“To understand the corruption, chaos, and general insanity that is continuing to engulf the Trump campaign and much of the Republican Party right now, it helps to understand the predicate embraced by many Trump supporters: If Joseph R. Biden Jr. wins the presidency, America dies.” – Peter Wehner
As Mike Pence put it at the RNC: “It’s not so much whether America will be more conservative or more liberal, more Republican or more Democrat. The choice in this election is whether America remains America.”
Joe Biden (and any other Democrat who might have been nominated), Democrats/liberals, and the broad, diverse coalition the Democratic Party represents – all pose an existential threat to the United States of America in the minds of the Trump base. Opposing the Democrats is the raison d’être of the Republican Party and the glue that sticks Trump’s base to Trump.
When asked what the contemporary Republican Party stands for, a senior GOP aid replied:
“Owning the libs and pissing off the media. That’s what we believe in now.” – Brendan Buck
David French, former National Review writer, quotes Buck and then adds [emphasis added]:
I can boil it down into three words—“fighting the left.”
You don’t need a platform to accomplish that goal. You don’t even need to succeed in governing the nation. Your pandemic response can fail. You can watch cities start to burn. Unemployment can soar. But behind it all is a bedrock animosity so strong that any success (such as the excellent diplomatic achievement of an Israeli/United Arab Emirates peace deal) is something your opponent could not possibly achieve and any failure would be orders of magnitude worse under an opposing regime.
And note how these beliefs are fundamentally unfalsifiable. How can you “prove” a Democrat would have achieved the same success as a Republican? How can you “prove” that their failures would have been worse?
Negative polarization is utterly futile and destructive as a governing philosophy.
Wehner writes [emphasis added]:
I know plenty of Trump supporters, and I know many of them to be people of integrity in important areas of their lives. Indeed, some are friends I cherish. But if there is a line Donald Trump could cross that would forfeit the loyalty of his core supporters—including, and in some respects especially, white evangelical Christians—I can’t imagine what it would be.
Consider Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, a spectacular failure as illustrated by comparing the U.S. (which leads the world in cases and deaths, and where COVID-19 is still out of control) with other countries confronting the pandemic:
Yet any erosion of support among Trump’s base has been barely detectable:
“Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”
Seen through the prism of a worldview embraced by Congressional Republicans and Fox News Channel, the possibility of a Democrat in the White House threatens the very fabric of America. The base accepts Trump at his word when he says, “… I alone can fix it,” whatever it may be — all evidence to the contrary.
That’s a consequence of negative partisanship (which FNC and the conservative media universe create and sustain). That’s owning the libs and defying the reality-based news media.
But that’s not all that’s going on here. The white folks who embrace Trump most tightly would also appear to fear a democracy in which increasing numbers of people of color, especially Black people; Muslims and other people of faith, apart from Christians ; and dark-skinned immigrants all have a say in governing our nation.
I’ll explore that issue and white identity politics in a future post.
(Image: PBS NewsHour.)
