wins.
But I think the simpler answer is what JVL said earlier about the id theory of politics; the GOP voters want to feel good and validated about their choices, and they'll vote for whoever makes them feel that. Reagan made them feel good, claiming it was morning in America while turning out the asylums and putting the mentally ill onto our streets. Bush made them feel good about killing terrorists while he tried, and ultimately failed, to privatize social security. Trump scratches that itch for them even more. No more do you need to feel ashamed, he says, 'I am your voice!' and then later 'I am your retribution.'
The lie that GOP office holders told themselves was that they could ride that beast, feed it Glenn Beck's paranoid delusions and Bill O'Reilly's rants against minorities, stomach his belief that 'traditional america didn't exist anymore' when Obama was elected, and not actually do anything that would cost them membership in the polite society they wanted to be a part of. To put it another way, the base wanted blood, it wanted circuses, and the GOP elected kept cheaping out on them.
Part of it is racism, part of it is xenophobia, but I believe that had the party not been so open in accepting the George Wallace voters, that this still would have happened. They'd just have changed who they considered the 'other.' After all, plenty of white people got AIDS, and you didn't see them lifting a finger to help them. They created their monolith, fed it red meat, and then were surprised when their monster ate them too. That's what I think.
I think you've hit several points squarely. But where I'd differ/qualify things...
One of the common problems with these sorts of analyses (from left or right), and, especially lately, is that they tend to imbue malice to the other side. "It's all about the cruelty" is a constant refrain. Or, in your case "...voters would accept anything so long as it hurt the right people..". I suspect this thinking is wrong in terms of the primary motivation. While it does seem (especially lately) to morph into a gratuitous cruelty, I think the primary motivation is a sense of fairness (really entitlement). White grievance comes from a sense of loss, of being left behind. It's not fair
- note well how often Trump uses that language. And so on.
The other driving factor is the *need* for an "other". As many conservative writers themselves will acknowledge, the American right, in particular, needs a common enemy to push back against. The cold war was great for keeping the conservative factions allied. But who can play that role now? Well, it seems it's us.
BTW, I think it's no coincidence that attempts at "constructive optimistic conservativism" don't seem to get traction. Whether Jack Kemp or W's compassionate conservativism, it never seemed to get the base all excited.
But I think you are spot on in terms of resentment of the GOP elites. The sense that those squishy RINOs failed much of the electorate. Also, that so much of America has been drilled in "gov't always bad" thinking for decades. It feeds directly into populist thinking.
Who can play the role of "other" now, in place of the communists? The obvious answer is that communists could still play that role, starting with the heirs of Mao and Stalin, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. The only reason that's not happening is because the GOP feels compelled to cover up for Trump's corrupt ties to those and other foreign dictators.
I think this is a prime exhibit for hypothesis 2 - it's all contingent. GOP foreign policy is being driven by Trump's personal corruption, not by any coherent, comprehensive political strategy, theory, or movement. If Trump had owed money to the Saudis rather than the Russians, his foreign policy might have looked more like that of the Bush-Cheney administration.
I half agree. On the one hand, we've seen that motivated reasoning can dominate groups. Even to the point of blatant 180s on subjects.
That said, my guess is that the current GOP flip-flop on Russia isn't simply about covering for Trump's corruption (entanglements in Russia). That could be a factor, but it's more likely emotionally driven by opposition. The Dems are very anti-Russia now, so, therefore, Tucker, et al, kinda like Russia. The entanglements serve to strengthen the knee-jerk opposition. This became obvious with the Mueller investigation. I doubt there's a conservative around that hasn't derisively spouted "Russia! Russia! Russia!"
“BTW, I think it's no coincidence that attempts at "constructive optimistic conservativism" don't seem to get traction. Whether Jack Kemp or W's compassionate conservativism, it never seemed to get the base all excited.”
“Constructive optimistic conservatism” can never get traction if the party is always selling nostalgia for a past that is better than the future could possibly be.
