Saturday, January 9, 2021

Tucker Wonders Why the GOP Loathes Its Voters + Explains a Lot in the Process



Thursday night on Tucker Carlson’s show, he looked at the demonstration that took place in the US Capitol (no, it was not an insurrection) and the actions of the Democrats. He wondered why they were labeling the people who marched on the Capitol as “domestic terrorists” (because you have to be a terrorist to want to make sure the Constitution is followed, right?) and “seditionists” and “insurrectionists”–and by extension, some tens of millions who supported them as “terrorist enablers?” More importantly, he wondered why they could do this without anyone from the Republican party pushing back. The answer he arrived at is only surprising because someone of Carlson’s background had the perception to see it. The video is cued up.

Why are they doing that? Simple. They know that if they keep saying it, history will record it as true. They understand the power of language, and that’s why they try to control it. They know that words have consequences. This is scary, and the party that should be stepping in to stop it, to push back, to tell the truth in the face of lies and to protect its voters from this deception and the destruction that inevitably comes next, does nothing. Often, in fact, they join in.

With bodyguards like this, tens of millions of Americans have no chance. They’re about to be crushed by the ascendant left, the people who say, “Well, I don’t think they should be allowed to fly on airplanes.”

Why is no one defending them? The main problem, and this really is the main problem on the right, is that the people who run the Republican Party don’t really like their own voters. They especially don’t want the voters that Trump brought. Trump brought a noticeably downscale element to the party’s ranks, and this horrifies them.

Many Republicans in Washington now despise the people they’re supposed to represent and protect. In fact, it’s not just Republican leaders who feel this way, but our entire leadership class. You rarely hear it spoken out loud, but it’s the truth.

A very specific form of internal loathing is at the core of the reaction to Donald Trump. Nothing is more repulsive to socially anxious White professionals than working class people who look like them. The proles are their single greatest fear. They remind them of where they may have come from or where they could be going if things turn south.

So if you want to understand the hatred — not just disagreement, but gut-level loathing and fear of Trump in, say, New York or Washington or Los Angeles — you’ve got to understand that first. It’s not really Trump, it’s his voters. The new money class despises them.

Trump didn’t despise them, and that really was his secret. In the end, Donald Trump did not judge his own voters. Trump ate McDonald’s and his voters were very grateful for it. You’d be grateful for it, too, if everyone else hated you.

Thirteen days from now, tens of millions of these voters will not have Donald Trump to protect them. They won’t have anyone. And unless the Republican Party decides to wake up and push back against the lies and acknowledge the purpose of those lies, which is an unprecedented crackdown on the way you live, you have no chance, either.

 As I’ve related, I don’t come from a family like Carlson’s. My grandfather dropped out of school at age 13 to go to work in a coal mine in Pocahontas County, WV. That was during the days when miners were paid in company scrip based on the number of tons of coal they loaded each day. My grandfather loaded coal with an older brother so the brother could increase his output.


My father dropped out at the same age to become a farm laborer. I know what it is like to not have and, as I moved through college and into the Army and afterwards, I’ve never lost that sense of who I am, where I come from, and what, but for the Grace of God, my life could have been.

When Donald Trump first entered the race, I was a huge skeptic. What flipped me to something of a Trump supporter happened right here on RedState. In the behind-the-scenes email discussions, the folks in that first wave of Trump supporters, the people going to his rallies in the spring of 2016, were belittled, castigated, and demeaned. All kinds of cute, juvenile names were dreamed up to mock them. That’s when it really hit me. The antipathy towards Trump had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with classism. There was a total contempt for the working men and women who built this country. It also struck me that I wanted nothing to do with anyone who would have happily handed this country over to Hillary Clinton rather than consort, even at a distance, with those people.

If the feeling among Trump voters was so strong among people who had no reason to feel superior about much of anything, I can’t even imagine how much more visceral the dislike of rank-and-file Trump supporters must be among GOP staffers on Capitol Hill, where in upbringing, education, and cultural leanings, they are largely indistinguishable from their Democrat colleagues.

Carlson is right. They are coming for all of us next. Yes, they have Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz in their sights right now (see Joe Biden Compares Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley to Actual Nazis and Chris Coons Demands Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz Resign and We Should All Be Worried) but that is just the opening phase. We see airline stewardesses…sorry, I mean flight attendants…demand that folks affiliated with #StopTheSteal be barred from using airlines (see FBI and Homeland Security Prepare to Join the Era of Mob Rule and Extrajudicial Punishment as President Trump Prepares to Exit the White House), and the demands being seriously considered by federal agencies. It will get much, much worse before it gets better.

Where Carlson gets it wrong, though, is the unspoken assumption that at some point, before all the icky people became visible, that the GOP establishment stood up for and protected Americans. That is false. Who sent our manufacturing overseas? Who coddled Communist China’s theft of intellectual property? Who allowed nearly unbridled illegal immigration to help their buddies in the US Chamber of Commerce drive down wages with cheap labor? Who pushed to increase the number of H1B visa holders using the myth that there are not enough STEM grads to fill the jobs when a large majority of US STEM grads never find employment in that field? Don’t look at the Democrats. Look at the GOP.

The main difference between the GOP  and Democrat establishments is that the Democrats want you dead while the GOP wants your vote…of course, given what we know of the Democrat get-out-the-vote program, they may want you dead and then use you to vote for them.