What it Means to Call Yourself Republican

[_Jersey Girl]

I'll deal with the majority of your post in a few minutes. I'm trying to settle down about something in real life. Won't take long.

Jersey Girl, I think it must be very tough for long-time Republicans such as you (and I think there are lots of them) to figure out how the fit into the current political landscape.

I want to make something clear here. JB is invested in politics. Not me. My only current political activity is reading news online and discussing it half assedly here and listening to it blaring on the television every day. God save me from Trump's rallies. I have to go outside and walk away.

I started out as a registered Democrat. For some reason, I switched my registration and I don't recall just why. It probably had something to do with a candidate I preferred but honestly, I can't recall who that might have been.

I left it as Republican and completely ignored it based on who I wanted to "hire". I don't recall most of the folks I even voted for because quite frankly my life and work has consumed me over the years and I tend not to keep up with things because I'm very cynical about politics to start with. I've made time for people as a priority, not politics. I'm, by nature, very apathetic regarding politics and Trump is more of a psych observation for me than anything else.

I know I voted for Obama twice. I have no blessed clue what went on during those years politically because well...catastrophic stuff happened in our family that was far more pressing than politics. I do recall the Bin Laden event. I don't recall which term that was. I recall whatshisface getting got...I'm sorry I can't recall the name right now...they found him in a hole underground and then they hanged him. I watched his hanging over and over again because I wanted to see what a real hanging looked like. Anyway, I think that happened under Bush2 but seriously, I don't really remember.

So anyway, I have no love for either party. I have no attachment to either one. I have no pride in either one. I tend to despise the lesser parts of human nature and I think politics is lousy with greed, corruption, hate, and the quest for power, fame, and status.

I value none of those things or the people who seek them.

[_Res Ipsa]

Thanks Jersey Girl. I thought I’d remembered that you had been an R for a long time. My mistake.

I do personally know folks who fit within my description. I feel bad for them.

[_DoubtingThomas]

Thanks Jersey Girl. I thought I’d remembered that you had been an R for a long time. My mistake.

I do personally know folks who fit within my description. I feel bad for them.

Hey. Please don't forget a reply in the other topic. I know you are very intelligent Res Ipsa and I do appreciate all the advice you gave me. Sincerely.

[_Jersey Girl]

Okay so let me go through this now.

Jersey Girl, I think it must be very tough for long-time Republicans such as you (and I think there are lots of them) to figure out how the fit into the current political landscape.

I tend not to worry about where I fit in because I accept the fact that I never fit into groups. My attitude is that I happen to be a registered Republican and who really cares?

Well apparently enough (let me be clear about how I receive this) bigots apparently care because they are telling me that they know what I think and believe just because of my current party affiliation, an affiliation that means exactly nothing to me and never has. I'm not in any way a partisan person. I despise partisanship. Anyway, now I'm apparently a racist or condone racism because my name is on a list.

My ass. Like I said prior, you couldn't find one person on the planet who would describe me as racist. Why should I take seriously the assumptions or accusations of anyone who thinks that my name on a list means something more than what it is without them ever asking me what I think about any given issue.

I can have my name removed from one list to the other. And unless you engage me, you still don't know what I think.

When you look at the gap between the party’s rhetoric and actions during the Obama presidency with that during the Trump presidency, it’s hard to figure out what the party stands for beyond winning at all costs. Fiscal Restraint? After two years of Republican control of the presidency and both halves of the Congress, the deficit has exploded and will, by the White House’s estimate, top one trillion dollars. By the end of Trump’s first term, it will have doubled over four years? Promoting the benefits of market capitalism through free trade? Replaced by protectionist tariffs and repudiation of trade agreements.

But tell me something so I understand. Is the upcoming trillion dollar deficit due to overspending or was it naturally going to grow in the same way as the price of gas and milk and homes go up every year? I don't fully understand economics. I know enough about budgeting and saving and investing a bit to where I could build a brand new house, pay for it before I moved in and not have a house payment for the last near-30 years, cash flow two kids through college, pay cash for weddings and donate our butts off for various reasons. So I'm not entirely stupid. I just don't fully understand the economics you are discussing.

I think the national budget, deficit, tariffs and all the things that you mentioned are confusing to me. I haven't followed these things for decades as some of you seem to have had or they don't hold my interest.

Defense of allied nations that share the values of democracy replace by pandering to repressive dictators and governments. Genuine patriotism and love of country replaced by jingoism and mindless chanting. Genuine support and appreciation for those who serve our country replaced by using them as political props to be cast aside when not useful or demonized if they don’t toe the party line.

This I understand! The behaviors, the relationships, the manipulations, the lip service the herd mentality. I fully understand these things. I am proud of this country and extremely proud of our military. Using them as props? Yes, I see it and he can go straight to hell.

But this is also partly why I have a hard time maintaining interest in things political. It's all about the photo op, the talking points. It's disingenuous and I hate it all, RI. It's fakery and manipulation.