I think this is as close to describing the late 20th c early 21st c GOP as one can come. But it is really really really disturbing to think it infects tens of millions of Americans. I always knew these people existed but I never thought they were more than 10% of the GOP which was less than half the country. The 49-51 split is what perhaps baffles me most.
You're on the right track, and funny we're talking about this during the Fox News v Dominion lawsuit, but I'll add that the democratization of media and campaign fundraising had a lot to do with that 'suddenly'. You could keep those conservatives in check as long as folks like Buckley, Ailes, and Limbaugh could keep telling them the leadership was listening and they understood their concerns. As long as they were the only voices around, well, who else was there to tell them otherwise? And as long as campaigns were financed by the big money guys, maybe you have the odd Pat Buchanan or David Duke sneak into a trace but that was the most damage that could be done.
Then comes the internet, and with it you get Free Republic, then Breitbart and Newsmax, and then social media where any guy with a grievance can be turned into a viral star. Meanwhile, SCOTUS opens the doors on campaign fundraising right as online fundraising is hitting its stride. The party lost its guardrails, and you could see it happening in real-time. Trump was just the culmination of it, a campaign that could effectively wield both social media and online fundraising straight into the White House. Now the old guardrails like Fox News and Limbaugh are having to follow instead of lead, and you get to where we're at today.
Don't take this as a 'sheeple' argument. I'm never a fan of arguing in favor of 'brainwashing' but I do believe in the power of validating beliefs that one would keep out of polite company. And boy howdy are these beliefs being validated all day every day now.
Now, I could be wrong and you could be right that it was only a matter of time, regardless. Maybe they were always going to be fed up after Bush touched the third rail of Social Security and Romney's support of corporatism. I still don't think I'm entirely wrong, though. We're in a whole new era of media consumption and its follow-on effects in politics and culture, and we're still feeling our way through here.
Personally, I don't think any of these answers are entirely correct, so I'll mostly reiterate what I said the other day, which boils down to 'tribalism uber alles.' There's more to it of course, but let's start there.
My belief is that at one point, the GOP was in fact some kind of big tent, or at least contained several different groups who all mostly wanted to go in the same direction. You had your nationalists, you had your racists who were fleeing the democratic party, you had your fiscal conservative types, you had your gung-ho MURICA types, and all of these existed in some kind of harmony because in general, everyone had the same end goal, which was to win.
Culturally speaking, there is always some kind of belief around what is and is not acceptable in 'polite' society. These things move around of course, but they exist, and they were stronger in the past than they are now. Which meant that your white grievance types and nativist types couldn't simply sit on top of the ticket and speak openly, they needed someone like a Reagan or a Bush to carry the torch and protect them from the slings and arrows of their enemies. Which they did.
As a result, two groups formed. You had the voters, who in general aren't particularly well informed no matter what party they vote for, and you had 'Conservatism Inc' which put gloss on the ideas so that voters would go for them. What this meant was dressing up the ideas on top for the people on the bottom. Reagan spoke out against 'welfare queens' despite his cuts to the poor hurting white people just as much. Bush wanted his wars, and it was rural military families that were pushed into the fray by their communities. But you can't sell cutting things people like without making it seem like you're not doing it.
My favorite point on this is that conservative voters overwhelming want to repeal 'obamacare' while also favoring the 'Affordable Care Act' by a wide margin, despite these two things being the same. This is basically how it is for the entirety of the conservative movement writ large.
So there's some truth to that idea that white grievance was behind it all, because voters would accept anything so long as it hurt the right people. But it's also wrong because the voters did in fact believe in things like cutting entitlements... just not for them.
And here is where we get a bit theoretical, but bear with me for a moment. The Conservative view of the world is that everyone is an individual, and any force that exists to push you in a direction is violating your autonomy. Ergo, if the state is trying to make you do something, it's wrong, even if it's good for you. Reagan's idea that 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help' boils down to an idea that the government can only hurt you, it can't benefit you.
But that's just a bud of an idea. Consider that most ideas are not used and abused by their creators, but by the generations that came after them. Now let's infuse a little Gingrich and Limbaugh inspired hatred, and some 9/11 inspired xenophobia, and let it percolate for about a decade or so, before throwing in a financial crisis. What do we have?
