Throughout this fetid garbage bag of an election season, republicans have been clutching the proverbial pearls over the odious brand of populism offered by their presidential election standard-bearer, Donald Trump. Indeed, dozens of republicans who truly believe in putting America first have decided either to sit out the presidential race, vote for a third-party candidate or vote for Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton. If traditional democratic voters go to the polls in numbers that even approach those reached in 2012, their votes, combined with those of republicans who actually give a damn about America’s future, could send Secretary Clinton into the White House by a landslide in spite of the FBI Director’s blatant attempt to swing the election to Trump. But regardless of whether or not Secretary Clinton is victorious next week, republican leaders would do well to engage in some serious introspection regarding their role in getting us to where we are today. A full 40% of American voters are drinking Donald Trump’s toxic cocktail of bigotry and fear mongering. Though they would not admit it, such a combination highlights both the core of republican political appeals over the last half century and the abject failure of their plutocratic, special interest policy agenda in improving the lot of America’s working class.
President Obama argues that eight years of mindless, reflexive obstruction, reckless brinksmanship and tolerance if not encouragement of vituperative political rhetoric helped to create the Trump candidacy. We here at WokeCitizen believe that the unprecedented treatment of America’s first president of color represents merely the crescendo of cynical, Southern Strategy-style politics and that the chickens of ignorance and bigotry now roosting in the GOP have been on their way home for quite some time. From President Nixon’s initiation of the horribly failed “War on Drugs”, to President Reagan’s states’ rights speech in the county where civil rights workers were murdered and buried in an earthen dam, to President George H.W. Bush’s “Willie Horton” ads, to Mitt Romney’s assertion that delegates at the NAACP were looking for “free stuff”, to dozens if not hundreds of well-documented demonstrations of racially hostile rhetoric and policy actions in between, republican candidates have sought ballot-box success through cynical appeals to resentment of the proverbial “other”. Much of the time, such highlighting of unattractive otherness has been based on race. Is it any wonder that the current republican nominee seeks office in part through the vilification of Muslims and Mexican immigrants and the promise to protect white people from them?
Throughout this history, republicans have advanced an economic ideology that victimized working class people of all races even as working class whites continued to harken to their siren song of racial animus. As company after company decided that it was in the best interest of the shareholder to move jobs from the industrial midwest to far-away lands, republicans told white working class Americans that affirmative action was the source of their problems finding well-paying work. When people of color sought unemployment, retraining and other support to recover from devastating plant closures in urban areas, republicans told white working class Americans that those lazy people were looking for handouts, that they should stop having babies out of wedlock, get off their backsides and get to work. White working class Americans bought into this blame game and dutifully voted republicans who would protect them from the predatory other.
While in power, republicans pursued a policy agenda that had little to nothing to do with strengthening America’s working class and many of the most vulnerable members of that working class went right along with it. As investments in technology resulted in an explosion of productivity, the benefits of which rose to the shareholder class as wages stagnated, republicans told white working class Americans that more tax cuts for the wealthy would accelerate business formation and thus jobs. As businesses consolidated into ever-larger corporate behemoths and extracted synergies from “rationalization” of the labor force, republicans told working class white Americans that more deregulation and more privatization would remove the yoke of government from their lives and that the private sector would respond with more jobs at ever-increasing pay. In addition to protecting them from the “others”, white working class American bought into republican promises that the economic benefits of tax cuts, deregulation and government restraint would trickle down to them. Of course the trickle that most working class Americans are feeling on their heads is not the economic benefits of republican policies and after decades of uncritical support, white working class Americans are in full revolt.
Into this mix steps Donald Trump, who gives them the latest set of “others” to resent and who offers a simplistic and simpleminded policy agenda that he has no ability to execute even if he were inclined to do so once in office – except, of course for giving himself and those like him more tax cuts. He has derided trade and economic policies that supposedly drive manufacturing overseas as if the exodus of manufacturing jobs wasn’t already a half-century in the making. What’s more, trump hasn’t demonstrated a single scintilla of concern for working class people of any race for any of his 70 years on earth. He uses foreign-made products in each and every one of his businesses. In short, he is once again playing working class white people for chumps as have every republican candidate before him. The only difference? Trump is making overt appeals to the resentments, the fears, the insecurities and the bigotries of working class whites where many republican candidates before him were only slightly more subtle.
One cannot deny that a huge percentage of the republican base now rejects republican economic policy prescriptions and have embraced a populism that runs completely counter to entrenched republican ideology. As well, one might reasonably argue that if not for a half century of appeals to racial animosity and other flavors of bigotry, much of the current republican base wouldn’t actually be republican. Donald Trump has exposed both how deeply that bigotry has infested the once grand old party and how decidedly out of touch republican policy priorities are with the needs of working class people of all races.
WokeCitizen 