It seems that the Republican party is going to shit in America, by which I mean turning fascist. There was always an undercurrent of that (just as there is always an undercurrent of leftist authoritarianism among the Democrats), but it's engulfing the party right now. The politicians and the grassroots both seem captured by themes of race, nation, and pride, expressed in a highly distorted, illusory way, and willing to throw America's institutions under a bus to perpetuate that illusion. I was struck by how uneasy the traditional Republican Party intelligensia was about this while I was in DC (from August 2019 until March 2020), and things have accelerated dramatically since then, notably with Trump's USPS Putsch. The writing has been on the wall for a while (at least since Trump won the GOP primary), but three things came out in the 3 months that seem to me to suggest that core of the GOP is irrevocably rotten (and I will not even mention Qanon). To wit:
Exhibit A: Trump's recent tweets on affordable housing
This is an example of 'saying the quiet part out loud'. Succinctly, that NIMBYism isn't about maintaining neighbourhood charm, heritage buildings, etc., but rather about maintaining house values and excluding poor people, especially those of other races (invariably non-white). Conservative, ostensibly 'pro-business' parties have always had a strong support base among what Australian Prime Minister John Howard called 'aspirational' households. Such households are classically bourgeois, defining success materially and desiring, above all, to distinguish themselves from those 'beneath' them. American Beauty is a remarkable artistic representation of it. 'Aspirational' Households lend themselves to a politics of envy and vanity. Living in the same suburb as social housing is anathema to such people because it inhibits them from distinguishing themselves from the poor.
One of the saddest and funniest examples of this was when the Australian Capital Territory government begun building social housing in the new suburb of Gunghalin. That suburb was like catnip to aspirational households, with shiny new MacMansions and, at the time of construction, no social housing. Of course, the ACT has a strict policy of having social housing spread across just about every suburb (except downtown) to prevent ghettoes and promote the idea that everyone deserves amenity. New Gunghalin residents were askance at the new developments. Some even spoke to the Canberra Times, explicitly stating that they had purchased their house precisely because there were no poor people around. They were now worried about pedophiles moving in down the road! They said the quiet part out loud.
Trump is a narcissistic psychopath, so he understands that what people really want is to distinguish themselves from poor people (as he does), but he doesn't understand that it's deeply immoral to hold that attitude and socially frowned upon. So he just went ahead and tweeted it! I remember my reaction being "well he knows his base". But that's precisely why this is an indication of the rotting of the party. The base of the GOP is not grounded in healthy values. Envy, greed, vanity, contempt for your fellow human beings - these are not noble ambitions on which to base a political project. This isn't celebrating 'up by your own boostraps' work ethic either - ghettos and associated issues like an inability to access decent public schools is one of the main reasons why America has such terrible social mobility relative to other advanced nations.
Relatedly, my girlfriend made an astute observation the other that pertain to this and how the American right talks about 'freedom'. I mentioned to her that I was confused about how people so committed to freedom that they won't wear a mask in a pandemic could simultaneously be anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-POC, anti-immigration, anti-muslim, pro-monopoly, etc. I think the fact that American conservatives are conservative about liberty blurs the conservative/liberal divide in American political psychology. Regardless, it also seems to be the case that the 'quiet part' of all this liberty talk is that when many Americans talk about freedom they mean freedom own a huge house, drive a huge car, work in a polluting industry, and tell poor people to get off their lawn. It's basically freedom to create negative externalities. This is very different from a European or even Australia/Canadian notion of liberty. I found this sentiment quite striking in Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land, an ethnography of Tea Party country in Louisiana. There was an enormous dissonance among the characters of that book, especially the 'Cowboy'. At one point, the Cowboy explicitly says that living with their ancestral hunting and fishing lands being polluted by industry, giant sinkholes opening up because of under-regulated chemical dumping, and air pollution is just 'the sacrifices we make for capitalism'. Such maps of meaning were critical for people during the Cold War, but they're so played out now and impeding America updating its social contract for the new century (see my recent paper for Brookings, here). This again speaks to the core of Republican party ideology being rotten.
Exhibit 2: Stimulus Payments
Perhaps the clearest example of rot in the Republican party is that they're so corrupt they can't even play the politics well anymore. Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, Senate Republicans had a chance to send marginal voters a large cheque with Donald Trump's name on it and declined because 'they're worried about the national debt'. Of course, they weren't worried about the trillions of dollars of debt when they passed Trump's tax cuts, nor when they advocated for payroll tax cuts, so really this is just 'fuck the poor' without saying the quiet part out loud.