We have an electorate that has been trained for almost twenty years on the idea that government is bad, mixing with the idea that government only helps 'those' people. Government is against you, the conservative voter. Of course, the elected class picked up on this; that's how you get guys like Ted Cruz claiming to be salt of the earth tea party people. The point is that slowly, the people who got elected were willing to speak a lot more crassly about things like the government, and who it helped.
When things fail, it's usually slowly, then suddenly, and that's how it went with the GOP in terms of falling to Trumpism. See, there's a limit to how far that Rand Paul's of the world are willing to go. Oh, they want to cut government, but not so much that they might lose money. They want to remove waste, and they want to run government like a business, but they'd never actually think of themselves as part of that. Or every just come out and say that those 'other' people are the problem.
Until Trump. Trump said everything out loud. Trump revealed the great lie, which wasn't that voters didn't care about things like shrinking the government, they just wanted it shrunk for other people. They'd happily accept a police state so long as that state attacked the right people. Trump didn't change the nature of the GOP, it simply revealed that the GOP voter had become openly distrustful of the GOP elected class, who no longer resembled them. You can't wean a generation on the idea that government is bad and that everyone is against you, and then just not do anything you said you wanted.
The thing about the Trump years, and now really, is that they've moved many conservative priorities along far more than they ever did before. Want to control immigration? We'll build concentration camps at the border and ban muslims. Want to deal with abortion? Roe V Wade is gone. Guys like DeSantis are showing that yeah, the GOP could have done all the things the voters wanted years ago, they just chose not to.
Now, that's because they're bad ideas. But that's not the point. The point is the voters got fed up of the lie that the GOP elected class was actually doing what they said they wanted to do, and put in people who actually wanted the same things. So far as there has been a 'transformation' it's been that the people who used to be considered 'electable' have all been shown to be the minority in their own party.
Thus, the 'lie' is the one that GOP elected officials told their own voters, who believed in what they said, having been raised on a diet of paranoia and delusions.
Now of course, I could be completely wrong. I must admit that it's entirely possible that it's racism all the way down. It's also possible where it's a cargo cult, where the people in charge are hapless fools who can't decide who or what their party actually believes, and they'll go with whoever wins.
But I think the simpler answer is what JVL said earlier about the id theory of politics; the GOP voters want to feel good and validated about their choices, and they'll vote for whoever makes them feel that. Reagan made them feel good, claiming it was morning in America while turning out the asylums and putting the mentally ill onto our streets. Bush made them feel good about killing terrorists while he tried, and ultimately failed, to privatize social security. Trump scratches that itch for them even more. No more do you need to feel ashamed, he says, 'I am your voice!' and then later 'I am your retribution.'
The lie that GOP office holders told themselves was that they could ride that beast, feed it Glenn Beck's paranoid delusions and Bill O'Reilly's rants against minorities, stomach his belief that 'traditional america didn't exist anymore' when Obama was elected, and not actually do anything that would cost them membership in the polite society they wanted to be a part of. To put it another way, the base wanted blood, it wanted circuses, and the GOP elected kept cheaping out on them.
Part of it is racism, part of it is xenophobia, but I believe that had the party not been so open in accepting the George Wallace voters, that this still would have happened. They'd just have changed who they considered the 'other.' After all, plenty of white people got AIDS, and you didn't see them lifting a finger to help them. They created their monolith, fed it red meat, and then were surprised when their monster ate them too. That's what I think.
I think you've hit several points squarely. But where I'd differ/qualify things...
One of the common problems with these sorts of analyses (from left or right), and, especially lately, is that they tend to imbue malice to the other side. "It's all about the cruelty" is a constant refrain. Or, in your case "...voters would accept anything so long as it hurt the right people..". I suspect this thinking is wrong in terms of the primary motivation. While it does seem (especially lately) to morph into a gratuitous cruelty, I think the primary motivation is a sense of fairness (really entitlement). White grievance comes from a sense of loss, of being left behind. It's not fair
- note well how often Trump uses that language. And so on.
