As I have disclosed numerous times, once upon a time I was a Republican activist. That was years ago and before the GOP full embraced white supremacist (the two are usually synonymous from my experience). Over the last 15 to 20 years the GOP has resorted more and more to dog whistle racism. Enter Trump and now the embrace of racism and bigotry is no longer hidden. Indeed, between his post-Charlottesville comments and his pardon of Joe Arpaio, Der Trumpenführer has ripped away the veneer of the GOP's heretofore well-mannered white supremacy. A piece by columnist David Brooks - a heretofore GOP apologist - in the New York Times and a story in USA Today look at the ugly reality of what the GOP has become and how, if we are lucky, Trump will kill the party. First, excerpts from the Times column:
It’s ironic that race was the issue that created the Republican Party and that race could very well be the issue that destroys it.The G.O.P. was founded to fight slavery, and through most of its history it had a decent record on civil rights. A greater percentage of congressional Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act than Democrats.
It’s become more of a white party in recent years, of course, and adopted some wrongheaded positions on civil rights enforcement, but it was still possible to be a Republican without feeling like you were violating basic decency on matters of race. Most of the Republican establishment, from the Bushes to McCain and Romney, fought bigotry, and racism was not a common feature in the conservative moment.
Between 1984 and 2003 . . . . In that time, I never heard blatantly racist comments at dinner parties, and there were probably fewer than a dozen times I heard some veiled comment that could have suggested racism. But the Republican Party has changed since 2005. It has become the vehicle for white identity politics. In 2005 only six percent of Republicans felt that whites faced “a great deal” of discrimination, the same number of Democrats who felt this. By 2016, the percentage of Republicans who felt this had tripled.
Recent surveys suggest that roughly 47 percent of Republicans are what you might call conservative universalists and maybe 40 percent are what you might call conservative white identitarians. White universalists believe in conservative principles and think they apply to all people and their white identity is not particularly salient to them. White identitarians are conservative, but their white identity is quite important to them, sometimes even more important than their conservatism.
According to a survey from the Public Religion Research Institute, for example, about 48 percent of Republicans believe there is “a lot of discrimination” against Christians in America and about 43 percent believe there is a lot of discrimination against whites. [T]hree things are clear: First, identity politics on the right is at least as corrosive as identity politics on the left, probably more so. If you reduce the complex array of identities that make up a human being into one crude ethno-political category, you’re going to do violence to yourself and everything around you. Second, it is wrong to try to make a parallel between Black Lives Matter and White Lives Matter. To pretend that these tendencies are somehow comparable is to ignore American history and current realities.
Third, white identity politics as it plays out in the political arena is completely noxious. Donald Trump is the maestro here. He established his political identity through birtherism, he won the Republican nomination on the Muslim ban, he campaigned on the Mexican wall, he governed by being neutral on Charlottesville and pardoning the racialist Joe Arpaio.
Each individual Republican is now compelled to embrace this garbage or not. The choice is unavoidable, and white resentment is bound to define Republicanism more and more in the months ahead. It’s what Trump cares about. And this is where the dissolution of the G.O.P. comes in. Conservative universalists are coming to realize their party has become a vehicle for white identity and racial conflict. This faction is prior to and deeper than Trump. Friendships are now ending across the right. People who supported Trump for partisan reasons now feel locked in to support him on race, and they are making themselves repellent.
It may someday be possible to reduce the influence of white identity politics, but probably not while Trump is in office. As long as he is in power the G.O.P. is a house viciously divided against itself, and cannot stand.
The USA Today piece continues where Brooks begins and looks at how the GOP has put its white supremacy into toxic policy. Here are highlights:
A federal judge found last summer that the North Carolina Republican Party had passed voting restrictions that “target African Americans with almost surgical precision” in an effort to “impose cures for problems that did not exist.” In other words, North Carolina’s GOP was trying to cure an epidemic of black people voting.
The ruling confirmed that conservatives in a crucial swing state had been engaging in unrepentant suppression of black voters — yet not one prominent Republican threatened to quit the GOP, as many had over the nomination of Donald Trump. There weren’t even vague condemnations of their own party’s resumption of this nation’s centuries-long effort to deny African-Americans the ballot.
But the same silence did not meet President Trump’s insistence this month that "many sides" were at fault for the violence at the “Unite the Right” protests in Charlottesville, Va., which left counter-protester Heather Heyer dead. Why has Trump’s comfort for white supremacists provoked bipartisan recriminations while the North Carolina’s GOP’s effort to deny black Americans the vote did not? Why are conservatives silent about reports that the Indiana GOP has limited early voting in urban areas while letting it flourish in suburban communities?
Perhaps Republicans know they get away with policies that enforce white supremacy through voting restrictions and mass incarceration, but to do this, they must reject public displays of bigotry. This unstated compromise is the heart of a strategy that has helped the party accumulate more political power than at any time since the Great Depression.
The Republican approach to white identity politics that has been reinforced in the last decade by adding new voting restrictions and more effective racial gerrymandering on top of felon disenfranchisement that combine to diminish the power of non-white voters. But it has been stoked for generations by an assault on public services that has fed by the dog whistle that “‘government’ equaled ‘coddling of nonwhites.” It’s just revealing that conservatives seem to summon outrage when a clerk says "Happy Holidays," but they can't find it when government excess victimizes someone who isn't white.
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