Before I continue with this post, I wanted to flag a story in the Washington Post about a recent study that provides some support for my thesis that Trump voters are motivated more by ethnic rather than economic anxiety.
Previous posts in this series:
- The first, in which I introduce the concepts I'm discussing.
- In the second post I discuss small government conservatism and point out that rather than being a foundational ideology, it's a rather new concept.
- The third post deals with white ethnic nationalism and link it to our country's ugly history of racism and white supremacy.
- The fourth post links white ethnic nationalism to small government conservatism to show how the former was exploited to pass tax cuts and deregulation in order to benefit the wealthy.
This post is a bit of a diversion. In it I want to discuss the degree to which the Republican base is afflicted by a strain of know-nothingism. The term know-nothing refers to the American party, which was active nationally in the 1850s in the interregnum between the disintegration of the Whig party and the coalescence of the Republican coalition that propelled Lincoln to the presidency in 1865. The party was colloquially known as the Know-Nothing party; the party was a semi-secret organization and upon being asked about the party members were supposed to respond with the phrase "I know nothing."
Of course there are similarities between the policy agenda of the two parties. The Know-Nothing party was aggressively anti-immigrant, a response to the immigration of a large number of German and Irish immigrants in the mid 19th century, while the modern Republican party has often been outright xenophobic in its opposition to Mexican immigrants. But perhaps a strong thread uniting the two parties is ignorance: in the case of the Know-Nothings it was professed ignorance about the party. In the case of the modern Republican party it's often outright ignorance about, well, everything.
This isn't a new phenomenon. For decades the right in the United States has cultivated an alternative media landscape dedicated to the care and feeding of the Republican base. The original bastion was of course conservative talk radio. Rush Limbaugh is of course the avatar of the right-wing talk radio host, offering his audience a steady diet of bile and fury about the latest liberal outrages. Talk radio was in no small part the fuel for the controversies of the Clinton presidency; the place where conspiracy theories about the Rose Law Firm and Vince Foster first took root. Limbaugh is the most notorious and successful of the bunch, but he's only the tip of the iceberg. There is a virtual army of right wing radio hosts, at least one per media market across the country. Incidentally: this is a good place to mention David Foster Wallace's classic article Host, which makes right-wing talk radio its subject.
Right wing talk radio is of course a relative fringe. Far more well-known is Fox News, the primary source of news and commentary for the Republican base. Numerous polls show that Republicans engage in far more media monoculture than independents and Democrats, and the focus of that monoculture is Fox News. "Fair and balanced," tagline aside, it's also well established that Fox News presents a distinctly right-wing view of the world. This extends beyond its editorial content and into its news coverage, both in terms of the subjects it chooses to focus on (Benghazi, the IRS scandal, etc) and the tone of that coverage. Of course it's also well established that people who use Fox News as their primary source of news about the world are less well informed than those who prefer other sources. This is not a coincidence.
Online, sites ranging from the Drudge Report to Breitbart.com to others decidedly less savory perform the task of caring and feeding for the Republican base. These sites feel even less of a burden than Fox News in terms of acknowledging reality, often peddling outright falsehoods and deceptions (Breitbarts series of "sting" videos have been universally discovered to have been frauds; Breitbart is being sued by Planned Parenthood over one such series). Spend some time on these sites and you'll rapidly come to the impression that these people aren't just seeing the world from a different perspective; they are living in another world entirely.
This phenomenon is deliberate. The entire point of the conservative media complex is to create an alternative world in which Republican voters are constantly one election away from disaster. From having their guns taken, their jobs seized, their daughters married off to minorities. Conservative media exists to keep the base in in a state of perpetual panic, living in a world where only Republicans stand between the voter and the barbarian hordes.
Let me make something clear: it's not that Republicans are dumb, though they often seem that way. It's that they are the victims of a decades-long effort to exploit their insecurities. The Republican party has performed this exploitation for electoral gains. And as Rick Perlstein documented in his fantastic article The Long Con, an array of hangers-on have exploited them for financial gain. Indeed, the entirety of Ben Carson's 2016 presidential campaign appears to have been a scam to enrich unscrupulous political consultants. Republicans have been convinced by their alternative media landscape that they are under siege. Furthermore, they have been convinced that they can trust no other sources of information: academics, experts, elites, and all other outside sources are necessarily afflicted with liberal bias and are not to be trusted. Julian Sanchez in 2010 coined a term for this: epistemic closure.
And in 2016 this epistemic closure has bit the party on the ass. The Republican base has been kept in a state of frenzied panic for decades. And all that their leadership has delivered in that time has been a series of tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. For all the sturm und drang over the threat Obamacare presented to the nation, the Republican Congress could not repeal it. For all the furor over Hillary Clinton's emails, the FBI refused to indict her. It's important to realize the depth of Republican delusion: Republicans were not simply rooting for an FBI indictment: they were certain of it. They were genuinely shocked when Director Comey declined to recommend an indictment. Because of course Hillary Clinton is a criminal. Rush says so. Breitbart says so. Hannity says so.
One important function of political parties and elites is to guide the nomination process. This was the subject of the 2008 book The Party Decides, which examines the modern presidential nomination system. The book describes the nomination process as a contest among elites, where elites signal their preferences via fundraising and endorsements. The nomination of Donald Trump presents a powerful counter-argument to the thesis of the book; he trailed badly in both fundraising and endorsements and yet throughout the primaries lead in polling as his more well-funded and endorsed opponents fell by the wayside. To anyone with a modicum of sense Trump was obviously a terrible choice for President. Forget that he's proven to be an awful candidate in the general election: the man is a buffoon. He's a dim-witted narcissist, a bully, as well as a bigot. He's been a disaster as a businessman (as anyone who grew up in the New York media market in the 80s and 90s knows). A character like Trump would never have had a chance in the Democratic primaries, regardless of what policies he offered. But Republican voters--who among all have a well-cultivated sense of ignorance and distrust of elites--chose Trump. They did this in no small part because Donald Trump appeals to their ethnic anxiety; the most common refrain from Trump supporters when they explain their support for him is "He says what he thinks." But they also did this because they were too ignorant to recognize what a disaster Trump would be, both as a candidate and as a president. And their distrust of elites meant that they could not be convinced otherwise.
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