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Has the Republican Brand Become Toxic?
With the loss of the election for mayor in Chicago and the loss of the supreme court election in Wisconsin, I am beginning to wonder if it is even possible for a conservative, and more particularly, a Republican to be elected in many places in the United States. According to the reporting and even the reaction from some Republican leaders, the issue in Wisconsin was abortion. It seems to me, that while this is likely a relevant issue, it is only part of a larger opposition to the Republican party and the conservative movement in major segments of the American population. It seems to me, that as conservatives, we have to face this issue squarely as we approach 2024.
After the terrible results from the 2022 midterms, one on-air pundit made a statement that I think explains not just 2022, but these two recent losses in Chicago and Wisconsin, he said, “The Republican brand is so toxic right now.” Remember Hillary’s description of the “deplorables:” they are “homophobic, xenophobic, racist, islamophobic…” That is how we conservatives are perceived by way too many people in this country. It is a large part of why we are going to have a hard time winning elections going forward. We are seen as bigots and at least supportive of white supremacy. It is almost unthinkable for a young person to vote for a Republican today. I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am.
We can complain all we want about how unfair the media has been to conservatives and of course, to Trump. We can list all the ways that we have been deplatformed and shadow-banned. We can describe all the ways that we suffer under a two-tiered justice system. But, in the end, we are complaining to ourselves and among ourselves. Our complaints gain no traction outside of our websites and news channels. This is a huge problem that I see no one even attempting to deal with much less change. Part of why they feel justified in their abuse of conservatives is what I said before. For many in the media, conservatives are evil personified. It is why Biden could invoke “Jim Crow 2.0” when Georgia passed its election reform laws, and major corporations would pile on to punish the state for its decision. It is why we can be described as a “threat to democracy” and no one in the media bats an eye.
I had some hope that Elon Musk, Matt Taibbi, Michael Schellenberger, and even before them Glen Greenwald would penetrate the so-called Media Bubble, but it simply hasn’t happened. They have just been lumped in with the rest of the “Right-Wing Crazies” on Fox News and almost completely ignored. In other words, honest journalism reflected in the recent “conversions” of liberals like Bari Weiss and Sasha Stone along with Musk and the others hasn’t moved the needle.
I continue to believe that the upcoming hearings in the House on corruption in the FBI and DOJ, the hearings on the Biden family, and hearings on government induced censorship of the internet will finally break through to the American public. However, all of these hearings and their results will be “filtered” through the larger media, and we have been repeatedly dismayed by their ability to deflect, ignore, and spin the reporting of all of these things. We already have a large history with all the ways they ignored and denied the Steele Dossier, the obvious FISA abuse, the Hunter Biden laptop, and now the collaboration between federal agencies and the social media giants.
All this to say that we are in serious trouble as a movement with hopes to restore sanity and conservative values to American society. We face unprecedented headwinds when it comes to the major institutions in American society. I honestly don’t know what we can do to change any of this. But I also know that we have to make the attempt. We certainly can’t keep doing what we are doing, which is complaining to each other and pointing out all the ways that we are being abused. No one on the other side cares, and in fact, most of them think that we deserve all of that abuse and more. Nor can we fight among ourselves and accuse each other of being “RINOs” and members of the “Uniparty.” We have to find a way to stand up for conservatism and conservative values the way that progressives unify around their so-called progressive “values.” This is an existential fight that we almost can’t afford to lose. Biden was correct about one thing, this really is a battle for the soul of America.
Nor can we fight fire with fire. January 6th revealed beyond a shadow of doubt that if we adopt their tactics of protest and riot (see BLM and all of the George Floyd protests) they will make us pay. This so-called “insurrection” has already been baked into the narrative of the Republican party and it is part of the reason we lost these recent elections. I have no idea how we break out of the current stereotype that paints us as “semi-fascists.” Part of what makes this so discouraging to me personally is the centrality of Donald Trump in the narrative. It feels like a complete “Catch-22” scenario. It appears that all of the indictments and scandals surrounding Trump guarantee that he will be the Republican nominee, and that he will just as surely lose the 2024 election. He is the epitome of the semi-fascist narrative: a narcissistic demagogue who wants to take over America. It doesn’t matter that this isn’t true, it is the story that so many people believe, and which will determine their vote.
