The dismal science? Move over for dismal patriots.
Thomas Edsall this morning expands on the thesis that many of our loudest and proudest flag-wavers are animated by animus toward fellow Americans. In fact, another study, “Partisan Schadenfreude and the Demand for Candidate Cruelty,” indicates that these voters take “‘joy in the suffering’ of partisan others.” They “create a ‘demand for candidate cruelty’ since these voters are ‘more likely than not to vote for candidates who promise to pass policies that ‘disproportionately harm’ supporters of the opposing political party.’”
Exploiting that, and in the tradition of George Wallace, Edsall writes, Donald Trump “has mobilized and consolidated a cohort that now exercises control over the Republican Party, a renegade segment of the electorate, perhaps as large as one third of all voters, who disdain democratic principles, welcome authoritarian techniques to crush racial and cultural liberalism, seek to wrest away the election machinery and suffer the mass delusion that Trump won last November.”
At The Bulwark, Joshua Tait examines the paradox of Trump intellectuals (no, he’s not treating that as an oxymoron) who for all their “grandiose professions of love for country” seem to hate it deeply. Or at least more than half of it. A senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and a visiting research scholar at Hillsdale College, Glenn Elmers targets not only undocumented immigrants but those “who may technically be citizens of the United States but are no longer (if they ever were) Americans.”
In the same way that dehumanizing the enemy in war makes it easier for your soldiers to kill them, de-Americanizing political opponents makes it easier for Republicans to justify their disenfranchisement. Or in the case of insurrection, to hang them. Or in the case of an election loss to them, to overturn it.
Tait writes of these dismal patriots, “What’s unusual about the Trumpist right is the extent to which they think that America is not just on the brink of collapse, but that it has already toppled.” A product of post-electoral defeat malaise, perhaps, “but increasingly these American Greatness patriots appear to actively hate America and their fellow citizens.”
Their issue, Tait explains, is with “the rights guaranteed in the Founding documents gradually reinterpreted and expanded to include more Americans” as the country grapples, too, with the demands of modernity:
Many Trumpist intellectuals have bought into an idealized vision of a bygone America and see the present as its perverse antithesis. So they proclaim, or at least imply the existence of, an authentic American people that excludes more than it includes or a Golden Age that never really existed. Caught trying to theorize the dominance of an electoral minority, they rely on a narrative of the people versus a ruling class—a kind of Silenced Majority of real Americans battling elites and their captured voting blocs of immigrants and minorities.
“Fundamentally at odds with modernity,” Tait concludes, “the Trumpist intellectuals are at odds with the real America, but remain committed to the rhetoric of patriotism. They are strangers in their own country, all the while professing to love it.”
Which is to say they are losing and know it.
The Jim Crow South managed to snatch racist victory from the jaws of battlefield defeat after the Civil War. For over a century Southerners and fellow travelers held off modernity and the promise of a more perfect union “reinterpreted and expanded to include more Americans.”
Non-white Americans born and naturalized since the Civil Rights Era now occupy more of the political space than ever. The Real Americans™ Tait and Edsall describe remain just as committed to the rhetoric of capitalist competition while grinding their teeth to nubs at having to actually having to compete. They would rather rig the game.
Edsall writes that Trump appealed to the demographic seeing its vote-share shrinking, “the alienated, the distrustful, voters willing to sacrifice democracy for a return to white hegemony.” They will have their hegemony back or else set the country alight.