Reading Max Boot’s column (How the ‘Stupid Party’ Created Donald Trump) in the New York Times, I was reminded of a piece I wrote last September called How the Stupid Party was Made. Here’s my intro to that piece:
It’s easy to get inured to polling results that demonstrate that a significant part of the American population barely has enough brain capacity to operate their lungs. It’s hard to imagine how a brain that can simultaneously hold that the president is a Muslim and that he is at fault for being a member of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s congregation can figure out how to simultaneously pump the heart and regulate body temperature.
And, therefore, it’s sobering to realize that a plurality of Republican poll responders think the president was born outside of the United States (44%-29%) and a big majority believe that he is a Muslim (54%) rather than a Christian (14%).
Consider the latter proposition. Republican poll responders are almost four times more likely to be wrong about the president’s religion than they are to be correct about it, and a third of them are too stupid to be sure one way or the other.
Okay, so there are a lot of dumb people in the world. This is not a newsflash to anyone.
But they’ve sorted themselves into this conservative movement in a rather striking fashion.
I’ll get to how I diagnosed this sorting in a minute, but first I want to take a look at Max Boot’s argument. He begins by noting that historically important Republicans like Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon were highly intelligent. He then seems to make a case that Republicans, perhaps starting with Eisenhower, began masquerading as the “stupid party,” in order to “preserve [their] political room to maneuver.”
Boot is taking a longer view than I had in my September piece. He’s trying to figure out how the Republican Party wound up nominating a Birther who “doesn’t know the difference between the Quds Force and the Kurds.” And he may have identified an important component of the explanation which can be described as “pretending to be stupid attracts stupid people.”
However, that doesn’t explain why the Stupid catalyzed from a strategic affectation into a virulent strain of Dumb during the (latter) Bush and Obama presidencies. My explanation addresses that question frontally:
What the Republicans did was create an electorate that didn’t previously exist. Sure, the gullible people were there already, but they weren’t misinformed and they weren’t sorted politically.
The reason this was done by Republicans, I believe, is because the conservative movement has determined that they can hold onto power a little longer despite demographic changes and the browning of America if they can sharply increase their share of the white vote. And the way to do that is not to figure out what these people need and offer ways to give it to them, but to get them to think more in terms of their whiteness. Whites go over here in the right column and everyone else goes over there in the left column.
This is the rationale. It has the potential to work, and it’s already working on the state and congressional district level, helping Republicans control legislatures throughout the country and in Washington DC.
It’s a transparent effort to ramp up racial animosity as a way, probably the only way, to avoid softening their positions on their conservative ideology. If they don’t do this, then they’ll have to recraft their appeal, which means that conservatives will lose control of the Republican Party– one of only two viable parties in the country.
There’s an ironic beauty in the fact that Trump came along and adopted this strategy as his own, but without the intention of preserving the power of the Conservative Movement. So, Max Boot is correct that the Republicans created Donald Trump by becoming the Stupid Party, but I don’t think he understands how this hijacking really occurred. It wasn’t dabbling in stupidity that weakened the party to the point that it could be stolen from conservatives. It was dabbling in racism that did that.
A political movement that relied on polarizing the nation by race in order to survive without compromising or evolving their ideology wound up getting a racially polarized nation and losing their party and their power.
So, now, conservatives are actually offended the racism goes too far and is sincere, and the pretense to stupidity has become the reality.
There’s a big cleanup in aisle three, and very few of the people who created this mess are in a position to be part of the solution. There’s no constituency left that wants to accept their leadership or listen to what they have to say.
Well, do you think it is a blind squirrel phenomena that has alerted the prols to the fact that their elites are predators? A sort of Jonestown fatalism?
The blind squirrel part is more latching on to trump and racism as a response i think.
I dunno. They gave been racists since the 70s to one degree or another. And voted consistently for the establishment candidates. What changed? Booman says they got stupider? Err…?
And even when they won, they lost economically…
I’ve seen several studies that being exposed to right-wing media makes more more ill-informed than consuming no news at all.
So, yes, right-wing media appears to misinform people, which isn’t quite the same as being more stupid.
What I’ve identified is a sorting process whereby people who are stupid by nature are shunted off to the right systematically until there a huge statistical obviousness about how much more credulous supporters of the GOP are than the public at large.
This was not the case always and forever. It was partly intentionally done and partly an unintentional byproduct, but it’s real now.
I dont disagree but one thing I always wonder when stuff like the foreign born question is asked is how many know very well Obama is a natural born citizen but respond with the opposite as a way to affirm tribal menbership and signal ultimate opposition.
Of course they do. It’s a dog whistle to make liberals sputter.
At some point, it becomes a distinction without a difference. You can see similar phenomena everywhere if you look: climate change denial, antivax, etc.
“… to get them to think more in terms of their whiteness.”
I wrote 300 words stumbling toward a question about the increasing emergence of light-skinned voters who identify as ethnically white, but I’m still not sure what I was asking. So this isn’t quite it. However … while I have no patience for the “What about ‘White History Month?'” idiots, new ethnic identities do form. Are we seeing a tipping point in the formation of a genuine ‘white’ ethnicity?
You might be correct. However, White ethnicity is as effective now as it ever will be.
By formalizing any kind of structure, the structure itself will fold under the pressure. As these things normally work out, very soon after the inception the definitional phase sets in: Who are the “real” [fill in the blank] ethnics?
For whites people Italians, Spaniards, Portugese, Turks, Slavs (poles, serbians, Bulgarians) are the first to be thrown under the bus.
Then fighting really begins. I watched the splintering of the Klan during the ’60s. Groups of 5 and 6 would split in two over stupid shit like the proper form of a salute, whether blacks had souls (really) and other equally idiotic questions (at least idiotic to the outside).
