“We’ve got to stop being the stupid party,” said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal during the traditional winter meeting of the Republican National Committee. It was Jan. 25, 2013, and the resonant election defeat of Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate who ran against the incumbent president, Barack Obama, was only a few months old, something that inevitably transformed this meeting of the GOP’s general staff into the first act in a process of contrition and revision. Or more precisely, as many have written, into the first episode of what would be a ruthless autopsy of one’s own cadaver.
How had the Republican Party died two months before? Precisely “of stupidity,” Jindal responded provocatively, Jindal being the first governor of Asian origin in the history of the United States. And in saying what he said, he plunged the knife into what he was not the only one who saw it as one of the most infected wounds of Republican politics after the November defeat. It’s worth saying: The ostentatious anti-intellectualism that, in declared opposition to a hypothetical “cultural-media establishment,” as well as obviously to the very vituperative politically correct, had progressively become one of the most visible banners of the GOP. And that, in turn, it was nothing else but one of the consequences of the strategy of a party that found itself stuck politically and demographically in a country that was deeply transforming itself.
Barely three months after that meeting and that remark about stupidity—a self-inflicted insult that, in reality, was only a cry of pain—the Republican National Committee published a document of almost 100 pages officially entitled the “Growth and Opportunities Project,” that is, the result of the above-mentioned “autopsy,” essentially based on the ruthless statistical analysis of the lost votes. Who were the voters who after 2008 stopped voting (or chose not to vote) Republican? And why had they done so? They had done so, responded the report citing a meticulous opinion poll, because they saw the GOP as scary, narrow-minded, and out of touch. That is, as the party of fear, intellectually limited and detached from reality. In sum, as the party of stuffy old men; old, male, white and of a very simple academic background (precisely, the “stupid”).
In conclusion, in order to hold on to any serious possibility of reconquering the White House, the GOP needed to re-polish its own image and expand its electoral base, adapting it to a reality that was rapidly changing. It had to re-establish, or make more visible, contacts with intellectual elites and extend its message to minorities that, if evaluated in their entirety, have not been minorities for some time now: women, Latinos, African-Americans, immigrants of every origin. It had to stop being—to return to Jindal’s appeal—the stupid party: white, male and uneducated.
End of flashback. Fade-out. Back to today. In the foreground, the sprightly face of Donald Trump, who from the podium of the Republican Convention in Cleveland, delivers his acceptance speech as presidential candidate of the Republican Party. A long (75 minutes), rabid and rambling over-the-top rant that, between xenophobic and apolitical accents, false statistics and a circus of tall tales, provides a single recognizable concept: “I alone can fix it.”
Three years later, what the “Growth and Opportunities Project” has produced is this: the caricature of a “providential man,” a candidate who proposes building walls—of real steel and cement like the one he wants to erect at Mexico’s expense along the southern border, or metaphorical ones—in the place where the Republican project planned for building bridges and extending hands.
A man in his 70s, white and uneducated beyond imagination, who mocks the disabled, insults women and wants to deport immigrants and ban Muslims. A garrulous and vain carnival barker (as he was once very correctly defined by Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie) who, with the arrogance and crudeness of a provincial bully, divides the world into winners and losers, and succumbs to making enormous errors every time the topic at hand shifts from exalting himself to some concrete subject of foreign or domestic policy.
Jindal, having run in the Republican presidential primaries, quickly dropped out of the race, a genuine “loser” without ever reaching even close to a 5 percent approval. And the same happened to all the heavyweight candidates, accompanied by the insults and gags of the winner. Jindal was a man introduced into the field by the Republican establishment to oppose the rise of Trumpenstein, the monster who went along gobbling up the party: Jeb Bush (“low energy Jeb”), Marco Rubio (“Little Marco”), and lastly (a desperate and improbable last) Ted Cruz. As for Chris Christie, (yes, precisely the same New Jersey governor who had coined the term “carnival barker”) things went even worse, considering that today, he is one of the closest and most obsequious Trumpenstein collaborators.
On July 31, in The New York Times, Max Boot, a historian of clear conservative persuasion, very clearly explained how the stupid party created Trump and destroyed the GOP. Or more simply, how all the menacing forces of the GOP invoked over time to win the approval of white America—from the southern strategy of Richard Nixon following the battle for civil rights, to the clear racist implications of Reagan’s politics, dishes always served in an anti-intellectual sauce—wound up, like in the ballad of the sorcerer’s apprentice (“der Zauberlehrling”) of Wolfgang Goethe, exposing themselves to irreversible condemnation.
In a single mouthful, Trump has consumed what remains of Republican intelligence without leaving any leftovers. What little has survived of Abraham Lincoln’s compassionate conservatism, of the neoliberalism of Milton Friedman, in the anti-Stalinism of Friedrich Von Hayek, of the exasperated objectivist individualism of Ayn Rand in the still vivid and notorious memory of the neocons, will accompany the horrors of the unfinished war of George W. Bush. All power to the stupid, one wants to say, invoking the absolution of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. But how could this have happened? And how will it conclude?
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