The late NFL head coach George Allen had a favorite saying: “The future is now.” Conversely, The Week columnist Damon Linker believes the Republican party’s future “will be delayed so long as [its] candidates remain beholden to voters who view politics primarily as a megaphone for broadcasting an ignorant, garbled howl of anger, fear, alienation, and resentment.”
In a Friday piece, Linker remarked that conservative activists, who tend to view events “through a fog of paranoia and conspiracy,” have gradually dragged down the party as they’ve become a larger and larger share of it. In Linker’s words, “They’ve grown and spread like a fungus (thanks to the fertilization efforts of Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes).” One recent consequence: the popularity among GOPers of the “vulgar blowhard” Donald Trump.
“What the Republican Party needs isn't more courageous candidates and elites,” declared Linker. “It's a new electorate.”
From Linker’s column (bolding added):
There is certainly a chickens-coming-home-to-roost character to Donald Trump's meteoric rise in the polls over the past couple of weeks. This is a party, after all, that has spent close to the entirety of the Obama administration stoking right-wing populism, encouraging conspiracy theories about the president and his policies, and deploying wildly irresponsible rhetoric about the dire threats posed to the nation by mainstream members of the Democratic Party…
The GOP's Trump problem goes all the way down to the roots of the party — the grassroots.
We've seen it all before. And no, I'm not just thinking about 2012, when a succession of unelectable rabble-rousers bounced to the top of the Republican primary field for a week or two...
But that faction's roots go back much further than 2012 — all the way back to the origins of the modern conservative movement in the right-wing populism of the postwar John Birch Society and similar groups. They were a ragtag conglomeration of ideological radicals animated by rage against various actors, forces, trends, and policies in mid-20th-century American life: the New Deal, Big Government, communists, negroes, elites, decadent city folk, Catholics, Jews, immigrants, feminists, homosexuals, and secularists. Some feared them all, others focused on one or a few. All of them saw the world through a fog of paranoia and conspiracy.
Until 1964, these Americans had no natural political home in the major parties. But they've been drawn to the Republican Party ever since Barry Goldwater became their champion in his failed bid for the presidency...Ronald Reagan…truly brought them en masse into the Republican Party.
At first these voters were just one faction in a party made up of other groups, many of them far more mainstream…
More than 30 years later, they've grown and spread like a fungus (thanks to the fertilization efforts of Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes). The populists are [now the] base of the party — its most loyal and devoted members, surpassed only by super-rich donors for influence among the party's leading politicians and strategists. Candidates for president have no choice but to woo this base, to legitimize its obsessions and flatter its prejudices…
That's how we've ended up with a vulgar blowhard like Donald Trump riding high (almost certainly for a brief time) in the polls…
No one except a wingnut (or a professional manipulator of wingnuts) could possibly consider him a serious candidate for the nation's highest office...
…[The party’s] future will be delayed so long as Republican candidates remain beholden to voters who view politics primarily as a megaphone for broadcasting an ignorant, garbled howl of anger, fear, alienation, and resentment.
What the Republican Party needs isn't more courageous candidates and elites. It's a new electorate.
