The End of the Republican Party: Why They Won’t Last

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In 2016, the numbers were in their favor. In 2020, it's only four years later. You're seeing more college educated, white people and more minorities, which is already closing that gap even further. By 2024, 2028, it's going to become increasingly difficult to run on white supremacy.

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I'm your host, Anita [inaudible 00:00:27], and this is The World We Inherit. Yesterday night was the presidential debate, and it was a shit show. I think the most disappointing part on the whole was how devolved our politics has become. Previous debates were obviously never like this, and the one thing that I couldn't stop thinking about was how the Republican party left behind all of their decorum and backed Donald Trump. Now he has become the face of the Republican party. The entire identity of the Republican party was left behind and they just took on whoever Trump was. That kind of leads to the question, what will this party look like after Donald Trump? What do they do? Do they continue behaving in this way? I don't really think you can replicate the spectacle that is Donald Trump again. Do they revert back to their 2012 politics and platform? What does the future hold for them?

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Today we're going to talk about the effect of Donald Trump on the Republican party and whether or not they're going to survive. I think, to put it very simply, the appeal of Donald Trump for the Republican leaders is just the amount of power he possesses over his base, and he really is a figure that is untouchable. There is not a single story that can come out that can hurt his reputation amongst his base. The amount of devotion that his base has for him is channeled from white fear really, which is this fear of losing their higher status in society to minorities. In the debate itself, I don't know if a lot of people caught this, but Donald Trump was asked why education about race and race relations was a racist thing. One of the phrases that he had said was it's like a role reserval.

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He would know.

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What is radical about racial sensitivity trainings?

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If you were a certain person, you had no status in life, it was sort of a reversal.

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Which implies that they are very much aware and acknowledge that they enjoy a higher status in society than minority groups. Would know about racial sensitivity training. That honestly really struck me because it was this very obvious acknowledgement that this structural racism exists, and our fear is that we will one day have to be in your position. For all the lies he tells, that was a very honest moment. I don't really think it came from him. I don't think he really cares about anything, to be honest. I feel like if you took Fox News, put it in a washer dryer and gave it a run, the jumble of words that come out is basically how Donald Trump talks, so I'm sure that is a phrase that he had heard from that outlet, if not somebody from his own inner circle.

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Obviously, this white fear thing is not a new phenomenon. It can actually be traced back to post Civil War when that same zero sum game, that if someone is being given freedom, that directly subtracts from my freedom. Then it kind of puts on a mask, I guess, after the Civil Rights era in the 1960s and becomes dog whistle politics, so people are talking about things that root in white fear, like immigrants are taking our jobs and more dressed up white fear platforms that the Republican party takes on. That idea of appealing to white fear and to white supremacy in general is called the Southern Strategy. If you listen to part two of the police brutality series, I go into depth about the Southern Strategy and whatnot, so I highly recommend you listen to that, but just to give a summary, the Republican party starts realizing that they are losing election after election and in kind of a way to save their own party, they really start playing to southern white people with this white fear, white supremacy dialogue.

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By doing that, the Republican party obviously alienates itself from all minorities. 80% of people of color vote for the Democratic party, and it is purely because of the premise of the Republican party to start out with. There's actually a word for it, and it's called Group Status Threat, where people in the group worried that their own group status influence and position in the hierarchy is under threat. I'm not just ascribing my own analysis of the Republican party. There's plenty of empirical evidence that proves that the fear of other drives people to become more conservative and more likely to vote for Republicans.

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One such study found that white people increased their support of Trump after hearing about the minority majority affect. The minority majority effect is that in time we'll one day be outnumbered by minorities. That was a study by UC-Santa Barbara. It was actually admitted by the RNC chairman in 2005. His name was John Ehrlichman, and he basically apologizes to the NAACP about how the Republican party played into racial divides and how they were apologetic and this and that. It was a real thing that saved the Republican party, but it's only inevitable that white people will become outnumbered by minorities. That's due to the rising Latino population and more immigration. All of these factors in time dilute out the power of white people in their ability to occupy political power with the idea of white folks.

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That dawns on the Republican party in 2012, and that's when Obama happens. You see 2008 he wins and in 2012 he wins again. That's when the Republican party decides to reevaluate what the hell they're doing. In 2012, where they have this report. I think is like the growth and opportunity report, but it's more famously in the media known as the autopsy report, where the Republican National Committee goes back and basically rips apart the Republican party itself, which acknowledges the inevitable ending of the Republican party if they continue to go by this playbook. It's actually pretty shocking how progressive the report is. It acknowledges it's need to support immigration reform, which they very blatantly say that they need to get more Latino voters, so they need to acknowledge immigration reform. Another thing was that they have to be more welcoming to gay people. It's this very progressive report and outlines how much restructuring needs to happen in the Republican party to be able to continue to exist and not die. Now it's hilarious to look at because in 2016, they basically trashed that entire idea and backed Donald Trump.

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Does that mean they were wrong in 2012? No. The number of minority voters will ensure that Republicans never get elected to office anymore. There are still not enough minority people in the correct places, I guess, in the political map to have that kind of ensured power. It's like an ever closing gap of time when Republicans can continue on this platform and still mathematically have a chance of winning, but my interpretation of the whole thing is the Republican party went from dying slowly to rapidly dying. By backing Donald Trump, they went from smoking a pack a week to smoking a pack a day. They only sped up the death of their own party, which you would think that they would have more foresight to predict such a thing, but I think the appeal of the power of Donald Trump was so much so that they kind of forgot or trashed or disregarded completely this idea of becoming more progressive and becoming more inclusive and accepting of people to going in the exact opposite direction, because in that point of time, it still worked.

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In 2016, the numbers were in their favor. They could still pull it off. In 2020, it's only four years later. You're seeing more college educated white people that are less likely to vote for Trump and more minorities, which is already closing that gap even further. It's not like it's statistically impossible, but by 2024, 2028, it's going to become increasingly difficult to run on white supremacy. I would think that somebody thought of it, or maybe the calculus was hey, you know what, our party is structured around being exclusive and closed minded that there's really no way we can restructure it that significantly to attract minority voters. We're going to go out anyway, so we might as well do a big. Maybe that was the calculus. I don't know.

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I don't think that's lost on Republican leaders. I don't think that they haven't thought of that. I just think Donald Trump has hijacked the whole party that there isn't much they can do to change the direction of where they're going. It's kind of all in this man's hands. Honestly, I kind of feel for them because imagine having your hands tied and watching this guy lead your party. You kind of have to feel for them. I guess a word of solace for people who have been just as nervous and stressed as I have been and will continue to be for the next month up until and even following the election, that if Donald Trump wins 2020, the platform on which he ran on is not sustainable. There will be a point in time when being inclusive of others, condemning white supremacy, championing equality will become necessary parts of parties' platforms.

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As painful as it is to see the white supremacists having rallies and supporting this guy, there's some hope in knowing that at some point their voices will be diluted out and the number of people who support equality. That's kind of my peace on something to hold onto in a time when everything feels like this singular election is going to make or break the country. Okay. Thanks for listening. I ask that you subscribe, rate this show, if for nothing else, just for the fact that I have to edit this episode, so that means listening to my own voice for hours and hours on end, which is some kind of torture to have to listen to yourself on recording. Please subscribe, rate the show and send it to your friends. Yeah. That's all I have to say. Thanks for listening. I'm your host, Anita [inaudible 00:11:23] and this is The World We Inherit.