The other driving factor is the *need* for an "other". As many conservative writers themselves will acknowledge, the American right, in particular, needs a common enemy to push back against. The cold war was great for keeping the conservative factions allied. But who can play that role now? Well, it seems it's us.
BTW, I think it's no coincidence that attempts at "constructive optimistic conservativism" don't seem to get traction. Whether Jack Kemp or W's compassionate conservativism, it never seemed to get the base all excited.
But I think you are spot on in terms of resentment of the GOP elites. The sense that those squishy RINOs failed much of the electorate. Also, that so much of America has been drilled in "gov't always bad" thinking for decades. It feeds directly into populist thinking.
Who can play the role of "other" now, in place of the communists? The obvious answer is that communists could still play that role, starting with the heirs of Mao and Stalin, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. The only reason that's not happening is because the GOP feels compelled to cover up for Trump's corrupt ties to those and other foreign dictators.
I think this is a prime exhibit for hypothesis 2 - it's all contingent. GOP foreign policy is being driven by Trump's personal corruption, not by any coherent, comprehensive political strategy, theory, or movement. If Trump had owed money to the Saudis rather than the Russians, his foreign policy might have looked more like that of the Bush-Cheney administration.
I half agree. On the one hand, we've seen that motivated reasoning can dominate groups. Even to the point of blatant 180s on subjects.
That said, my guess is that the current GOP flip-flop on Russia isn't simply about covering for Trump's corruption (entanglements in Russia). That could be a factor, but it's more likely emotionally driven by opposition. The Dems are very anti-Russia now, so, therefore, Tucker, et al, kinda like Russia. The entanglements serve to strengthen the knee-jerk opposition. This became obvious with the Mueller investigation. I doubt there's a conservative around that hasn't derisively spouted "Russia! Russia! Russia!"
“BTW, I think it's no coincidence that attempts at "constructive optimistic conservativism" don't seem to get traction. Whether Jack Kemp or W's compassionate conservativism, it never seemed to get the base all excited.”
“Constructive optimistic conservatism” can never get traction if the party is always selling nostalgia for a past that is better than the future could possibly be.
I think this is as close to describing the late 20th c early 21st c GOP as one can come. But it is really really really disturbing to think it infects tens of millions of Americans. I always knew these people existed but I never thought they were more than 10% of the GOP which was less than half the country. The 49-51 split is what perhaps baffles me most.
You're on the right track, and funny we're talking about this during the Fox News v Dominion lawsuit, but I'll add that the democratization of media and campaign fundraising had a lot to do with that 'suddenly'. You could keep those conservatives in check as long as folks like Buckley, Ailes, and Limbaugh could keep telling them the leadership was listening and they understood their concerns. As long as they were the only voices around, well, who else was there to tell them otherwise? And as long as campaigns were financed by the big money guys, maybe you have the odd Pat Buchanan or David Duke sneak into a trace but that was the most damage that could be done.
Then comes the internet, and with it you get Free Republic, then Breitbart and Newsmax, and then social media where any guy with a grievance can be turned into a viral star. Meanwhile, SCOTUS opens the doors on campaign fundraising right as online fundraising is hitting its stride. The party lost its guardrails, and you could see it happening in real-time. Trump was just the culmination of it, a campaign that could effectively wield both social media and online fundraising straight into the White House. Now the old guardrails like Fox News and Limbaugh are having to follow instead of lead, and you get to where we're at today.
Don't take this as a 'sheeple' argument. I'm never a fan of arguing in favor of 'brainwashing' but I do believe in the power of validating beliefs that one would keep out of polite company. And boy howdy are these beliefs being validated all day every day now.
Now, I could be wrong and you could be right that it was only a matter of time, regardless. Maybe they were always going to be fed up after Bush touched the third rail of Social Security and Romney's support of corporatism. I still don't think I'm entirely wrong, though. We're in a whole new era of media consumption and its follow-on effects in politics and culture, and we're still feeling our way through here.