Truly, the most fascinating thing about politics right now is that I get to observe a raging narcissist every day of my life and the only drawback is that he's dangerous.

And then to be surrounded by people full of self-righteous indignation screaming at you that if you don’t immediately change your party affiliation that you’re a racist antisemite and if you do that you’re a communist anti-Semite who hates America. (I guess we’re all anti-semites. Who knew?)

I get it.

I really don't take it seriously because I don't respect the people who do it any more than I respect Trump. I think the folks who do that would do well to check out the guy in the mirror. They're doing the same thing that they accuse Trump and the GOP of doing. The same damn thing. The irony is never lost on me. I find the lack of self awareness kind of amusing but I'm not about to judge the totality of the people who do it because I know there is more to them than their views on politics.

Folks should seriously as the question of how two extremely similar tribes in Africa ended up with one dismembering the members of the others with machetes. And then they should do the homework to find out how.

I know what you mean in principle but I don't know if that's really a true thing that happened.

There's a children's book about that. It's called The Land of Many Colors. It was written by preschool aged children. Used it every school year.

Okay so I don't think I fit into these discussions at all. I try to learn and I don't think my eye is ever fully on the ball. I don't think I understand all the political nuance, but I do think I see the big picture. This country is NEVER going to be saved by partisan politics. The one and only thing that I think will save us is a spirit of collaboration.

But I don't think that will ever happen. I don't think politicians are in office because they are wise or smart.

[_Kevin Graham]

I think KG was being extreme and inflammatory. That's what I think he was doing. I in fact think he was as guilty of being inflammatory and hateful as that which he assigns to the Republican party and Trump.

Yes, there was absolutely zero difference in my calling Trump supporters racists and Trump actually being racist. None whatsoever.

When I read the question I did not read what does it mean to be a registered Republican. I read "what it means to call yourself a republican," and in the age of Trump, this was the image that immediately came to mind. I'm not talking about people who happen to be registered Republicans who don't vote for Trump (i.e. George Will, Justin Abash, etc). I'm obviously talking about anyone who would vote for Trump in 2020.

I stand by my comments. I'm tired of giving Trump supporter "Republicans" the benefit of the doubt. And if you're out there calling yourself a Republican and don't support Trump then you're talk is empty because it means nothing becxause the Republican party is Trump. His supporters don't deserve the benefit of the doubt it anymore. Not after 3 years of Trump's insane policies that attack minorities. It is enough to make anyone with the slightest shred of moral fiber to abandon him completely. So anyone out there bragging about being a Republican is basically bragging about being a Trump supporter since he is the King of Republicanism right now. And it is impossible to defend yourself as a Trump voter and not be a racist. Not at this point.


By Republican Standards, Almost Nothing Is Racist

Trump Is a Racist. If You Still Support Him, So Are You.

[_Res Ipsa]

And millions of folks are tired of giving liberals the doubt.

Yay!!! Let’s stock up on machetes!!!!

[_Jersey Girl]

RI don't feel like you need to reply to me again. I'm a waste of time.

[_EAllusion]

It is the case that racial resentment is massively overrepresented among people who self-identify as Republicans with high racial resentment scores being in the majority. (In some good news, this is getting better, not worse, as the young replace the old.) This doesn't make all Republicans racist, of course. It isn't even easy to figure out when it becomes appropriate to label a person with various racist views a full-blown racist.

What's harder is that people who are proudly supporting the Republican party are telling you that they are indifferent to serious racism or profoundly ignorant of what's going on. What do you call that indifference or (possibly willful) ignorance?

I don't know. There's a decorum that surrounds not using a label with such negative connotations to paint such a broad swath of the public, but we also shouldn't pretend what's happening isn't happening to spare people their precious feelings. There is a serious moral problem with supporting Republicans right now. We should be to call out and condemn people's moral failings. If people don't care that the party they support is a cult of personality surrounding a racist authoritarian, then that's a problem.

[_EAllusion]

Brian Beutler wrote this piece recently, which seems relevant:

Let’s start at the beginning, before what happened gets lost in a farrago of lies and revisionism. Because it didn’t start with some bad apples chanting “send her back!” and they didn’t chant “send her back!” out of patriotic fervor. But these excuses will get an increasingly respectable airing—as if they’re offered in good faith—because the alternative would require neutral institutions to abandon neutrality and take a moral stand against throngs of American citizens.

Several days ago, the president of the United States, directed a racist attack at four congresswomen—all Americans by definition, but none of them white—because he had just watched a segment about them on Fox News. He told them to go back where they came from.

This attack was unprompted—not that a racist outburst would be a forgivable response to anything, but it was a response to nothing. The four congresswomen weren’t feuding with Donald Trump. They were at odds with members of their own party. The Fox segment was about Democratic infighting. Trump simply saw some black and brown members of Congress challenging their leaders, and tweeted the first smears about them that came to mind. Lo and behold, what occurred to him was foul bigotry.

When Trump realized his comments had ignited swift and overwhelming outrage—enough to threaten meaningful defections among his Republican allies on Capitol Hill—he invented a cover story, grabbed a shield, and picked a scapegoat.

