Democrats can misunderstand the Roy Moore phenomenon.
He won't be the Democratic whipping boy. Democrats have it backwards.
Some Democratic friends think Roy Moore is win-win. If he loses the Democrats have an unexpected Senator. If he wins, Democrats have a poster boy. They can shame the Republicans.
One Democratic friend put it to me this way: "So he will be topic A in every interview for months to come and the center of attention as the media makes him the poster boy for the GOP."
No.
The deep meaning is that Democrats are so terrible, and represent such a threat to Christian values, that even a creepy, sexually inappropriate, intemperate extremist like Roy Moore is better than even the very best Democrat, an upstanding federal prosecutor. Roy Moore's election doesn't measure Republicans. It measures Democrats, and finds them unacceptable.
Republican voters--and not just in Alabama--have been inoculated against Democrats. Readers interested in understanding American politics might watch this five minute video of Frank Luntz talking with Alabama voters. This thinking is representative of what I learned while sitting quietly in Republican audiences for presidential candidates.
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| Click Here for the video |
The voices: The allegations against Moore are untrue. The allegations are unproven. The women accusers are paid. George Soros put them up to it. What Moore did wasn't all that bad. Moore is forgiven. Democrats would abort 9 month fetuses. Blacks are stupid--or at least vote stupidly. Blacks foolishly want immigrants her who will take their jobs. Blacks are influenced by bad people.
Lunt challenged them. You really think this? Come on, really? Yes. They asserted there are policies and a social order of power that Roy Moore represents that are correct and in the best interests of America and they want to support those policies.
Frank Luntz questioned them about the lack of blacks in the room. The group addressed it. Blacks are wrong, and Obama inflamed racial tensions.
This blog has asserted that the turning point in the Obama presidency was not his election. It was the moment that he criticized the white Cambridge, Massachusetts police officer who hassled black professor Henry Louis Gates as he attempted to enter his home, having locked himself out. Obama said the police acted stupidly. In that moment Obama was outed. He was black. His first instinct was not to identify with the white policeman, suspicious of a black man, but with the black man being wrongly assumed of a crime. Obama tried to repair things with a "beer summit." Too late. Obama tried to assert there were two sides to this misunderstanding.
Trump and the people in that audience above understood that there was only one side, and Obama has slipped up. Maybe he wasn't really bi-racial. Maybe he wasn't really American. One thing was sure: he didn't see things the way white Americans saw things.
That set the frame which Trump understood and exploited brilliantly. White people were at risk of being displaced. It set off backlash, and they closed ranks.
1 comment:
You correctly frame the discussion in terms of "race".
"Race" is a myth propagated by bigots. Educated people abandoned it long ago, as science revealed that all humans are one species and skin color is an irrelevant physical trait, much like hair color or shape of ear. Yet, in the South, it remains the predominant way people are judged and the basis of their class structure. Ignorant caucasian southerners (Trae Crowder's "S****y white people") fear retribution for their continued acceptance of slavery and the subjugation of people of color (more precisely, non-"white" because it extends to anyone who doesn't look like them). The continued veneration of the Confederacy is an example of this. Republicans (and preachers, sports teams, rock bands, etc.), have exploited this fear. However an ever-diminishing base has left them with the most rabid and ignorant bigots, who now control their party.
The Obama election created a backlash that Republicans seized on; maybe they thought they could control it. But it now colors every part of their agenda, one that had racist subtext that now has become overt. It extends into our own Oregon District 2 as otherwise "moderate" politicians find themselves forced to go along or be pushed out.
The simple truth of this is that if you acquiesce to a fundamentally racist agenda, you must wear the label. It can now be seen that the Civil War was a draw.
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