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Monday, December 02, 2013

GOP Turns On Its Base

Joan Walsh just noticed something I've been getting more and more curious about lately:
Does any modern political party besides the GOP hold a huge segment of its base in contempt? I’ve written a lot about how Republicans have failed to make inroads with Latinos, young voters or women since their 2012 defeat, but what’s really interesting is the way they continue to deride many of their older, white, working-class voters, too. When Mitt Romney insulted “the 47 percent” of Americans who pay no federal income taxes, he failed to notice that the vast majority of them are white, most of them white seniors, the most reliably Republican voters in the country.
This is the flip side of Fox's Stuart Varney identifying his politics with those of the dinosaur aristos of Downton Abbey and declaring the popularity of the show will destroy liberalism.

When Sarah Palin roars about The Real America the denialism about the really real diversifying, urbanizing, secularizing, planetizing America is a palpable thing. But what happens when the bubble bursts and the real Real America becomes undeniable -- and reveals itself to be not so very terrible after all? As people sign up for the ACA and find that getting better, cheaper coverage (or getting coverage at all after a lifetime of needless neglect) isn't actually the same thing as living in totalitarian Russia, more and more Republican pundits are growing irritated with their feckless base, seeing them as useless eaters without the backbone to fight the good plutocratic fight to the bitter end. Jabs at fat hicks in the Styx with diabetes on the couch are beginning to prickle the surface tension of the reactionary commentariat -- you know the ones, bone skinny fascist ladies with long blond hair and suited pseudo-intellectual brutes who fancy themselves British squires, lifelong Manhattanites who go to Broadway shows paid for by writing populist articles praising belligerent country western music they don't listen to and declaring gun safety regulations hate speech against hunters they wouldn't be caught dead talking to themselves.

The majority of food stamp beneficiaries have always been poor white folks, even as white millionaires deride the black blackety black black Obama as the "Food Stamp President" (get it? get it?), but as the austerians keep the jobless recovery in force and slash food, unemployment, and education support for precarious majorities of every color it's almost as if the wingnuts are starting to worry some of their Base voters cannot be counted on to hold true to the white-racist politics of resentment and fear on which the plutocrats have so long depended.

As the coalition of white racists and patriarchal pricks bought and paid for by plutocrats to vote against their objective interests begins conspicuously to fray, the plutocrats are giving vent to the contempt and hostility they have always truly felt for the easily deceived majorities on whom they have always depended to maintain their unearned positions and privileges in even a notionally democratic polity.

Needless to say, turning on their Base will only expedite the collapse of the Movement Conservative GOP already well underway as that Base has grown ever more demographically marginal anyway. But I expect these expressions of contempt to increase and to amplify. The ugly self-congratulatory id of the elites won't be able to constrain its howls of impotent rage as it dies. That won't make any kind of practical electoral sense, of course, but it makes every kind of sense psychologically. When it comes to the horrible attitudes of Republicans, they have never been able to stop themselves from making a spectacle of themselves.

1 comment:

jollyspaniard said...

That contempt hasn't gone unnoticed by the base judging by the comment section on Hot Air.

Don't underestimate the right's ability to heal that rift however. The right in Canada was fractured, they split into three parties at one point but after less than 10 years in the political wilderness there was a Unite The Right movement and they are now running the country.