This Is Republicans Getting Desperate

We've seen this shitty movie before

We all know what Democrats look like when they get desperate; we experienced four years of it under Trump. The world beyond their front doors becomes dark and menacing. Anxiety mounts. There’s a Russian spy behind every bush. Everyone to the right of Jake Tapper is a white nationalist. We’re a tweet away from a fascist conquest of America. It’s the bunker mentality of an elite professional class terrified and disdainful of the uneducated and unruly masses.

Now we’re seeing what Republicans look like when panic sets in.

Just a few months ago, the Trump wing of the Republican Party was in an intriguing and politically potent place. I wrote then about what I called “the Labor Right” — the post-neoliberal, anti-corporate, pro-worker manifestation of the GOP. Decades of working class desertion of the reconstructed, business-friendly Democratic Party had saturated the Republican Party’s ranks with non-college-educated, blue-collar voters. Finally came the inevitable: this new electoral base overthrew the old guard and replaced it with a new party establishment.

Back then, with Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, the populist movement behind Trump was self-confident. At the Republican National Convention, the choice of J.D. Vance as Trump’s running mate and the fiery address of the president of the Teamsters union before the assembled delegates ratified the ascendance of this faction.

But that was another era. In the weeks that followed, Trump found himself facing a new nominee who energized the Democratic base and, overnight, turned the Republican road to the White House from a cakewalk into an uphill slog through thigh-deep mud in a hailstorm.

Now, the Republicans are afraid, and that fear has crowded out all of the heady philosophizing about industrial policy, right-wing unionism and “national conservatism.” Since Harris was installed, the GOP’s id has erupted and buried its superego under fifty feet of molten lava. Suddenly they can only talk about the one thing they assume lights a fire in the loins of all of their supporters: hatred of immigrants.

I use the phrase “hatred of immigrants” with conscious intent. If I believed that their rhetoric merited it, I would use a more careful phrase, like “opposition to illegal immigration.” But that would be a dishonest representation of the current Republican mood. The fear-mongering lies about Haitians stealing and eating dogs and cats isn’t an expression of opposition to a policy, nor is it about illegal immigrants at all. It’s exactly what it looks like: the demonization of a despised minority to galvanize majority support in a close election.

I happen to be quite pro-immigration, but I’m not blind to the arguments against it. I get that my professional class, knowledge worker status takes me out of direct economic competition with the country’s immigrant workforce, and that I in fact benefit from it with cheaper childcare and domestic work and lower prices for food and services, not to mention countless cuisines to choose from. We can have an impassioned debate about the costs born by low-wage workers unlike myself in job displacement, housing costs, and cultural alienation, as my friend Batya Ungar-Sargon invites in her excellent book, Second Class.

This is not that. The fake news about Haitian dog- and cat-eating is not “debate.” It is no different from the hysterical and childish propaganda about nineteenth century Irish and Chinese immigrants that we’ve all seen in history textbooks, and it’s not that far from the paranoid Jim Crow fantasies of marauding freed black slaves preying on chaste white women. If you defend the current rhetoric as normal political discourse, I invite you to explain to me how those past examples failed to meet the same low bar.

I’ve been seeing the defense raised on Twitter that the pet-eating allegation was some kind of a heuristic tool to bring attention to the issue of a small town buckling under the strain of a huge migrant influx, so it doesn’t matter if it’s factually true or not. This is what’s also known as a lie told for political gain, no different from liberals claiming J.D. Vance once fucked a couch. When Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said an interview, “I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right,” she was ridiculed and excoriated by her conservative critics. Now they’re making the exact same defense of Trump, Vance, and their online supporters.

For all of their faults, the Republicans once at least had an actual message and platform to run on, unlike Kamala Harris. They’ve abandoned it. Their campaign is now predicated on instilling ordinary Americans with contempt and fear of powerless people and leveraging that hatred into votes. The pressure of actual political competition has reduced them to this pathetic spectacle.