Any “white ethnicity” movement WILL quickly descend into the current molehills of neo-nazis, Aryan, Posse, Identity Xtians and so forth. And will indulge in the requisite “purifying” phase.
Well, I think the current definition of ‘white’–at least as I’m envisioning it–is different to that. I’m not (primarily) talking about ‘white power’ people. And I’m talking about an exclusively American identity; no Italians or English or Irish or Poles need apply. An identity that traces its roots all the way back to (white) America, and rejects everything ‘foreign’. And while racism is a necessary part of it (White History Month!), defining against an out-group is probably not unusual in the generation of an ethnicity.
I don’t know. I feel even more muddled than usual. Maybe it’s just a thought experiment that occurred to me: Can a genuine ‘white American’ ethnicity emerge, of which ‘white power’ is merely the fanatical fringe?
Part of my problem is terminology, because a vast number of people who are factually white American wouldn’t identify ethnically as ‘white American’ …
I follow three countries pretty closely on FB…Kenya, Namibia and South Africa. Black nationalism has a big problem with factionalism as far as internecine violence and economic favoritism goes.
Critics See Efforts by Counties and Towns to Purge Minority Voters From Rolls
By MICHAEL WINES
JULY 31, 2016
SPARTA, Ga. — When the deputy sheriff’s patrol cruiser pulled up beside him as he walked down Broad Street at sunset last August, Martee Flournoy, a 32-year-old black man, was both confused and rattled. He had reason: In this corner of rural Georgia, African-Americans are arrested at a rate far higher than that of whites.
But the deputy had not come to arrest Mr. Flournoy. Rather, he had come to challenge Mr. Flournoy’s right to vote.
The majority-white Hancock County Board of Elections and Registration was systematically questioning the registrations of more than 180 black Sparta citizens — a fifth of the city’s registered voters — by dispatching deputies with summonses commanding them to appear in person to prove their residence or lose their voting rights. “When I read that letter, I was kind of nervous,” Mr. Flournoy said in an interview. “I didn’t know what to do.”
The board’s aim, a lawsuit later claimed, was to give an edge to white candidates in Sparta’s municipal elections — and that November, a white mayoral candidate won a narrow victory.
“A lot of those people that was challenged probably didn’t vote, even though they weren’t proven to be wrong,” said Marion Warren, a Sparta elections official who documented the purges and raised an alarm with voting-rights advocates. “People just do not understand why a sheriff is coming to their house to bring them a subpoena, especially if they haven’t committed any crime.”
The county attorney, Barry A. Fleming, a Republican state representative, said in an interview that the elections board was only trying to restore order to an electoral process tainted earlier by corruption and incompetence. The lawsuit is overblown, he suggested, because only a fraction of the targeted voters were ultimately scratched from the rolls.
“The allegations that people were denied the right to vote are the opposite of the truth,” he said. “This is probably more about politics and power than race.”
But the purge of Sparta voters is precisely the sort of electoral maneuver that once would have needed Justice Department approval before it could be put in effect. In Georgia and all or part of 14 other states, the 1965 Voting Rights Act required jurisdictions with histories of voter discrimination to receive so-called preclearance before changing the way voter registration and elections were conducted.
Damn. That is evil.
Thank you for posting this.
Marrion Warren’s statement that “People just do not understand why a sheriff is coming to their house to bring them a subpoena . . . .” misses the mark by a wide margin.
I suspect that the people who were visited by an armed representative of the powers-that-be understood loud and clear the not-so-subtle threat.
They nominated Goldwater and Reagan.
Why people think this is new is beyond me.
Poll: Millennials Go for Clinton; Trump Can’t Buy an Older Minority Vote
FAWN JOHNSON | JULY 21, 2016
CLEVELAND — Hillary Clinton is a grandma who is subjected to ridicule for her clothing and even her figure, judging by the street vendors hawking wares here at the Republican National Convention.
But that’s not fazing younger voters, according to national poll results from Morning Consult.
The Democratic presidential nominee has a sizable lead over Donald Trump among voters younger than 45, according to 23,347 interviews of registered voters conducted through June and the first two weeks of July. Clinton leads Trump by 17 percentage points, 47 percent to 30 percent, among voters aged 18 to 29. She leads by 10 points, 46 percent to 36 percent, among voters aged 30 to 44.
…………..
Among white voters 45 and older, Trump leads Clinton handily. White respondents over 65 pick Trump over Clinton 50 percent to 34 percent, with similar margins for white voters age 45 to 64, 48 percent to 34 percent. Gen-X white voters (age 35 to 44) still opt for Trump, but the margins are tighter at 44 percent to 39 percent. Among white voters under 35, Clinton leads Trump by 2 percentage points, 40 percent to 38 percent.
I think one of the most significant results of the Trump nomination is it has ripped off the mask and exposed the true face of the GOP. It is a loud and proud White Nationalist party. They don’t really try to hide it anymore.
It’s all about IDENTITY POLITICS, as many here have noted. So-called “white identity politics”. But when we criticize that, we need to be aware that the right-wing thinks that the left plays identity politics, too. Are they incorrect??
There are lots of historical reasons for identity politics, going back, I suppose, to the way that certain (white) immigrant ethnic groups became firmly aligned with one political party or another (the Irish and big-city Democratic machines, for example). Those groups were responding to discrimination. One can go on and on, and also write about the roots of the alignment of racial minorities with one party or the other.
My strong sense is that identity politics is at the root of the political polarization in the US in the last several decades, and that this is a self reinforcing phenomenon. We on the left ridicule blacks, or Latinos, or Muslims, or gays who express support for the Republican Party. Is it possible that such ridicule actually exacerbates polarization?