The elections in Chicago and Wisconsin seem to me to be a foreshadowing of what lies ahead for the entire country. We desperately need to move away from the failed policies of the Left, but the voters keep electing Leftist politicians primarily because they aren’t Republicans. Until we face up to how toxic our “brand” has become I see no hope for us to restore sane governance to American society. I am not talking about pandering or compromising our values to appeal to the Left or even to moderates. We have to learn how to present our values in a compelling way. For too long the Left has presented themselves as the defenders of the poor, of women, of children, and as the party of compassion and the defenders of justice and equality. We have to learn how to use language the way that they do only legitimately and in the service of all that is right and true. They patronize the poor, women, and minorities. They are the party of paternalism. Their patronizing has, in fact, kept many of these communities in semi-permanent dependency and poverty. If there is structural racism in America it exists on the Left not on the Right. For too long we have allowed the Left to get away with its false narrative. We have to learn how to push back and to expose them for the ideologues they are.
Published in Elections
This is one of those instances when a Like button is not enough. This comment hits the bulls eye.
I agree with all of this and would add another element: national social chaos.
I asked myself last night: “Would I have voted for Donald Trump in 2020 if I had had a viable alternative like DeSantis?” I did not vote for Trump in the 2016 primaries. My first choice was Jeb Bush and my second was, don’t laugh, Bobby Jindal. Trump’s style of making personal attacks on people goes against everything I stand for in political discourse. It’s why I belong to Ricochet. He is not someone I could ever relate to in any way in any setting. I would much prefer someone who had some sense of debate decorum. And I’ve never agreed with him on foreign policy. But, to my surprise, his work during his first term was fantastic and much more productive than I expected. He made some lasting changes that we needed.
Nevertheless, here I am. I seem to have a choice now.
This is where the debate in my head got interesting. I cannot separate the Never Trumpers’ and Democrats’ unrelenting, visceral, continuous, seven-year-long assault on Trump and then the J6ers in my inner debate. It did happen, and I can’t ignore it now. I cannot answer my own question.
If I’m feeling that way, others are too. In the grand scheme of things, the Democrats and Never Trumpers really did affect the course of history, I think. They introduced a chaos and its resulting uncertainty that may have dire consequences for the entire world. As John Adams is said to have said, “War takes on a life of its own.”
It kind of makes me think of the persecution of the early Christians and the resulting chaos. I’ve been reading Acts very slowly [ :) ] for the last two years, and I’m getting a new sense of the first century AD. It’s interesting to read it now during our own upheaval.
By the way, isn’t it interesting that the riots that were plaguing the country during the Trump administration–including the shocking takeover of the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle–aren’t happening anymore?
My sense that our country has been reeling from some interior and exterior destabilizing efforts and forces is accurate, I think.
It does seem as though the Republican Party is a target. I imagine that’s because we’re the only thing standing in the way of a complete transformation into a European-style welfare state.
Looks like the GOP TX State House members have voted to undermine school choice bill. About half of the GOP voted with all the Dems to block educational savings accounts.
In 2015, what I didn’t like about Donald Trump was the way he expressed himself using a bulldozer when he could have used a tweezer. What I did like about Donald Trump was what he said he would do as President and the way he viewed the USA and our place in the world. I called him a pragmatic conservative. He got his ideas from life experience, not from reading books. And to my mind his ideas were sound. What I loved about Donald Trump was that in spite of almost total adversity, he did what he said he would do. Today I fear that the MAGA movement belongs to Donald Trump. His most ardent supporters view him as almost beyond human. Several commenters here have said that Trump doesn’t seem to care about having the MAGA movement last beyond himself. That is worrisome to me and makes me question Trump’s authenticity. Yet, in the face of all odds, he continues to fight.