This sort of behaviour can only lead to kleptocracy, toward which the Republicans have marched with a kind of reckless abandon since the Bush years (so have the Democrats with Wall Street and Tech, but slower and less recklessly). Of course, because kleptocracy cannot be rationally appealing it must be populist. Unfortunately for the Republicans, all demographic trends in the US point away from race, nation, old white dudes without college degrees etc. It is unsurprising then that they have clamped down so hard on these trends - defunding the immigration office while funding ICE, instituting terrible industrial policy (the kind that Republicans fought against under Reagan), waging a war on colleges, etc.
Exhibit 3: Republican Party Machismo
This may be the most embarrassing tweet I have ever seen. Like, how fragile can your masculinity be? The guy might as well be asking for daddy Trump to give him a spanking. Yikes.
This is not an isolated incident. Fox News in particular is replete with pathetic and sad (say it in Trump's voice) chest beating about toxic masculinity. Take, for example, their reporting of Obama's bike helmet: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=369492613660277,
Oh and the tan suit fiasco: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYaluOHcATU
Apparently it was not 'a suit of strength'.
I don't bring these incidents up just for the lols, or for the sadness. They're indicative, again, of rot. It's well established that the base of Trump's support in 2016 was working class whites without a college degree. He won the election in the rust belt, which is overwhelmingly populated by such individuals. The tragedy of the rust belt and the recent tragedy of the South (because there is so much tragedy in the South) is the tremendous loss of dignity that afflicts the population. The culture of these places emphasises that dignity, especially for men, comes from hard work and providing for your household. The only work that was historically available was hard work - in factories, mines, plants, forestry, drilling, construction, etc. The kind of work that results in torn rotator cuffs, slipped disks and lifetime prescriptions for pain medication (one of the important underlying drivers of the opiode epidemic is a history of dependence on pain medication). The kind of work that has high on-the-job fatality rates. 'Masculinity' was historically rooted in the capacity to control your emotions (notably stress and fear) under such circumstances (notably warfare) and get on with things so that you could provide for the family. So many of these men (and the women who love them) put a great deal of stock in such old-fashioned 'masculinity'. When Fox News panders to it they feel respected. More perniciously though, they are cut off from it in their lives. They are unemployed and their skills are obsolete. Repressing your emotions is rightly derided as toxic. Being dependent on pain medication to live is rightly seen as a tragedy, not an indication of how tough you are or how many sacrifices you made to put food on the table. The GOP establishment under Trump has not helped these people to update their culture, to reimagine it for a new world. It instead panders to their sad weakness, pumping them up. But this pumping is just like oxycodeine (the drug behind the opiode epidemic) - it makes you feel good for a while, but it destroys your foundations rather than fixing them.
Some hopeful thoughts:
It's hard to say whether rising partisanship in America is caused by cultural actors like Fox News and opportunistic politicians or whether they are simply responding to an exogenous trend. In any case, the root of America's contemporary problems is that there is no culture unifying the nation. The core of American culture will not be as thick as it was in the 1980s ever again, because the country is so much more diverse now. But something needs be salvaged and mixed with something new. Then America will be reborn and can continue to be a light on the hill for aspiring people everywhere. If the GOP keeps appeasing a rotten temple it will crumble along with that temple. The democrats will also not be held in check when they go about building a new culture, because they will be able to write off the cultural tropes of the Republicans as toxic. America desperately needs to have a conversation with itself, fast. Both Brookings and the American Enterprise Institute seem acutely aware of this and are rapidly devoting immense resources to the study of social capital and how to rebuild it. One idea I suggested was sending clubs and societies (the beating heart of social capital), including churches and the like, grants on the condition that they used some of it to organise a conversation with another club or society, preferably from a different part of the political spectrum. The topic of these conversations would be something like 'what does America mean to us?' or 'what sort of America do we want our children to grow up in?' Having these conversations in person will ensure greater civility and respect than is possible in online fora and media echo chambers. Events can be recorded and warehoused by government, and their output can be used to generate a new social contract at the cultural level.
On a hopeful note, I think Joe Biden is actually the perfect person to do this, and he seems to be stepping up to the plate on it rhetorically. He is an old, white, Christian, masculine (fast cars and shotguns), dude, with a big house in the burbs and a fondness for old America. But he's also progressive and has graciously involved all branches of the Democratic party in constructing his election agenda. Importantly, he has also talked about how he wants to be an interim President, preferably only for one term, who helps the nation heel, unite, and come back stronger. I would like Joe Biden to win and start his victory speech by echoing Reagan: 'It's Morning Again in America'.
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