There are many interesting things in the New York Times’ latest profile of Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. I want to focus on how he talks to Republican voters in his home state. Here’s part of what he said at a recent gathering of Republicans where he was the keynote speaker:
In Greenville, Graham framed the Kavanaugh melee as a proxy battle over President Trump — and placed himself on the Trumpian side of an us-versus-them divide. The Democrats and the national news media, he said, are engaged in a singular mission to thwart the president. “Why? ’Cause they hate him,” Graham said of Trump. “They hate us,” he added, and repeated the call: “They hate us.”
Political parties exist in large part to “thwart” other political parties, especially when they don’t control the White House. It’s not necessary to posit hatred as a primary motivator for political criticism and oppositional behavior. Senator Graham was engaged here in a toxic form of discourse. He was telling people that the Democrats hate them. He said the same thing about the media.
You can hear the same kind of rhetoric on Fox News and hate radio. Joe DiGenova made a recent appearance on Laura Ingraham’s radio program and declared:
“We are in a civil war in this country. There’s two standards of justice, one for Democrats one for Republicans. The press is all Democrat, all liberal, all progressive, all left – they hate Republicans, they hate Trump. So the suggestion that there’s ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future in this country is over. It’s not going to be. It’s going to be total war. And as I say to my friends, I do two things – I vote and I buy guns.”
Again, the media is treated as the enemy, and in this case the solution involves buying guns in preparation for a civil war–with the obvious implication that Republicans need to get ready to kill some folks.
Continuing with this theme, Steven Bannon evoked civil war during a weekend appearance on Face the Nation:
“I think that 2019 is going to be the most vitriolic year in American politics since before the Civil War,” Bannon said. “And I include Vietnam in that. I think we’re in, I think we’re in for a very nasty 2019.”
The country is certainly divided. It’s astonishing to me that President Trump could have over fifty percent approval with any group of human beings, including his own family, but according to Gallup, he’s actually seen an uptick in the number of states where he has majority support:
The good news for Trump is that he had 50 percent approval or higher in 17 states, up from 12 in 2017. (The additions? Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina and Utah.)
The bad news? In 13 states he won in 2016, his approval rating is underwater. And in no state that he won in 2016 is his approval rating worse than in Texas.
That’s hardly an enviable political position for a president seeking reelection, but it’s nonetheless troubling that we have states in this country where most people are actually are willing to tell a pollster that they support Trump.
They no doubt base that support in large part on their perception that they share the same enemies. This is supported by a recent analysis done by Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz. He looked at how people are voting in congressional elections and concluded that they are no longer judging candidates as individuals but only as members of a party that they either support or oppose.
Abramowitz notes that during the 1960s, the 1970s, and even the 1980s, the correlation between the presidential vote in a district and the House vote in that district was about 0.6 — substantial, but not overwhelming (correlations run from 0, meaning no correlation, to 1, meaning perfect correlation). In 2016, it was .97, higher than it had ever been before. The candidates who thought they could overcome their district’s fundamental partisanship by constructing a more moderate profile were almost all on a fool’s errand.
In other words, Trump is getting a lot of support simply because he’s not a Democrat. In many parts of the country, not being a Democrat is all that is required to gain approval, and the Republicans are feeding off of that with the rhetoric that Democrats hate their political opponents.
This will limit how well any Democrat can do in the presidential elections, and it will also strictly limit how many seats the Democrats can win in Congress. But I do have two hopeful observations.
While it may be a fool’s errand for congressional Democrats (or Republicans) to pursue a moderate political profile in an effort to win in areas where their party doesn’t predominate, it should still be possible for the presidential candidates to change the overall split in support between the two parties. In other words, where a presidential candidate is winning, the congressional candidates will probably win, too. What this means is that moving the needle must be done from the top.
The second hopeful observation is that better leadership will result in better citizens. Where people feel that opposing the Democrats is a moral or political necessity, they will make allowances for whatever horrible behavior Trump dishes up, but they’ll follow someone else if and when that becomes necessary. If they aren’t constantly being fed divisive and toxic rhetoric and they aren’t constantly having to make excuses for inexcusable behavior, their devolution as human beings will slow and eventually reverse.
Someday soon, Donald Trump will no longer be the leader of the Republican Party. I hope that day comes before the Republicans formally nominate their candidate for president in 2020. If not, we’ll continue to see U.S. senators behaving like Lindsey Graham. And the country cannot long endure if we don’t get off that course.
The country is not necessarily headed for a civil war, but that will depend in large part in what kind of leaders emerge in 2020. Neither side is going to soften or reconcile organically from the bottom up, so we need people to lead the charge from the top.
Cant do much as long as fox news and right wing radio roll along.
