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The Republican Party’s Problem
The Liz Cheney brouhaha brought to sharp relief the problems the Republican Party faces with regard to Trump and Trump-supporters. Liz and her crowd firmly believe that the way to deal with Trump is to rebuke and circumscribe him for his attempt to steal a second term through a campaign of lies about the election.
The problem with this is this: There are big chunk of the Republican electorate that doesn’t trust the elite mainstream Republicans that Cheney typifies. This chunk includes not only populist white working-class people but also the black and brown people who defected to Trump. They trust Trump.
Why should they trust the Republican mainstream, who has never given a rat’s rear about their plight vis-a-vis jobs, wages, and social issues? Who has never spoken to them or reached out to them and still doesn’t? Even worse, who condemn them as insurrectionists, just like the Democrats do!
Why should they not trust Trump, who recognized and acknowledged their concerns, and then when elected actually did something about them or tried to.
By their lights, the Big Lie is no lie. The election really was stolen just like everything else has been stolen from them, and they were out to right that injustice by standing up on Jan. 6th. They don’t think Trump was lying, either. Trump was speaking the truth for them.
Most Republican politicians know what Cheney and her supporters don’t. To go against Trump is to brand oneself as one of the Republicans who don’t care about them, the people. And this isn’t about a cult of personality, it’s about a specific set of policy priorities. Most Republican pols obviously know this, but they apparently couldn’t get Cheney to understand it.
Yes, the party will eventually move on from Trump, but it will take time. And it will take someone capable of replacing Trump as the champion of people like his supporters. It will take someone who can fight for the people and yet … uh … tweet nicely.
Published in Politics
“Base” is another of those words that may be too imprecise to be useful.
I suspect most supporters of each party are pretty much normal Americans. But it does seem that the people who are more extreme in their views tend to be treated differently by the two sides, with extreme Democrats being elevated to positions of influence within the party (e.g., the squad), while extreme Republicans are marginalized and considered an embarrassment.
This could be because the media treat the two groups differently, downplaying extremists on the left while focusing on extremists on the right, but I suspect it has more to do with special interests, which I think have much more influence over the left. Republicans and conservatives are, generally speaking, expected to uphold the status quo, not transform it. There’s a broad but relatively uninterested (nod to @KentForrester there) constituency for upholding the status quo, and a fractured and noisy group of constituencies for changing it.
The left is far more a collection of special interests that they have to manage as opposed to a set of principles.
The socialist Dems did it first, the reaction in the gOp base is mere physics.
That is as may be, but it’s just as bad.
I admit that I haven’t got a clue as to your larger point (prior to or after my comment above) and, to be honest, I really don’t care…but if you are drawing any sort of equivalence between the opposing sides shown posing for their respective bases in my graphic then I am afraid you fall within the realm of the galactically stupid (see reference here). But that’s just me…
You seem nice.
It’s an illusion. :-)
Physics is physics. No bad to it. Very natural.
Physics is supposed to be an equal and OPPOSITE reaction, not a going-long-the-same reaction.
But I find myself wondering if Pelosi was able to stand up again, on her own.