wingedbeast

Since Trump was elected, we've heard a number of explanations for the confounding question of how he got elected. Most of these explanations, at least the ones I've seen, have operated on an unstated assumption.

Conservatives elected Donald Trump because liberals called them racist!... for voting for Donald Trump. Or because liberals didn't respect them. Or because liberals wouldn't date them... Yeah, that's one of the reasons.

In short, we liberals weren't nice enough to conservatives or Republicans, thus forcing a portion of them to elect Donald Trump their nominee and the rest to hold their nose and vote for Trump. If only we were nicer.

I want to explore a few options that make a contradictory assumption. Let's look at the history of what got us here with the assumption that conservatives are responsible for their own choices. (If you need to take a moment to wrap your mind around that, I understand. Apparently, it just never occurs to some people.)

So, let's go through a bit of history and find out some of the reasons.

1. The Southern Strategy.

This is the phrase for a strategy that involves two prongs. One is uplifting small-town America/old fashioned values. This one includes whitewashing over the failings of old-fashioned values. This is involves idealizing such times as the 1950s as "A Simpler Time". This involves rural America being "real America".

This prong also involved taking ownership of the concept of patriotism away from the cityscape, away from higher education and liberal values, into the province of the small-town. At the same time, it included denigrating things like a college education and diversity and a number of other liberal strongholds.

The purpose in this prong is to give people an easy way to vote for you. On the purely emotional level, a vote for the conservative/Republican candidate is a vote for your own sociological dominance and good feelings. With this vote, a conservative can vote for a world wherein it's up to the rest of the world to conform to their values, not up to them to change to meet a changing world.

The other side of The Southern Strategy is, of course, racism. And, that, in a changing world, requires some bit of subtlety.

You start out in 1954 by saying, "N*****, n*****, n*****." By 1968, you can't say "n*****" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N*****, n*****."

— Lee Atwater, Republican Party strategist in an anonymous interview in 1981

This is the other prong, by volume, but it's really part and parcel with the first prong. The point is to validate and echo the racist feelings of the majority white voters. And, with dog whistle politics as explained by Atwater above, the point is to enable those who acknowledge their own racism to get their way without having to openly admit it and for those who don't to eath their racist cake and have their non-racist self-image too.

Nixon did this with talk of law and order. Reagan did this with talk of young bucks buying steak on food-stamps or welfare queens riding Cadillacs. By the time George W. Bush came along, the talk had moved onto a heavy focus on illegal immigration.

When Gingrich, in 2012, ran for the Republican Nomination, he spoke of having urban youths on free lunch programs clean the schools so they could "learn the value of work". "Urban" and "inner city" were often code for "black". And, despite my memory of that, it wasn't anything like a campaign-breaking controversy. It was a show that, in popular Republican mindset, the concept of "poverty" and the concept of "black" were deeply wedded together.

Decades of this effort wedded the Republican Party to thinly veiled racism. Republicans politicians repeatedly used this effort. It kept going until Paul Ryan claimed not to have ever heard the phrase "dog whistle politics". At the same time, conservative voters were willing to go along with it, either to get what they wanted or to get what they wanted without having to admit to any racial bias in what they wanted.

But, we just talked about Gingrich, so...

2. Reagan and Evangelicals

This isn't completely separate from The Southern Strategy.

Following the loss of tax exempt status for segregated private schools, the leaders of a collected block of Evangelical voters had a short time to find another goal to maintain and use that cohesion. That goal was a shift in position with regards to abortion.

Prior to that point, being an Evangelical did not mandate a pro-life position. In fact, Fred Clark in the Slacktivist Blog is, at the time of my writing this article, taking on a multi-part examination of a 1975 book by Norman Geisler. Ethics: Alternatives and Issues discusses abortion and solidly comes down on the view that women are people and embryos are potential life, not yet people.

That is a stark contrast from the position, of conservative Evangelicals, that pro-life is an essential element of being an Evangelical. The shift happened at this point in history.

Also, at this point in history was Evangelical Christian leaders throwing their political weight behind Ronald Reagan.

I was born in 1978. By the time I was politically aware enough to know that Ronald Reagan was the President of the United States, the President ending every address with "May God Bless the United States of America" was a defacto requirement of the office. Republicans and conservatives thoroughly owned the application of Christian values to legislation.

This wasn't to say that a liberal voter or a liberal legislator was incapable of being a Christian at the same time. In terms of personal identity, they had every bit as much legitimacy in that identity. In terms of social perception, things were different.

If you opposed gay rights, opposed legal and safe access to abortion, opposed welfare, etc., you had an easy time of claiming to be a Christian. You had people on television and in the newspaper and on the radio announcing that your views and Christianity were one and the same. They'd done the work. They'd found the verses in the Bible. And, where the verses seemed to conflict with your position, they'd also done the hermeneutic work of finding out why there wasn't really a conflict between the command to tend to the poor and opposition welfare.

If, on the other hand, you were in favor of gay rights, feminism, civil rights, welfare, abortion rights, etc., you had a harder fight. You especially had a harder fight if you were in favor of a strong wall of separation between church and state. In this case, you could be painted as not really a Christian or being selective about your Christianity or not applying your Christian faith to politics.

