How the GOP Is Losing Its Grip on Working-Class Republicans

How the GOP Is Losing Its Grip on Working-Class Republicans

by Jacob Weisberg at Salon

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/04/how_the_gop_is_losing_its_grip_on_working_class_republicans.html

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Working-class Republicans are waking up to the reality that their new party doesn’t represent them any more than the Democrats did. On issue after issue, Trump’s supporters are at odds with GOP dogma. They don’t support free trade and globalization. They don’t favor tax cuts for the wealthy, or bailouts for banks, or financial deregulation, or the rollback of consumer protections. They’re against privatizing Social Security, paring back Medicare, and eliminating other government programs that aid the middle class. While they’ve been encouraged to regard Barack Obama as an extraterrestrial, they’re not demanding the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Though nationalistic, their families are the ones that paid the human cost for the neoconservative fantasy of bringing democracy to Iraq.

With his real estate developer’s nose for opportunity, Donald Trump has bought up the swampy property between Republican leaders and the Republican led. His most effective line of attack is against sensible immigration reform, which the party’s donor class supports and its constituent base rejects. Trump’s voters couldn’t care less about bringing Latinos into the GOP. But his rallying cry of “build the wall and make them pay for it” isn’t just about nativism. It expresses a broader distress over the consequences of globalization, free trade, deindustrialization, and deunionization. Like William F. Buckley in the 1950s, Trump’s supporters stand athwart economic change yelling, “Stop!”

In this context, the rise of the Tea Party, circa 2009, now appears as red herring. Rank-and-file Republicans weren’t in fact dismayed by George W. Bush’s failure to shrink their entitlement benefits. It was the party’s wealthy elite—the Koch brothers and their beneficiaries at libertarian think tanks—who were frustrated about that. Working-class Republicans were enraged because they saw the federal government bailing out Wall Street banks instead of ordinary citizens. The Tea Party quickly dissipated into irrelevancy because it didn’t represent the people it claimed to represent.

Granted the nomination, Trump will drive away the Republican elite in this year’s election. Denied the nomination, he may lead the white working class out of the party for good, or clear the path for its slow-motion removal. But people who agree on next to nothing can’t go on cohabiting indefinitely. It’s impossible to say what form a Republican schism will end up taking. It could be an actual rupture at the Republican Convention in Cleveland, like South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat walkout from the 1948 Democratic Convention, with immigration as the new segregation. Or, if Republicans lose in November, we could see the emergence of a Trumpian third party. Or a populist faction could try to seize control of the GOP from within.



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