Republicans Without A Plan

There's a thing on Twitter about #WAP that's not exactly safe for work but it's out there and well-known.

What's also out there now is another WAP and this abbreviation stands for Without A Plan because that's where the modern Republican Party has led itself (via Annie Lowry at the Atlantic):

The GOP in general is remarkably quiet on how it would govern and what it seeks to accomplish in the coming years. Breaking with precedent, the party decided against producing an original platform for the 2020 convention. (Put differently: It no-platformed itself.) And Republican leadership has gone dark on a huge swath of issues: balancing the budget, reforming entitlement programs, tackling climate change, improving public education, reducing student-loan debt, and ameliorating racial inequalities—as well as getting the country through the pandemic and out of the recession.

With the planet burning, the virus killing, the economy collapsing, and millions of Americans preparing to vote, the country’s leading political cabal has moved into a queasy post-policy space: Its aperture has narrowed to just a few issues; its desire to try to pass major, proactive legislation has withered. This is not just proof that a man as interested in his own image as he is uninterested in briefing books should not be president. It is also a sign that American democracy is in peril...

What the Republicans did was posit a party platform that was copied and pasted from the 2016 agenda, and edited most everything out except for a new paragraph: RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda. Without clarifying exactly what trump's agenda really means.

Basically, the Republican Party is saying "We're gonna do whatever Our Lord and False Idol donald trump tells us what to do."

This is both refreshing and horrifying. Refreshing in that at least the Republicans have stopped pretending outright that they care about issues. Horrifying in that they're demonstrating they care only about appeasing a despotic wannabe who lusts after the money and the power.

Also horrifying is the implication that the Republican voting base is not expecting anything more out of the party leadership than the ongoing pandering to their partisan identity... and worse, pandering to the fears and racism that trump offers them in lieu of effective policies. Back to Lowry:

For the many Republicans who don’t benefit much from tax cuts, and never received the promised populist policies, identity politics and racial resentment are strong enough forces to tie them to the party. A study by the political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Jennifer McCoy, for instance, showed that Trump’s dog-whistling worked. In 2000, George W. Bush won two in three working-class white voters who evince considerable racial resentment, measured by asking them whether or not they agree with statements such as “If Blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites.” Trump got nine in 10 of them.

Trump electrifies the party’s broader base with revanchism, nativism, and white nationalism, catering to the anxieties of a historically hyper-dominant group fast becoming a minority. Just take a look at who is speaking at the GOP convention to see what red meat looks like for red America: the couple who brandished guns at Black Lives Matter protesters in St. Louis and Nick Sandmann of Covington Catholic High School, whose interaction with the Native American activist Nathan Phillips in front of the Lincoln Memorial went viral in 2019. Or, in the absence of a national 2020 manifesto, take a look at the Texas platform: Delegates picked top priorities including banning gender-confirmation procedures, protecting monuments, purging the voter rolls, and preventing teenagers from getting abortions or obtaining birth control without parental consent, all potent fronts in the culture war. “Policy doesn’t matter much” to winnable conservative voters, Brent Buchanan, a Republican pollster, told me. “It’s more about personalities and principles.”

This is, in many regards, the final victory of Roger Ailes and Harry Treleaven, campaign handlers for Richard Nixon back in 1968. If you read The Selling of the President, which chronicled the rise of television-based marketing of elections, you might remember the breakthrough Treleaven developed regarding the electoral process. It's not about the issues - although they matter - it's about the emotional appeal a candidate or party offers to potential voters. Lemme quote:

It was Treleaven, working on a 1966 Congressional campaign in Texas for this businessman named George HW Bush, who noted that "logical persuasion" was difficult to sell because he found "probably more people vote for irrational, emotional reasons than professional politicians suspect." (p.45)  He found that image worked wonders, as long as he presented Bush as likable, hard-working, and expressing empathy for the voter...

The issues may be things that a party can rally around, but the driving force behind voter interest and voter turnout are the emotional and irrational appeals to that interest. The Beltway pundits may demand the candidates talk about "the issues" but when you watch and read how they cover the campaigns they almost always discuss non-issues about the candidates that cover personalities, follies, and worse.

When I look back at the Presidential campaigns I've witnessed, I've noticed the issues only mattered to a point: What mattered to the voters seemed to be the beliefs - based a lot on gut feelings - of which candidate appealed on an emotional level. It mattered if the voters had an irrational perception of the candidate, not the rational. A rational voter base would have swarmed to Hillary due to her experience and stances on issues that did resonate with Americans... but she couldn't achieve a majority vote because of the irrational fearmongering that had followed her for decades. Biden isn't as strong a candidate on paper when it comes to the issues... but his public persona is so likable he could (and did) make a few gaffes and still see his popularity polls go upward.

So it makes some sense, to be fair, that the parties find ways to appeal to not only their own bases on an emotional level, but also as many Americans as possible. It's a lesson learned from the 1970s, and it all depends - like the Republicans in 1980 with Reagan, with the Democrats in 1992 with Clinton - if the gamble pays off.

The problem is that since 1992 when Bush the Elder was losing control of the coalition that won them the 1980s, the Republican Party decided to pursue emotional prodding not through empathy or likability - although they'd LOVE to have another Reagan to come along and seduce the masses again - but through demonization of the Other. It had been there with the dog whistles on race and abortion under Reagan, but when Bush signed off on battling Dukakis with the Willie Horton ad, it was like a dam bursting loose.

The Republican turn to mudslinging (also known as Swiftboating when it was Kerry they insulted in 2004) came at the same time the Republicans were losing ground with their actual agendas of gay-bashing, tax-cutting, deregulating, and more. The views of the voting base shifted from conservative to liberal, even as the Republicans clung harder to their tax-cut Utopia ways. By 2012, their own strategists were warning the party that the younger more Progressive voters were going to outnumber the older more Republican voters by 2024 (2028 at the latest) and that no amount of irrational campaigning was going to win them over.

Instead, the Republicans doubled down. They focused on suppressing the voters they can't control - minorities, women, college-age blocs - and allowed their more racist leanings - expressed with anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim fervor - to dominate their agenda in 2016.

That lead to trump winning.

And it lead to the Republicans realizing that, even as they race towards that demographic brick wall in 2024, this is the only way left for them to win.

It's not much of a plan: Stoke outrage and let Overlord trump reap the benefits.

The horrifying thing is if they can drive enough Americans insane to make it work again in 2020.

We dare not let them.