David Brooks said on Friday that the talking points of the Republican Convention were incoherent. That is just incorrect, perhaps because Brooks preferred to believe Republicans had a sweeter tone in years past. But even on the first night, the talking points were neither new nor particularly biting than the accusations leveled against the Democrats ever since I started watching both Republican and Democratic Conventions ever since 1952. It has always been the penchant of Republicans to attack Democrats as Socialists or worse. They were also the exponents of Main Street and then of the suburbs. Republicans and Trump are against the labor unions and in favor of the corporate job creators. Republicans and Trump emphasize the danger of public rioting and urban unrest lest it reach to social anarchy. Republicans and Trump are bellicose about foreign nations, such as Cuba and the Soviet Union then, or, now, Venezuela and China and Iran. The great dirty secret is not that Trump took over the Republican Party, but that the Republican Party, however much its misgivings about his verbal excesses, is comfortable with most of his policy positions, to the extent that Trump can say he has a set of positions rather than a reflexive instinct for the most Conserrvative caricatures of American society. Henry Kissinger once said that the Republican Party was a first rate party with a second class constituency. He was probably thinking of the able cabinets Republican Presidents assembled once they got elected. That is no longer the case. The party is just its constituency.
It is no use to fact check for an overall point of view. Ronnie McDaniel said on the first night of the Convention that Biden wanted to raise the taxes on 84% of the population and so MSNBC threw on the screen a placard under the title “Factcheck” which said that Biden only wants to raise taxes on those making more than $400,000 a year. The point is that Republicans only sometimes describe the Democratic tax policy, accurately enough, as one to soak the rich; they more often present it as an attack on most pocketbooks. Similarly, Kimberly Guilfoyle said on the first night of the Convention that Democrats want to defund the police, when Joe Biden has repeatedly said that he does not want to do that. Yes, AOC may endorse that idea, but she does not speak for the Democratic Party, however much the Republicans would like to claim that she does, because it plays into their long time contention that the Democrats are the party of subversion and, oh yes, of the minorities, or to paraphrase Trump, we would welcome immigrants from Norway.
It is no use the Times columnists weigh in on the best and the worst moments of the convention. That is to miss the point that there is a standardized agenda and that each speaker, more or less strident, picks up one or another of the points that portrays the Democrats as simply being anti-American, and that some of the speakers, like Tim Scott, bring up that he moved up from cotton to Congress in one lifetime. We know where we are at a Republican Convention.
So how do Democrats answer this onslaught? Historically, they have done so with large personalities and demographic changes. They had JFK and Barack Obama and ever increasing numbers of college educated and minority voters. Hillary, however, turned people off for reasons I still don’t understand; she wasn’t all that bad an egg as a candidate, but suburban women and Blacks chose to stay home rather than vote for her, and so we got the present incumbent. Joe Biden may be a decent guy, but he does not have a large personality, and we will see whether their inaction in 2016 will be a sufficient goad to turn out the vote this time, the demographics favorable to Democrats because of the increased size of the Hispanic vote and the loyalty of the Black vote, and so maybe southern states will this time or next time move into the Democratic column. I nearly said “if there is a next time” because I take seriously Trump saying “why not twelve more years?” Believe what people say about themselves. Presidents in American history don’t even joke about such matters.
What has happened to the Reublican Party is an exemplification of what S. M. Lipset described in the Fifties as “working class authoritarianism”. The working class abandons its concern for its own economic interests so as to give in to its craving for a strong leader, even if Trump is not strong but merely bellicose. To do so in the Seventies was dignified as a division with the Democrats over social issues, such as abortion, though at the time it was also about racial issues, a nostalgia for the time not then long gone when Blacks knew their place. Now that is combined with the know-nothingism, the disdain for science, that Richard Hofstader, reflecting in the early Sixties on the same political scene with which Lipset had been confronted, identified as the anti-intellectual strand in American politics. Nothing changes because the Republican Party has never recovered from FDR. It didn’t go the way of Wendell Wilkie and become overtly progressive. Republicans, instead, favored slow and steady conservatism plus the red meat. Even George W. Bush spoke of “compassionate Conservatism”, which meant that it was an oxymoron, which meant that being compassionate was the opposite of being a Conservative. Moreover, Republicans did not open up to new voting groups, either Blacks or, as proposed not so many years ago by Marco Rubio, to Hispanic voters. Republicans, instead, drill deep into its base support, hoping to coax one more election out of them, and it is a great tribute to the party that it is successful at doing so, no matter how dated might seem to be its perennial ideology.
The kickoff speaker of the fourth day of the Republican Convention was a football coach who said that Trump had accomplished all of his promises. That was astonishing given that he had not built the wall and had not had Mexico pay for it. Was it just a slip? Perhaps the coach was imagining what he wanted his leader to have done. Perhaps he was suggesting that whatever were his lies, his bedrock foundation was that he always fulfilled promises. So it is quibbling to point out that he did not deliver. It is just an ordinary convention hokum. But be less generous. Biden did not have to lie even though he had to evade that he was harsh on crime a quarter of a century ago. The fact of the matter is that Republicans lie all the time because otherwise they would have to admit that they are in favor of the rich and mean to the poor. Mitch McConnell gives no hokum; he just delivers the Republican ideology that goes back to the Eisenhower years.
So there isn’t much to say. As Kelly Ann Conway, in a phrase that lasts, she said there are “alternative facts”, which means there is a different perspective if you bother to elaborate all the facts and premises that weave together as the Republican point of view. So let us just look. The White House celebrants were without masks and without distancing and no one except Trump and Pence were tested. There is nothing to be said. A pandemic is a political matter rather than a public health exercise. The Republicans thought themselves brave while they thought the Democrats were cowardly. Astonishing.
I am going to say something astonishing. Biden is saying that Trump has botched up the coronavirus pandemic. Let us suggest for a moment to disregard the coronavirus. It seems likely that masks and distancing seem to make a difference, but I am not an epidemiologist. Maybe Southern states are in the wane despite so much crowding. Let's figure about some certain facts. Trump, years ago, separated toddlers from their adults without any plan to reconnect them. That is so very very cruel, and not even in an emergency that might lead to the World War II relocation camps (which did not separate parents from children). That is sufficient reason to dump Trump.