I didn’t know much about Jindal when he started campaigning, but the more I saw of him the more I liked him. I think he would have made a good president if he had been elected.
While we don’t have a National Health Service like Great Britain, overall I think our per-capita welfare spending is already pretty much the same as most wealthy European countries.
Who can know for sure, but I suspect it’s an attempt to keep as many factions in the fold as possible. Keeping the union intact.
The Republican brand is clearly toxic to Affluent White Female Liberals (AWFLs).
Yet the party spends millions chasing a voting bloc they have no chance with instead of the more likely prospects among working class men.
“Who’s this guy FICA and why does he have all my money?” used to be sufficient. But that’s before all the schools went full-on marxist.
No, he really didn’t.
Has the swamp been drained? Was the wall built? Was Obamacare replaced?
He did tax cuts, a lot of talking, and a few good educational reforms (mostly thanks to De Vos).
He was better than the alternative, but he really didn’t accomplish much. He brought us lockdowns and several trillion in excess spending. Remember Fauci said that Trump was doing pretty much everything Fauci told him to do.
They could have the AWFLs if they spent time and money creating women’s programming instead of letting Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg brainwash them all.
Years ago, I think it was Glen Reynolds who remarked that conservatives need to buy up failing women’s magazines. And today, create TV shows, streaming channels, and websites.
The recall of the San Francisco district attorney last year seems to show that even in the most leftist parts of the US, some aspects of left-ism can be defeated.
I listened to the 538 podcast after the San Francisco district attorney got booted by the voters and one of people on the panel said that San Francisco isn’t a progressive city. One of the other panelists (they are all on the left) wouldn’t let him get away with that statement, pointing out what a small percentage of San Francisco voters are registered Republican.
Clearly the so-called progressives will overreach and the voters will seek at alternative. It’s just a question of whether the GOP is in a position to take advantage and make the sale to the voters.
In the 21st century, the Democrats have held a majority of the US House of Representatives from 2007-2011 and from 2019-2023, a total of 8 out of 22 years.
Who’d they replace him with? I haven’t heard that SF is much better since then.
Chicago just rejected their incompetent left-wing mayor, and replaced her with someone who appears to be even more left-wing (too soon to determine where he stands on the incompetence scale)
It’s an interesting polling result to me, and I wonder how accurate it is–about women, that is. I read a few years ago that, for example, women business owners were voting Republican across the board, which makes a lot of sense intuitively.
On Ricochet and the Wall Street Journal, which admittedly are the only places I read comments, it has often seemed to me that the men have been much harder on Trump than the women have been.
It’s something I noticed about teachers in schools. The men teachers were much harder on the boys, and the women teachers were much harder on the girls.
That doesn’t, of course, speak to the fact that the Democratic Party has more women in it, in general. However, it does address the numbers problems in that the candidate the Republicans run with, if the party truly has more men in it than women, has to pass muster with the men in the party. I suspect–just guessing–that Trump was an embarrassment to Republican men: “He does not represent me in any way!” In general, Republican women didn’t seem to have that problem with him. There are millions of exceptions here, but that was my sense of the situation, that actually Republican men were more likely to react negatively to Trump-the-person.
There are more glittering generalities in those two paragraphs than my head can handle. :) :) It’s why I really avoid the men-women debates. They are so big as to be practically meaningless. :)
This is a really important point. The American voters are all up in arms about abortion, while the economy goes into the tank. We are losing any semblance of energy independence, and energy prices are only going to get worse. And yet people buy the lie that Republicans are a threat to democracy. They are thinking ideologically. We will see what happens when we face a real recession. This is what was so disheartening about the recent mid-term elections.
Fair point. To be clear, I am not recommending anyone purchase rental property in San Francisco.
