Republicans Tell Us Who They Are By Their Votes

Growing up in a Republican family in the late 1950's, 1960's and early 1970's, members of the GOP came across as being a mix of so-called country club Republicans, the religiously moderate and those supportive of fiscal restraint and smaller, more efficient government.  Things began to change with the election of Ronald Reagan who first invited the evangelicals and scamvangelists into the GOP "big tent."  George W. Bush courted these individuals by his cynical campaign opposing gay marriage and over time, these extremists, many of whom were also white supremacists (remember why the Southern Baptist Convention came to be) infiltrated the GOP base and tragically were elected to county and city committees across the country.  Some Republican "friends" cling to the fantasy that the GOP is still the party of my youth and young adulthood.  In truth, nothing could be farther from the truth and this fantasy results in such people voting with people they'd never, ever allow into their homes or into their county clubs and yacht clubs.  Yet, by their votes for Republican candidates, these individuals are telling the world who they really are.  It's not pretty. Indeed, its down right ugly which explains why so many college educated suburban voters have fled the GOP.  Two columns, one in the New York Times and one in the Washington Post look at what these GOP voters are telling the world about themselves.  First, these excerpts from the Post: 

In November 1991, I stood in the packed, smoke-filled American Legion hall in the nearly all-White New Orleans suburb of Metairie. A day later in Baton Rouge, I watched a chilling development unfold on election night.

In Metairie, White men and women in their 20s, 30s and 40s, some decked out in campaign T-shirts and hats, whooped up a storm for the demagogic, ex-Klansman Republican David Duke, who was then running for governor. In Baton Rouge, coiffured senior citizens in suits and ties and cocktail dresses mingled with people clad in jeans and cowboy boots to cheer on the same racist bigot and antisemite. But those things weren’t the shocker.

The searing takeaway was not Duke himself, but nearly 700,000 Louisianans who, knowing what he stood for, voted for him anyway.

On Sept. 30, 2016, after closely watching nearly two years of Donald Trump’s primary and general election campaigns, I wrote about the dangers of his winning. He had been revealed as an ignorant, undisciplined, ranting bully who exaggerated and lied without shame. His tough-guy masculinity was fakery. Trump was a coward, I said at the time, who picks on women, demeans people of color and is thoroughly lacking in human decency.

“What does sicken and alarm, and what ought to concentrate African American minds, is the thought of Trump with the powers of the presidency in his hands. Therein lies the danger.”

On Election Day 2016, nearly 63 million Americans voted for Trump, giving him more than 300 electoral votes and the White House. The takeaway? They, too, knew where he stood and voted for him anyway.

Four years later, the impeached, scandal-scarred president went before the American people once again. By then, Trump was known all too well. In his losing bid for reelection, Trump attracted 74.2 million votes.

So, it comes as no surprise — deep disappointment, yes; a jolt, no — that Trump’s foremost Republican critic, Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), would get a thrashing at the polls in 2022, losing renomination by 37 points to Trump devotee Harriet Hageman. Wyoming Republicans knew where Trump stood on Cheney.

The story is the same in Arizona, where Kari Lake narrowly won the Republican primary for governor, Blake Masters prevailed in the Senate GOP primary and Mark Finchem took the Republican nomination for secretary of state.  Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers went down in flames in a state Senate primary for the same reason. Voters knew where Trump stood on all four . . . . This is not a recital of complaints about Donald Trump. It’s about people by the millions who know where Trump stands and slavishly side with him anyway.

Trump holds cultlike control over Republican voters. They aren’t blank slates. They know what the struggle for economic and racial justice is about. They know, too, what Democrats are talking about when they go on about expanding access to health care and reducing prescription drug prices, or confronting the climate crisis, or advancing racial and gender equity, or treating immigrants with dignity and decency

So, when it comes to elections, bear in mind what’s really at stake. Donald Trump’s name will not appear on any midterm election ballot.

The challenge is to turn out more voters who want the country to keep moving forward and upward than voters bent on empowering candidates to stand in for Trump and all he represents.

That kind of test was there with Duke in Louisiana. Also in 2020, when Trumpism was met head-on and taken down. . . . . The alternative is almost too dreadful to imagine.

The column in the Times likewise looks at what Republican voters are saying about themselves and the threat they pose to the nation.  Here are highlights:

Tuesday’s primary in Wyoming delivered Liz Cheney a resounding defeat. She is one of the few Republicans in Congress willing to resist Donald Trump’s election lies, and Republican voters punished her for it. . . . She mainstreamed a political principle that many liberals had held all along.

[H]er loss does crystallize something for us that many had already known: that the bar to clear in the modern Republican Party isn’t being sufficiently conservative but rather being sufficiently obedient to Donald Trump and his quest to deny and destroy democracy.

We must stop thinking it hyperbolic to say that the Republican Party itself is now a threat to our democracy. I understand the queasiness about labeling many of our fellow Americans in that way. I understand that it sounds extreme and overreaching. But how else are we to describe what we are seeing?

[A] Washington Post-University of Maryland poll published in January found that the percentage of Republicans who say that violence against the government can sometimes be justified had climbed to 40 percent, compared with just 23 percent of Democrats. It should also be noted that 40 percent of white people said that violence could be justified compared with just 18 percent of Black people.

We have to stop saying that all these people are duped and led astray, that they are somehow under the spell of Trump and programmed by Fox News.

Propaganda and disinformation are real and insidious, but I believe that to a large degree, Republicans’ radicalization is willful.

Republicans have searched for multiple election cycles for the right vehicle and packaging for their white nationalism, religious nationalism, nativism, craven capitalism and sexism.

There was a time when they believed that it would need to be packaged in politeness — compassionate conservatism — and the party would eventually recommend a more moderate approach intended to branch out and broaden its appeal — in its autopsy after Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss.

But Trump offered them an alternative, and they took it: Instead of running away from their bigotries, intolerances and oppression, they would run headlong into them. They would unapologetically embrace them.

This, to many Republicans, felt good. They no longer needed to hide. They could live their truths, no matter how reprehensible. They could come out of the closet, wrapped in their cruelty.

But the only way to make this strategy work and viable, since neither party dominates American life, was to back a strategy of minority rule and to disavow democracy.

Republicans are the threat to our democracy because their own preferred form of democracy — one that excludes and suppresses, giving Republicans a fighting chance of maintaining control — is in danger.

For modern Republicans, democracy only works — and is only worth it — when and if they win.