Several weeks ago, there was an Internet meme about whether it would have been ethical to kill the infant Adolf Hitler. In a Monday column, The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky poses a (somewhat) less-weighty back-in-time question: Could the Republican party’s current Donald Trump problem have been avoided?
Tomasky suggests that it could have been, but instead, during Bill Clinton’s first term in the White House, GOPers “played footsie with the then-burgeoning far-right militia movements in the run-up to the [Oklahoma City] bombing…Fringe elements never properly denounced then are now, under Trump, becoming an in-broad-daylight part of the Republican coalition.”
In part because of that long-ago malignant neglect, Tomasky argues, “The Republican Party of Trump is becoming a white-identity party, like the far-right parties of Europe…[The GOP is] probably 97 percent white people, a significant percentage of whom are now openly embracing their racial identity; that is, they’re supporting Trump as white people, because they feel he will protect their white privilege. And yes, this is very different from why black people voted for Obama as black people, and if you even need me to explain that, you’re totally lost.”
From Tomasky’s column (bolding added):
[A] number of congressional Republicans…played footsie with the then-burgeoning far-right militia movements in the run-up to the [1995 Oklahoma City] bombing…
…Many didn’t merely criticize the ATF and the FBI…but went beyond that to stoke these peoples’ paranoia about government and suggest/not suggest…that armed resistance was acceptable. Texas Senator Phil Gramm…was probably the highest-profile pol to use such rhetoric, arguably aside from Newt Gingrich himself…
This was also the time when right-wing talk radio was…full of defenses of these movements...
There’s no serious counterpart to this on the liberal left. You could compare it I guess to Leonard Bernstein’s radical chic back in the day, but unlike Phil Gramm, Bernstein wasn’t a United States senator whose presidential candidacy was being taken seriously by serious people…
The line from all this to the rise of Donald Trump…is direct and indisputable…
…Fringe elements never properly denounced then are now, under Trump, becoming an in-broad-daylight part of the Republican coalition. But now, since all this has been going on so long, are they even fringe elements? When 65 percent of Republicans tell a pollster they support Trump’s poisonous call to ban Muslims from the country, it’s hard to call that fringe. A more recent poll puts that support level at “only” 42 percent, but that…sure isn’t fringe either.
The Republican Party of Trump is becoming a white-identity party, like the far-right parties of Europe. Yes, it includes token members of other races, which accounts for Ben Carson, who’s just a political idiot, whatever his skills in the operating theater. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are in a different category as Cubans; in our political discourse, we throw them into the mix as Latino, but of course Cubans are very different culturally and politically from other Latinos…
…[The Republican party is] probably 97 percent white people, a significant percentage of whom are now openly embracing their racial identity; that is, they’re supporting Trump as white people, because they feel he will protect their white privilege. And yes, this is very different from why black people voted for Obama as black people, and if you even need me to explain that, you’re totally lost…
…[T]here’s a strong chance all of this won’t just go away on its own.
Then the Republican Party will have a choice, a choice it really has to make already, about whether it is collectively willing to stand up and say no, we don’t want to become [a] neo-fascist, white-identity party. Of course if the party’s leaders do that, they are thwarting, potentially, the will of their voters. It’s quite a bind to be in. And it’s one they created, starting at least 20 years ago.
