There is an old adage in sales, “When the spouse is selling your product for you, smile and nod and be quiet.” Well, “be quiet” is actually the phrase that
goes by the initials, STFU. But you get the idea—the best person to make your sales pitch is a member of the family. So it goes with today’s Republican Party.
Increasingly, the GOP nominating process is serving Democrats—peeling back the layers of obfuscation and exposing the weaknesses and inadequacies of its likely nominees. That’s different from past contests. To understand why, a little history is useful.
The contemporary Republican majority—since the Reagan era—has been crafted from three distinct groups: captains of industry, evangelical-religious literalists and bitter dumbasses. These last folks are the people Reagan recruited by telling them they were smarter than actually-educated people. They are a significant group of voters but have always had little actual influence. Historically, they have been the followers, wrangled by rich guys in the same way evangelicals are herded by preachers. A pander here, a pander there and they were on board.
The rich guys have always had outsized influence in the party. They’re smart, they’re ruthless and they have the ability to buy the efforts of right wing think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. They hire these nonprofit marketing firms to promote economic mythology like Trickle-Down Economics and ideas like turning over the Social Security Trust Fund to Wall Street. Turns out that uneducated folks are pretty gullible.
Without the alignment of all three groups—the ruthless rich, religious literalists and the gullible—Republicans can’t craft a vote majority. Even when the three groups are in alignment, they don’t amount to more than a bare majority.
But right now, these three elements are at war. Reagan’s pact with the devil—that smart is stupid and stupid is smart—is coming home to roost.
Rich guys picked Mitt Romney and in other years that would have been enough. Until recently he (and they) have assumed he was a lock on the nomination. But they underestimated the strength of religious bigotry among the party’s evangelical wing. Remember, many of these right-wing evangelicals are literalists. They believe that voice in their head (speaking about US politics) is God. They believe that Election Day is a battle in the war with the devil. And at least some of them, those who hear these voices most loudly, will never vote for a heathen. To them, being a Mormon is the same as being a soldier for Lucifer.
No comments:
Post a Comment