Trump dishonestly reimagined his own tweets (which neither he nor Twitter has deleted) as a call for all of his critics to get with the program or self-deport—still an unacceptable sentiment from a U.S. president, but one that clears the lowest bar of being race neutral. He used Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN)—one of the women he’d attacked, and the only one who’s a naturalized citizen–as an avatar for those critics, and lied about her nonexistent “history of launching vicious antisemitic screeds.” This was the prompt for his rallygoers to chant “send her back” in North Carolina Wednesday night—a chant they reserved for Omar alone, not for Nancy Pelosi or Bernie Sanders or any of the president’s other white critics.

Republican officialdom now exists to lie about the value system Trump and his feral supporters proudly espouse—that non-white citizens who don’t wear MAGA hats should be defamed and deported—and if you challenge the lie, these Republicans will exploit the suffering of Jews (who overwhelmingly reject Republican politics) to stifle dissent. This is the 2020 campaign they intend to inflict on us.

Suffice it to say, Republicans’ interest in the well-being of Jews is tissue thin. It wasn’t Ilhan Omar who praised “very fine people” among a horde of neo-Nazis who chanted “Jews will not replace us” and murdered a woman two years ago. So the lie is sustained with the bad-faith exploitation of a religious minority hostile to their politics, and it’s all in service of obscuring the racism of their leader. The question for the rest of us is whether we let them reprise this tactic over and over again uncontested or whether we describe it for what it is every time. Here, the outlook is poor.

It has never been controversial to observe that President Trump is abnormal, but it took two and a half years of his presidency for mainstream institutions of journalism to accept the factual claim that something Trump did was racist—and even that generated enormous controversy within the industry, because racism—and more importantly Trump’s exposure of racism’s vast political constituency—can’t be contained in the framework of norms.

From the moment Trump launched his candidacy, reporters have asserted without qualification that Trump has contempt for norms and institutions, and in important ways, it’s true. All politicians spin but normally they try to avoid lying outright. Thus the fact that Trump lies pathologically can be expressed as a matter of abnormality rather than as a matter of moral deficiency. Modern presidents relinquish control of their assets and place them in blind trust, so Trump’s decision to run a real-estate and branding organization from inside the White House is easily framed as an example of his contempt for norms, rather than as evidence of graft, theft, and other crimes. Trump doesn’t appreciate the values of free speech, rule of law, or free and fair elections, and his unwillingness to conceal those authoritarian predilections is indeed abnormal. But the concept of normalcy fails to capture either the ubiquity or the moral horror of white supremacy. In this realm, it’s not that Trump is abnormal. It’s that he’s bad.

Worse, his very badness guarantees that the incitement he unleashed against Ilhan Omar will recede into the realm of controversy. Did he solicit the chant? What did the chant even mean? Did Omar have it coming? Was any of this really racist or do Republicans simply have a chauvinistic—that is, abnormal—sense of patriotism? Were the chanters merely condensing some racially charged rhetorical targeting? Mitt Romney said the chant “didn’t speak well of that crowd,” and maybe that’s all the condemnation that’s needed.

These evasions aren’t tempting because the referees can’t tell right from wrong. They know David Duke is bad and they know Louis Farrakhan is bad, and they say so regularly. If Ilhan Omar had said we should send Jews in Congress “back” to Israel, she would have been promptly expelled from the body, and no mainstream institution would have lacked the language to condemn her, her character, or her supporters.

That language is elusive now because to deploy it against Trump is to implicate millions of people who relish these very values. To vote for him, knowing the first thing about his character, is to reveal a moral defect. To don his hat and chant at his rallies isn’t abnormal in the slightest anymore, but it is bad. The imperative to report what’s true and the imperative to maintain studious neutrality between the parties have always created tension within media organizations, but until Trump they could still leave certain moral abominations outside the sphere of respectable discourse. Trump forces reporters, editors, commentators, to choose between the principle of neutrality and personal fidelity to the tenet that racism is unacceptable.

One way to resolve this dilemma would be for these institutions to embrace their roots in the small-l liberal tradition and mix moral language into the craft of fact gathering—to bear witness to Trump’s war against multiracial democracy faithfully, and say that it is bad. The other is to dodge the dilemma altogether by letting the obfuscatory fog Republicans are pumping into the news environment cloud public memory about what just happened. At every turn before now, they have chosen the latter. Sadly, the window for people of good faith to spread the plain truth about what just happened, untainted by propaganda and mainstream credulity, will soon be closed.

[_Lemmie]

Folks should seriously as the question of how two extremely similar tribes in Africa ended up with one dismembering the members of the others with machetes. And then they should do the homework to find out how.

I know what you mean in principle but I don't know if that's really a true thing that happened.

There's a children's book about that. It's called The Land of Many Colors. It was written by preschool aged children. Used it every school year.

Ouch. What happened to Sneetches? I don't remember any dismemberment in that one. Kindergarteners these days are tough.