Quoting longtime Republican Strategist Stuart Stevens's book, It Was All a Lie:
“As much as I’d love to go to bed at night reassuring myself that Donald Trump was some freak product of the system — a ‘black swan,’” Stevens writes, “I can’t do it”:
I can’t keep lying to myself to ward off the depressing reality that I had been lying to myself for decades. There is nothing strange or unexpected about Donald Trump. He is the logical conclusion of what the Republican Party became over the last fifty or so years, a natural product of the seeds of race, self-deception, and anger that became the essence of the Republican Party. Trump isn’t an aberration of the Republican Party; he is the Republican Party in a purified form.
“I have no one to blame but myself,” he declares on the first page. “What I missed was one simple reality: it was all a lie.”
What were the lies? That the Republican Party “espoused a core set of values: character counts, personal responsibility, strong on Russia, the national debt actually mattered, immigration made America great, a big-tent party.”
And what is the truth? The Republican Party is “just a white grievance party.”
Race, Stevens writes,
has defined the modern Republican Party. After Goldwater carried only southern states and received a record low of 7 percent of the black vote, the party faced a basic choice: do what was necessary to appeal to more nonwhite voters, or build a party to win with white voters. It chose the latter, and when most successfully executed, a race-based strategy was the foundation of many of the Republican Party’s biggest victories, from Nixon to Trump.
In fact, Stevens told me, “race is the original sin of the modern Republican Party:”
With Trump, the Party has grown comfortable as a white grievance party. Is that racist? Yes, I think it is. Are 63 million plus people who supported Trump racist? No, absolutely not. But to support Trump is to make peace with white grievance and hate.
Thomas Edsall, NYT 3/18/20
Lying to oneself is something we all do, but Republicans do it collectively in a particularly toxic if psychologically naive way. They really believe they are the righteous ones when it truth they are just resentment-obsessed fools who have no true sense of what is right or wrong except that if it was wrong for grandad, it's wrong for me.
Do Republicans have things to be aggrieved about? Yes, but they can get in line. There's nothing special about their grievances, and in the grand historical scheme of things, they have much less to complain about than other groups. But this goes to the heart of the social psychology that animates their sense of grievance. Theirs are the grievances of the have nots worried about being overtaken by people who have even less.
I thought that was dramatized in an interesting way in Parasite in the conflict between the first housekeeper and the new one. There was nothing racial about it, but it's the same dynamic that keeps both white and black have-nots stuck in place. Somebody who has only a little sees his enemy in those who have less rather than in those who have more. They who have less have more in common with one another, but the system is rigged in such a way as to keep the have-nots fighting among themselves rather than fighting against those who have more to get their fair share.
That's the point of the violent scene at the party. The Father finally recognizes his real enemy–the rich homeowner. It's provoked when the homeowner winces at the odor of the now dead man he will replace in the basement hideaway. It's a moment of class solidarity, that we who smell badly are being kept in line by those who smell good. Would that such a moment of class solidarity could occur between white and black have-nots in this country. But alas.
And so the biggest problem, as this blog has been pointing out for nearly two decades, is that aggrieved white Republicans in this country allow the oligarchs who are the real cause of their grievances to manipulate them in such a way that they see Blacks and Liberals (Yankees) as their enemies. The problem isn't Liberalism; it's the disruptive, culturally destructive forces unleashed by capitalism.
And it's the Social Darwinist ideology, a social construction if there ever was one, that justifies capitalism as a system where anyone who is willing to compete and work hard can be a winner. And anybody who is a loser must be morally degenerate. This winner/loser scheme meshes with the reprobate/elect legacy of Calvinism, which shapes the social imaginary of most white evangelicals.
And so in the weird late-Capitalist world we currently inhabit, white Republicans live in a social imaginary in which the uber-reprobate Trump is their hero because he is a Winner, and so must be chosen by God. And so they don't see people like him as the enemy because they want to be winners like him. That's what America is all about, and that's what real Americans work for, right?–to be winners like Trump in the Social Darwinist game. But the corollary is also true–they won't join with aggrieved Blacks because they cannot admit to themselves that in fact they are, in fact, like them losers in the Social Darwinist game and reprobates in the Calvinist soteriology. That is the biggest lie that keeps the system of haves and have nots working like the well-oiled machine that it is.
The question is whether white Losers are ever going to figure out that the solution is to change the game. That this Social Darwinist game and its accompanying Calvinist soteriology has nothing to do with Christianity and the spirit of the Gospels. I think that some white Christians honestly thought that Trump was going to be a game changer, but if it's not clear by now, he's not. He's simply a tool, a useful idiot, being used by the Mitch McConnells of the Republican Party to keep the game going. All Trump has given us is chaos and incompetence, and we will pay for both for years to come.
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