Within the US, Christianity already had an assumption of being the means of making people good. So, tying oneself to Christianity meant tying oneself to a public image and self-image of being a moral person. This tying of Christianity to conservatism and Republicans (especially through opposition to abortion) meant giving Christians who were politically conservative an easy way to think of themselves as good people without having to struggle with morality.

For Republican Politicians, this was a choice to take the positive reputation of Christianity and apply that to themselves. No longer would they need to make the case that they had the morality in the debate. They'd taken ownership of Christian values, family values, good old fashioned values, etc.

For the Republican voters, this was, among other things, a choice to reaffirm one's own ownership of morality. Business practices could be more selfish and more shortsighted while, at the same time, those who employed those practices could see themselves as good Christian men.

3. Gingrich and Science

Newt Gingrich would eventually make great use of the aforementioned Republican ownership of Christian and moral values while, at the same time, being a perfect example why that ownership is a lie. That's an aside more than anything.

What Newt Gingrich did was get rid of the Office of Technology Assessment. He claimed that this was to save money. If that was true, this was a textbook case of penny wise and pound foolish, because the office had always saved more money than it cost.

If, however, this was to get rid of an agency that imposed, upon Republicans, politically inconvenient science, it was an effective move.

At the time, Global Warming, was a theory predicting the future. The theory, itself, was far older than that. We're pumping more carbon into the atmosphere, carbon traps heat, more carbon means more heat trapped, more heat in the general atmosphere means more severe weather along with changes to weather patterns. This was all basic and obvious and consensus among climate scientists even then. And, it was all counter to business interests.

Republicans opposed business regulations in general on the principles of supply side economics. They also opposed business regulations on account of big donors having business. Keeping science on a level of individual connections and, otherwise, trusting in the good sense of elected representatives to understand science without such aid. Well, that enabled Republicans to accept science as they see fit, rather than having a federal agency publicly contradict them.

For Republican politicians, this meant an easier time not trusting the science, believing that the "science isn't in" and that there isn't a consensus when there is, in fact, 97 percent agreement among climate scientists. It meant less science getting in the way of what they want to be the science.

For the Republican voters, this meant very little. It was just a part of winning. Environmentalism was already considered a liberal thing, something they didn't worry overmuch about anyway.

So far, we have a common theme that will continue on. But, it's worthy of note that none of this makes it a foregone conclusion that the Republican Party would reach a point where its voters would choose Trump and its politicians would back him or, at their closest to taking a principled stand, avoid the opportunity to support him.

That's because we had two factors that forced moderation on the conservative Party.

Individual Republicans had to run for office, that meant that they needed a plurality of voters to vote for them. Going too far to the right would have them lose an election, possibly to a Democrat, thus losing the Party power. While Newt Gingrich maintained control over the Party, he couldn't eliminate the need for moderates and the need to moderate for broad appeal.

News reporting was standardized. It was early in the days of 24 Hour News Networks, with CNN being the main place to go. Conservatives would often complain of a liberal media bias, but slightly less loud was liberals complaining of conservative media bias.

Fox News and Karl Rove

4. Fox News "Fair and Balanced. We Report, You Decide."

Not just Fox news, but also Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk radio. Over time, conservatives news sources developed a means by which conservatives could isolate themselves from counter-argument and other positions, relying upon the conservative sources to present liberal and centrist perspectives. The ideological equalizing force of news was no longer there. Now, it was a force for ideological extremism.

5. Karl Rove and Redistricting

Karl Rove, AKA Bush's Brain in the administration of George W. Bush, had a particular goal. He wanted to establish a permanent Republican Majority. One of the ways he did that was by making use of the timing to redraw districts to produce safe districts for the Republican Party.

The result was that, because the districts were safe, Republicans didn't need to fear losing an election to someone on the left, but losing a primary to someone on the right.

That not only enabled, but mandated that all of the first three issues become even more pronounced. The ownership of Christian faith, the lauding of themselves as the real Americans, the mirroring and validation of bigotries. Republican politicians did it because that's how they got past the primary. Republican voters did it because they got to be even farther to the right, even more conservative in the face of what they imagined to be a PC culture.

That theme that I mentioned. Each of these elements that I've mentioned have been about acquiring or maintaining power, in this Democracy, without having to face the one thing that any Democracy is based upon, conversation in good faith. And, it worked because they played to voters who wanted to maintain an image of themselves as strong, moral people without having to give up on their various biases.

How can we do better, if not by being nicer and more respectful to them in general?

Republicans, both the politicians and the voters, have created a system in which getting what they want does not necessitate the risks of interacting with the world in good faith. Yet, they've also made themselves into beings who cannot maintain what they want in the face of a good faith debate.

That's what we have to do. Take the falsehoods they repeat and debunk them, repeat the truth over and over and over again.

It won't take just one time. Take a belief somebody has worked into their identity and prove it false, then they believe it all the harder. That's human nature. But, repeat it over and over and it might break through to some people.

There's no need to be rude. There's no need to spit in eyes of people just for disagreeing, but there's not much in the way of liberals doing that in the first place. But, rather than just being nicer and more respectful and letting Grandma say her racist things and letting that guy at work blather on, push back. Because pushback is needed.

It's not glamorous. You won't get big, instant victories. But, it's what's needed. That's how we win.

Remember matters of slavery, civil rights, women's suffrage, equal pay, etc. In the short term, liberals can lose and lose often. But, in the long term, liberals win so hard that conservatives pretend they were on our side.