Todd Purdum has a piece at Politico on the structural deficit the Republicans have in presidential politics. He doesn’t mention the Electoral College, which I consider a major oversight, but he still hits the major points. The party is just too socially conservative, hostile to minorities, skeptical of science, and opposed to gay equality to make inroads into the Democrats’ presidential turf. In fact, in staking out these radical positions and opposing things like a hike in the minimum wage besides, they probably cannot even tread water.
They ought to look at the problem with clear eyes. They need to win Virginia. They need to win Florida. They need to win Ohio. They need to win Colorado. Why can’t they do a calm analysis on what the voters in those states want to see from a policy perspective and craft an agenda that will appeal to them? Back when the Democrats faced a similar problem and social issues were dragging them down, they developed the mantra, “It’s the economy, stupid.” In other words, they deemphasized the issues that weren’t helping them win votes. The Republicans simply do not do this. Brought to power in the midst of the recovery from the Great Recession, they immediately launched an all-out assault on women’s reproductive freedom. Suddenly, we weren’t talking about government spending but government-mandated trans-vaginal probes.
If your problem is that suburban women aren’t supporting your party, this seems like the dumbest possible way to improve your prospects. The same can be said for voter ID laws, climate science denialism, and opposition to gay rights, which all alienate ascendent constituencies that must be wooed if the GOP hopes to regain the White House.
But it makes sense if you understand that the Conservative Movement is not the same thing as the Republican Party. The Conservative Movement is still animated by support for school prayer, opposition to Roe v. Wade, and a host of John Bircher heat-fever fantasies. When they gained power in Congress and in the state legislatures, they set out to do what they had been fighting for for decades. What they have done is totally consistent with what they’ve been saying for all these years.
The Conservative Movement has captured the Republican Party and they aren’t going to change just because the party needs to change if it wants to win. This is an anti-intellectual movement based in an anti-intellectual form of religion, that has been coupled with a paranoid and xenophobic strain of embittered nihilism. It’s greatest crime is that it has been able to take advantage of on-team solidarity to convince a lot of formerly moderate and reasonable people to abandon reality-based thinking. Climate science is a perfect example. Only six years ago, John McCain and Sarah Palin ran on a cap and trade proposal to cap carbon emissions. Today, the party refuses to concede that carbon emissions are causing climate change. People didn’t suddenly get less intelligent. They just followed what their leaders were saying because they want to stay loyal to the team. They willingly chose to be more stupid.
This political weaponization of stupidity is at the core of the Conservative Movement. Until recently, the Republican Party was an uneasy marriage between the monied classes and the dumb, but now the dumb are leading the dumb, and the monied classes are the ones demonstrating on-team loyalty. They don’t care about school prayer or abortion or gay marriage, but they dare not buck the Conservative Movement. To some degree, after ingesting so much right-wing media, even the monied classes may come to devalue science and take on more socially conservative views.
The overall effect is that people who identity with the Republican Party and want it to succeed are continuously getting dumber. All of a sudden, a Select Committee on Benghazi begins to make political sense to these folks. What doesn’t make sense is spending on public schools, where people are taught biology and plate tectonics and meteorology. Public investment in infrastructure no longer makes sense. Foreign aid no longer makes sense. A sensible immigration and agricultural workers policy no longer makes sense. Paying your bills on time and protecting the states’ and the country’s credit ratings no longer makes sense. That the president was born in Hawai’i no longer makes sense. Pretty soon, people don’t even flinch when someone suggests “she’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception,” as if you take The Pill on a per-sexual encounter basis.
People are running around talking utter nonsense. “Keep the government out of my Medicare.” “ObamaCare is worse than the Holocaust.”
And the rest of us who have not been infected with the Conservative Movement Virus just stand around slack-jawed in a state of stupefaction that the moronification of the USA could be so effective.
We’re not just the elitists; we’re everyone who isn’t infected. And we’re a growing majority.