And the only way to defeat that consistently is through the ballot box. And the only way you get people to the polls consistently is give them a reason to vote for you. That means bold policies. The Blue Dogs and corporate stooges aren’t the ones knocking on doors and stuff. It also means keeping voters constantly engaged. Otherwise the right wins and they’ll repeal, or otherwise try and sabotage, anything the Democrats pass. There is a reason the Democrats controlled the House and Senate so much between FDR’s time and the early 1990’s.
There’s lots of reasons why the Democrats maintained a winning coalition for most of a half century. Among those reasons is that for decades the Party was willing to accept many of the worst racists and sexists in their coalition. The Party slowly but surely decided to stop allowing the worst racists and sexists to continue to dictate the policies our leaders pursued and the social views we found acceptable.
Among the basics of this: the New Deal was essentially offered only to white males. The Great Society was offered to most everyone. The racists and sexists decided they didn’t want to stay in our Party under those circumstances. The Party’s mid-century coalition is dead and gone.
We can engage voters controlled by their racism and sexism as much as we like. With Trump and Republicans constantly force-feeding red meat to them, very few of them will vote for Democratic Party candidates. The good news is that we can still see a winning coalition made up of voters who are not controlled by their racism and sexism.
I want our voters to maintain their own motivation as consistently as the current conservative coalition maintains their motivation. It seems that our voters have been more consistently motivated since 2016. It’s important for more of them to see that acting like consumers of politics who must be catered to does not work in their self interest. Consistently voting will get them what they want more consistently. It’s not complicated.
I also wish I could be as confident as you that “bold policies” are all that are needed to do the job in “keeping voters constantly engaged.” I don’t see solid evidence that voters in our broad coalition are universally positively motivated by policies which are as liberal as you and I would like, policies we might agree are “bold” and necessary. I desperately want that to happen. It just doesn’t appear to me that this is the center of our electoral challenges.
This is how I have been socializing the kiddos for their entire lives. Oddly enough how I was socialized. Consistently voting for your candidates/party/initiatives is hardly a guarantee, but it sure does improves your odds of getting at least some of what you want. Beats getting nothing. Even in a hopeless state like mine, there are some bright spots that occur because voters bothered to show up, rather than just curl up in fetal position in their living rooms. To put it another way, you can’t win if you don’t play.
Among the basics of this: the New Deal was essentially offered only to white males.
I know that. The point is to offer it to everyone now. Crackdown on FB and Google, among other companies. Raise taxes substantially on the rich. Spend federal money to upgrade the trains in various places. Give more money to the states to build housing.
I want our voters to maintain their own motivation as consistently as the current conservative coalition maintains their motivation. It seems that our voters have been more consistently motivated since 2016. It’s important for more of them to see that acting like consumers of politics who must be catered to does not work in their self interest. Consistently voting will get them what they want more consistently.
This isn’t true necessarily. Look at Cuomo and his now defunct, thankfully, IDC. Or Massachusetts and Maryland. Both states have large majorities in the state legislature and yet are happy to play footsie with GOP governors. And both GOP governors were elected because the Democratic Party in both states are corrupt and ossified. Neither supported their respective nominees for Governor.
Regarding your last point, it was New York voters that finally caused the IDC to become defunct last year, taking out some of the Conference’s Legislators and putting enough pressure on Governor Cuomo from the left to get him to move to help crush the remnants of the body. Progressive voters finally showed up in sufficient numbers to do that.
And while we may not think much of the Massachusetts and Maryland Democratic Parties’ effective support for their recent Governor candidates, it was the voters who decided to fail to show up for their more liberal options for Governor. I grew up in a California which most frequently placed Republicans in the State’s Executive office.
As recently as 2006, California Democratic Party voters put up a nominee for Governor who had the charisma of a thimble, and that was an big electoral loser when running against Governor Schwarzenegger. All the same, we would have gotten better policies quicker if that Dem Party candidate would have won in 2006. Failing to do so left us suffering with a incompetent and ideologically unsuitable Governor when the financial crash hit.
Leadership matters, zero doubt. I just want our voters to learn from the experiences we’re going through right now. Choosing Trump as President was an indefensible choice by the voters.
Something the Bernie/Warren approach does Bernie more than Warren imo, is give people an enemy to hate, corporations. I think this is good because corporations are by their nature evil (necessary evil?) but even if you dont, from a practical standpoint its 1. A good way to unify people 2. Provides an entry point for people already used to hating things (Republicans).
Is it a great plan? Doubtful, but I cannot think of another one that is executable within the current political coalitions.
I don’t know if anyone else read the breathtakingly brilliant article I wrote in my head, but this is explained by the fact that the differences between the parties is no longer primarily political. This is an ethnic conflict. Because ‘Republican’ is now an ethnicity.
