Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment isn’t just campaign fodder, believes The New Republic’s Brian Beutler, who in a Monday piece argued that by telling “impolite truths,” Clinton pulled an already-loose thread and may have furthered the unraveling of the GOP.
Assuming Donald Trump doesn’t become president, some Republicans will “wish to dislodge Trump and Trumpism from the party,” observed Beutler, but he doesn’t think they’ll succeed if they underestimate the prevalence of bigotry among Trump’s supporters. Unfortunately, he noted, “anti-Trump conservatives remain uncomfortable admitting the scope and severity of America’s racism problem.” In other words, for those conservatives to achieve their goal, they’ll have to concede that Hillary’s allegation was essentially correct.
According to Beutler, “Admitting that Trump derives a great deal of support from the deplorable things he says and does is the first and most critical step toward eventually addressing the concerns of those in the other ‘basket’ -- the one Clinton described as filled with ‘people…who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them.’”
Still, Beutler warned, “The problem of how to disempower Trumpism altogether is a tricky one, though, because the millions of deplorables make a sizable market” (bolding added):
People like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity may love the taste of Trump’s ass cheeks, but they’re doing what they’re doing at least in part because Trump’s followers flock to them, and they in turn see those followers as marks for goldbuggery and Flowmax [sic]…
Over the course of years in which conservatives tolerated Hannity et al as their-kind-of-assholes, their stars rose, their audiences became loyal, and they became impossible to control. That conservatives have awakened themselves to the nature of this malevolence means little so long as Republican politicians are forced to reach their voters through these intermediaries…
…The no-enemies-to-the-right tribal culture in which Hannity and Trump’s other supplicants flourished is the same one in which it’s considered a grave offense to call Trump-supporting racists deplorable.
