Chapo Trap House Identifies the Real GOP Ideology: Tribalism

On the most recent episode of the podcast “Chapo Trap House,” where Will Menaker, Felix Biederman, and Matt Christman riff on the media, politics, and our empty, soulless society, the hosts exposed the real consequences of the Donald Trump moment.

In short, the hosts said, Trump’s primary victories have exposed an uncomfortable truth for the right wing intellectual elite: right-wing ideology has never been important to the Republican base. The Republican voter has never cared about the intellectual underpinnings of right wing politics. It’s the tribalism that makes the party attractive.

[M]enaker began the discussion by pointing out that both free market conservatism and neo-conservatism are “niche ideologies” that the general public doesn’t care about. Rather, Trump’s success is predicated on his rejection of the niceties of political discourse and political correctness in general.

Biederman followed up by noting that the media elites on both sides of the centrist divide were equally in a panic over the possibility that the electorate doesn’t care about political talking points. If this is true, Biederman said, then the pundit class would have to accept that “they have no fucking power over the base they thought they had power over.”

Christman joined in with an inspired rant on the Republican Party’s past five decades that I’ve transcribed:

In the wake of the civil rights movement, they (the Republican Party) were gifted this huge chunk of the electorate. These pissed off white people, first in the south and then increasingly in the northern suburbs… for the last 30 years the conservative mechanisms of power have been pumping huge money into the intelligentsia whose job it was to give these “rubes” who were voting Republican- out of base reptilian animus- to spot weld conservative principles onto that.

“Oh you’ve got some racism? Here, wouldn’t you like some free market capitalism to go with that? How about some neo-conservative foreign policy?”

This is dead on.

[I]n the mid to late 1960s, after the Civil Rights Act, the Republican Party used the Southern Strategy to translate the white backlash against the Civil Rights Movement into a devoted electorate. The Republicans would use this strategy to keep the presidency for 28 of the 48 years since Nixon won in 1968, about 60 percent of the time.

More importantly, the Republicans used the Southern strategy to gain control of Congress in the 1990s. They have held it ever since (with one 4 year dip from 2006–2010).

The reason for that is simple- the Republicans control the majority of the South and enough of the north to maintain their control through gerrymandering and preying on the prejudices and apathy of the post-boom American generation.

[W]hat they haven’t been doing, as our friends over at Chapo remind us, is maintaining their control through the promotion of free market ideology and aggressive foreign policy.

Those ideological orthodoxies have been secondary, if they’ve been paid attention to at all. In poll after poll, Americans reject right wing bellicose foreign policy and hyper-capitalism even as they vote Republican. The two don’t connect in the mind of the average voter.

Obviously, there is something more going on here.

It’s as Christman says. The GOP took advantage of the discontent and racial animus felt in the wake of the Civil Rights Act. The party “brains” then did everything they could to intertwine Friedman-esque capitalism and PNAC foreign policy with that tribalism.

Unfortunately for them, the tail could only wag the dog for so long. Eventually, the electorate would turn its back on the economic and foreign policy that has destroyed their lives for so long.

That the loudest and most successful voice to fill that void is Trump’s is the fault of the GOP itself.

[spacer height=”20px”]

Seriously, check out the podcast.

[spacer height=”20px”]