Why Does the GOP Elite Hate Its Own Base?
For the GOP, the status quo is simply unsustainable.
By Josh Hammer
December 8, 2022
It is one of the most bitter and tragic ironies of our contemporary politics that the leadership of one of America’s two major political parties, the Republican Party, utterly despises that party’s very own voting base.
The GOP elite’s scorn for its own voters has, at this point, been a long time in the making. The trend accelerated during the 2009-2011 rise of the Tea Party, a grassroots movement fueled by constitutionalism and anti-elite populism. The crustier elements of the Republican establishment ran as far away as possible from the Tea Party, and the 2012 presidential coronation of private equity plutocrat Mitt Romney effectively killed the movement. Four years later, the Republican establishment fought tooth-and-nail against presidential candidates Donald Trump and Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the two candidates who most vociferously condemned the establishment’s myriad shortcomings; as an unsurprising corollary, Trump and Cruz fetched the most primary votes that cycle from actual rank-and-file Republican voters.
The Trump presidency saw the continuation of the same basic dynamic. Republican voters, by nominating a loudmouth non-politician like Trump, were clamoring for something new. Those voters were sick of the same-old Republican pablum: willful complicity in globalization and all the harms wrought by reckless immigration compromises and myopic supply chain outsourcing, and the ideologically driven pursuit of various right-liberal economic and foreign policy dogmas more generally—even when those dogmas came at the expense of the median American’s tangible interests. Nonetheless, with precious few exceptions, the conservative intelligentsia refused to treat Trump’s deviations from previous decades’ failed orthodoxies as anything other than a blip on the radar, to be conveniently discarded at a time when the GOP’s “dead consensus” might rise anew.
Now, in the midst of a lame-duck Congress and in the aftermath of a severely disappointing midterm election, we have gleaned even more indicia about the level of scorn Republican elites reserve for their own voters.
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https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/08/why-does-the-gop-elite-hate-its-own-base/
