Who’s “out of touch” now?
MAGA Republicans have turned so far inward that they are speaking to an increasingly thinner — and weirder — slice of America.
I’ll admit that I did not subject myself to the Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) response to the State of the Union Address on Tuesday. But clips and accounts suggest how far down the MAGA rabbit hole she and her party have gone.
Paul Krugman wites this morning:
So as Greg Sargent of The Washington Post points out, it was remarkable that Sanders spoke largely in right-wing insider jargon. She boasted of eliminating C.R.T. in her state, without even explaining the abbreviation; how many Americans know that it stands for “critical race theory,” let alone why that’s supposed to be such a bad thing?
For that matter, focus groups suggest that most people don’t know what “wokeness” means, or why they should fear it.
The Sanders rebuttal, wrote Matthew Sheffield, “was filled with far-right buzzwords that were likely incomprehensible to most Americans who had bothered to watch.”
Sanders spoke in narratives already “well past their sell-by date,” Kurgman adds.
The name of Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) new “Weaponization of the Federal Government” subcommittee, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) told the committeee in testifying Thursday, is a case of “pure psychological projection.” Weaponizing government is what Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans did, in spades [timestamp 49:50]. Jordan’s audience for his hearings is that same faction of not-of-this world MAGA insiders. “Normies” not receiving extremist narratives by IV drip won’t understand what it’s about.
Krugman concludes:
Just to be clear, there are culture warriors on the left, and some of them can be annoying even to social liberals. But few have significant power, and they certainly don’t rule the Democratic Party, which isn’t locked into a closed mental universe, impervious to inconvenient facts, whose denizens communicate in buzzwords nobody else recognizes.
Republicans, however, do live in such a universe — and what Sarah Huckabee Sanders showed us was that they can’t step outside that universe even when they should have strong political incentives to sound like normal people and pretend to care about regular Americans’ concerns.
Follow The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper’s Twitter feed or The Good Liars to see how bizarre the GOP base has become. Did you know Hillary Clinton has been replaced with a body double? That Donald Trump is currently president and running the country from Mar-a-Lago? That Nazis won WWII? That Mars has been colonized for decades? That there is no war in Ukraine; it’s all actors?
There is, however, a lesson in the Sanders debacle that the left is just learning. Our messaging friend Anat Shenker-Osorio cautions the left never to take their policies out in public: “It’s unseemly.” Drew Westen (“The Political Brain“) warns them not to take their acronyms out in public either.
The first time I heard GOTV (get out the vote), I thought it had something to do with television. Activists should never talk to normal people the way they speak with each other. There are few more effective ways for turning off potential volunteers than by making them feel as if they don’t belong. MAGA Republicans are perfecting that.
Need an example?