It’s just that every now and then even very “progressive” cities get fed up. Think of New York City when they eventually elected Rudy Giuliani.
Granted, Rudy Giuliani is pro-abortion and pro-gun control. But for NYC, that was a move to the right. Bloomberg came after and did lots of nanny-state stuff, but retained stop and frisk.
Then NYC elected DeBlasio and things went downhill. I say this as someone who has never been to NYC.
The MAGA movement won’t last beyond Trump and it shouldn’t. He coined the phrase and it has since been Alinskied beyond all recognition.
We’ll need a new phrase – Morning In America didn’t even last into a second term.
And it will also be attacked. And discarded.
The kids all ‘know’ that the money they should have been making is being kept among a group of investors.
They are wrong to think that this money would represent much of a raise if they did get it.
But they are not wrong to think that there is a leeching of profits that is broken.
Discarding the term is different than discarding the movement. I don’t think the movement is going anywhere until the underlying issues driving it are gone. It might be called something different or it might emphasize one facet more than another, but it’ll persist.
Reagan solved the foreign policy leg of the stool for us. Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama installed a new leg for us – America First.
The Tea Party reacted to the fiscal insanity and were crushed. They didn’t go away, but on that topic it’s hard to argue that there’s much of a difference between the parties, aside from the exception of the Contract With America years.
Trump is the first to articulate the America First foreign policy leg and is teh first to recognize, acknowledge, and try to deliver for the social issues leg.
If the social conservatives get crushed too, then what’s left to salvage?
The wonders of ‘free trade’.
Wasn’t Morning In America the theme for the second campaign? After Reagan had turned things around. I thought Make America Great Again was Reagan’s theme in the first campaign. I wasn’t voting age yet back then.
I believe you are correct.
As good an explanation as there is, I suppose.
Ron Johnson won re-election in Wisconsin just 5 months ago. So, perhaps it would be overreacting to conclude that Republicans can’t win there.
Also, the candidate that lost the race for State Supreme Court. He lost by a similarly wide margin in 2020.
So, maybe the answer is this: Don’t keep running the same losing candidates over and over.
This is sort of my predicament, too. I was highly skeptical of Trump in 2016, but not at all skeptical in 2020. Now I’m skeptical of Trump again, but I think that is more the result of the unending anti-Trump drumbeat (even here on Ricochet) and not so much what Trump says or doesn’t say.
So if the Right hates Trump and says things like, He’s responsible for the last three Republican election losses, and if he’s still Public Enemy No. 1 in the hyperbolic anti-Trump, NT, MSM and White House rhetoric, I figure he’s got to be a real threat somehow to the PTB.
And this leaves me with the question: What will Trump actually do? Well, first of all, he’s serious about running for President in an environment of betrayal and illegal persecutions and prosecutions. This in itself makes me think that he thinks he can still physically survive and take good political advantage of a potential win.
I’ve never thought that Trump was a “narcissist” in its pathological meaning. And I doubt he’s throwing himself up against a nail-covered wall just to be a martyr.
So I hope that he has a plan to win and a plan to govern, a plan that he can accomplish, and can drain the CIA and bureaucratic swamp and stifle the globalists’ tyrannical corporate oligarchical plan.
I see no one else that can or will do anything other than gently manage the US’s decline and make soothing sounds.
This is a simplistic view.
The factors in this election were entirely different.
I think this is misplaced. The swamp drained Trump, because he was up against a superior force. The wall was built in part, but the part left unbuilt was the fault of the judiciary. 0bamacare not being REPEALED (it didn’t need to be replaced at all) was the fault of the Republican congress. At least Trump tried to do what he said he would do once in office, which is a lot more than most Republicans in memory have done.
“He tried”. Great.
That and $5 will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
But I was responding to the claim that Trump DID what he said he would. He clearly and objectively did not.
Well, he succeeded at other things that no one wanted to see done. But, YES, trying and failing is more important that not even trying at all or being scared of failure. If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.