Characterizing entire groups
of people is the basis of prejudice. Sweeping generalizations are the
foundation of racism, sexism, antisemitism, and every form of discriminatory
ideology. Offensive stereotypes appear often in crudely
written op-eds, where selected evidence about individuals is applied to whole
categories of people.
I have worked hard to avoid
the easy tendency to overgeneralize. But this question persists in my mind: are
today’s Republicans nasty?
Certainly there are nasty
Republicans, as there are nasty people of every political persuasion. Perhaps
it is too easy to make a long list of nasty Republicans. I think it’s enough to
refer to the collective televised behavior of Republican Senators and
Representatives during the impeachment hearings, where argument and nastiness
were blended into a toxic brew designed to distract attention from what Trump
had actually done.
What provokes my bigger
question is the possibility that nastiness has become the essence of
Republicanism. This process did not begin with Trump. Rush Limbaugh has
personified the meanness
of conservatism since 1988, calling feminists whores and Nazis,
stereotyping gays, and repeating racist comments. His success spawned an
industry of right-wing talk radio hosts, copying his nastiness, sometimes being
rewarded with political office. Inspired by Limbaugh’s success as a Republican
spokesman, nine
radio hosts ran for Congress in 1994, all Republicans. A local
article about Minnesota’s two radio-hosts-turned-Congressmen, Jason Lewis
and Tom Emmer, says that on the air they “gladly played roles as bomb-throwers
and provocateurs.”
Alex Jones began as a talk radio personality, then
created InfoWars in 1999. His utter disregard for people in the deepest grief
has now landed him in court, sued by the families of young victims of the Sandy
Hook Elementary School shooting. But before that, Jones’ willful nastiness
earned him Trump
White House press credentials. When Trump gave Limbaugh the Presidential
Medal of Freedom during his State of the Union address in February, he placed
public nastiness in front of his Party for their instruction.
Trump has changed the rules
of public political behavior. When he was still a candidate vying for the
Republican nomination, viciously attacking Hillary Clinton in ways
unprecedented for a presidential campaign, Limbaugh
said, “Trump can say this stuff as an outsider. He can say this stuff as a
nonmember of the elite or the establishment”. That distinction is now gone. The
Republican establishment, headed by Trump, says things like that every day.
Talk radio hosts helped
eliminate moderation from Republican politics, says Brian
Anderson, author of “Talk Radio’s America”. “Any Republican who sought out
compromise or who rejected political warfare found him or herself a target of
conservative media.” Turning politics into a blood sport, and kicking moderates
off the team, made for good, passionate radio and meshed with listeners’
frustrations. Now many elected Republicans sound like radio commentators
instead of statesmen.
How nasty can a Republican
candidate be and still win the party’s official approval? Roy Moore ran for the
Senate in 2017 with full approval of the Republican National Committee, despite
having publicly disparaged Islam and homosexuality, being removed from the
Alabama Supreme Court for refusing to comply with federal court rulings, and
having said that America was great during slavery, because people “cared for
one another”. He only lost RNC support when it turned out he was a child
molester. But Trump endorsed him and the RNC reversed itself and got behind him again.
I think it’s also reasonable
to argue that common Republican political maneuvers are nasty. Voter
suppression, gerrymandering, and taking away powers from newly elected
Democratic governors are dirty political tools that have become the hallmark of
21st-century Republicanism. The official policies of the Republicans
in Washington are beastly: caging immigrant children and the treatment of
Puerto Ricans after Hurricane Maria.
What about your neighbor who
votes Republican, but seems like a nice guy? Is he responsible for the
nastiness of other Republicans? I believe that supporting a politician,
approving publicly of a politician, means accepting responsibility for that
politician’s actions.
The approval of 90%
of Republican voters for Trump is the basis for his complete lack of
restraint of his nastiest impulses. In the month of May, he topped himself. He retweeted
a video in which a Republican New Mexico county commissioner said that “the
only good Democrat is a dead Democrat”. He repeatedly
accused the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough of murdering a staffer, provoking
that woman’s widowed husband to plead with Twitter’s CEO to take down Trump’s
tweets.
That’s about as nasty as it
gets. It may be too great a leap of generalization to say that Republicans are
nasty people. But in their full-throated support for Trump, no matter how nasty
he gets, America’s Republicans promote nastiness.
Isn’t that nasty?
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
June 2, 2020
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