(Which also explains the ascendency of Trump. He’s pathetically inadequate as a political leader, but powerfully effective as an ethnic one.)
There’s still a little wiggle room between the parties–a Comey Unit of persuadables–in terms of ‘leadership effect’ but overall this is locked in. The most appealing-to-Republicans candidate we could possibly field will still be utterly unacceptable to them. Like the friendliest Nazi. (Er, except ‘friendly Nazi’ is actually their sweet spot.) We need to focus on expanding voter rights, statehood for PR and DC, and building liberal cities in Wyoming, the Dakotas, etc.
I’ve been saying the same thing about christianity for years, or at least the protestant flavors that predominate in the red states. They consider themselves a culture, and the religion itself is either ignored, or the contents of its primary text has been reduced to the parts of the Old Testament where God is belligerent, irrational, and convinced He’s the best. I grew up in rural Oklahoma and attended church every Sunday until I went to college, and I’ve witnessed a large part of this shift firsthand.
The far-right worldview is tribal, not in the sense that both-siderism purports, but in the sense of a developmental stage in which all people not in your immediate in-group is viewed as unequal to you and dangerous. There is no left “tribe” because even though we may be tempted to describe rabid conservatives as subhuman in their actions and beliefs, we understand that all of humanity shares the same potential for good or ill. That “globalism” is a dirty word on the right stems at least partly from this, plus no shortage of antisemitism of course.
With this us-vs-them mentality, the details don’t matter, just whose team you’re on. Policy, governing philosophy, law, morals, the Constitution, whatever you supported the last time you held power or the last time you were out of power–all that’s out the window along with the teachings of Christ. None of that matters in the least.
The Culture War is a literal war to them, and has been for years if not decades. All those weapons and ammo aren’t just there for sport.
I don’t see a full-scale civil war coming, but there are plenty of people itching for an excuse to start shooting, and I could easily see a period coming which is characterized by a lot of little insurrections with heavy casualties. To be honest I was already bracing for a handful of them to follow what I assumed was going to be a Clinton victory in ‘016, and the atmosphere now is so much more toxic than even then.
We’re in for a ride, I’m afraid.
The only way you get better leaders is through more & better voters participating in a fairer system. Or more impassioned voters making better choices in the present system and acting in ways to reform the current system.
Reform is the only way to go.
The survival of the country depends on sidelining the small,racist, Social Darwinist states.
I would say–hyperbolic as it sounds–the survival of the world depends on somehow neutralizing them.
For the reality-based among us, some slowdown of the anthropogenic extinction under way is perhaps the biggest emergency.
For those chuckleheads in South Dakota with their two Republiclown senators, it’s the little six-year-old girl from Honduras at the Mexican border.
At this point, rank tribalism is all the Яepugnicans have, and the fevered appeals to violence show that they know.
Яepugnican verbal discharge has come to be governed by four principles:
The blockquoted spew from Slimy Gnar Head’s cakehole toward the end of this recent piece here has it all.
Voters do not vote for damaged candidates. Remember Roy Moore. He got so damaged in his campaign they did not bother to vote. By time to vote in 2020 the donald may be just like Moore…they stay home.
I hold out little hope that this will be the case. We must rid ourselves of Trump via other means, imprisonment, impeachment, 25th Amendment, voting.
My friend had a radio station on that was nonstop yelling and anger. Literally. The job is to make listeners as angry as possible so that they will ignore everything and vote Republican. It works.
The South had to adjust to the outcome of the Civil War. They will have to adjust to not controlling the country now (“white power!”). And they can do it. They will never stop complaining, but they will deal with it if they have to. The challenge is much greater because we are essentially finishing the civil war, the part that they were able to fight off – allowing women and black people real freedom.
This time we just have to crush them electorally, and force them to realize that they can’t insist on expanding slavery over the whole country. In this case, white nationalist theocracy. And they can’t secede either, which they are desperately trying to do now – create their own right-wing “utopias” like in Kansas, as much of a disaster as that is.
When they realized they couldn’t win in 1863 they evolved mentally to the point where they could accept the end of slavery. They just tried to re-created as much of it as they could. We don’t have to allow that this time.
I believe that we have a certain percent (around the John Keyes “crazification factor” of 27 percent) who love Trump just because he hates the right people. There’s another group that’s simply too stupid to understand what’s going on (am I being harsh? A recent poll showed that 13 percent of Americans can’t identify Mike Pence), and another that’s cynical (“they’re all crooks anyway”) and selfish (“I’m doing fine so who cares”). I think his real “base” is just that 27 percent.
minor correction: John Rogers is the name you’re looking for
You’re right – I screwed up because (also because it’s very early here) it’s also known as the “Keyes constant,” for Alan Keyes.
Because they’ve earned it.