Re: Campaign 2016 Part XI: the Two Party Problem
That sounds good, and maybe your co-workers are telling themselves that, but when push comes to shove Herm Cain and Ben Carson got about as many votes as the guy who ran for dog catcher in my town. Again, I'll believe it when I see it. In the entire GOP congressional delegation, is there more than 1 minority (Scott in SC)? Out of almost 300 people?
I'm going to comment based on my 10 years of embedded anthropology among the Salt of the Earth.
The conservative mountain has several geologic strata.
Level 0: At the very bottom are the hard core unreconstructed racists. The genuine article, unchanged since the time of Mark Twain. None of these people actually has a job or functions in society wider than their extended families. They lie on the couch watching TV and spitting the same racist bile that has gurgled up from the id since we left the trees. I only know
of these people, from the stories my co-workers tell. Interestingly,
these are the people most conservatives have in mind when they talk about "good for nothing welfare cheats." And hey, they should know. It's always a brother-in-law who is like this. They have virtually no political activity.
Level 1: The next level are the Unskilled Working Poor Conservatives. They're mostly fundamentalist Christians, don't believe in evolution or global warming, and have almost zero "book learning." They do the very worst jobs: they work at chicken processing plants or convenience stores or assembly plants. They distrust Fox News and "slick" media types. The love Glenn Beck and go in for Infowars et al. They lack any mainstream political ideology, believing the Republicans and Democrats are two wings of the same party. They are primarily re-living past scores to settle: they hate the gubbmint or the drug companies or the military because at some point in their lives they've been genuinely wronged. They feed on and emit pure resentment. They
hate banksters and lawyers and, come to think of it, that guy over there does kinda look Jewy. Before Drumpf they had very little political involvement, but they believe in Him big time.
Level 2: My co-workers, the Blue Collar Skilled Conservatives. This is the backbone of the current Republican base. They have regular jobs, homeschool their kids, listen to talk radio, have a strange guilt relationship with religion. They are driven primarily by fear of losing what little they have. These are the people the GOP screwed over at the height of "What's the Matter with Kansas," and they even sort of know it but feel they have no choice because of abortion. If they have college it's a Strayer business degree or a post-military accreditation program. These are, as near as I can tell, the only people left in the United States who actually do real
work for a living. Without them absolutely nothing would work: cars, appliances, electrical grids, HVAC, plumbing, construction. These are the only people who have any skills that would be relevant in a pre-1950 world. They are the voters who the Democrats lost in the late 60's through late 80's. They believe much of the bilge that is firehosed at them by conservative media, but primarily they just want to be left alone. They're by far the largest segment of the conservative mountain and as such the most diverse, with the usual bell curve for intelligence, morality, and work ethic. Importantly, they are
not racist -- they are probably the only people in the country who are genuinely not caring about race. They value hard work, good values, and decorum. If they tend to distrust blacks or city people as a general hypothesis it's because they have been pumped full of poison by the Echo Chamber for generations, but put a black person in front of them and they welcome them with the same spirit of Christian brotherhood as anybody else. They're sick of being called racist and they would love a serious conservative black candidate to jam that smugness back down liberal throats. (They are, though, painfully homophobic, and they're fairly sexist although it's slowly dying off -- on gender they are about where American liberal males were in the 70's).
There are more strata above them but those become indistinguishable from liberal strata, with the political differences being driven not by ideology but by accidents of autobiography: they are middle class white collar folks born into conservative homes so they're conservative, or they are hard-scrabble immigrants who made it big and believe in American exceptionalism. At the top there are the take-no-prisoners "I'm alright Jack take your hands offa my stack" Meritocrats and then the doddering, Senatorial Bush/Romney Upper Class Twit of the Year donor class. These upper strata are the ones who run Republican national politics so they're all familiar enough.
