The 2016 Presidential election is no longer about taxes, health care, income inequality, "religious freedom," education, foreign entanglements, climate change, the economy, jobs or employment. According to Matt Taibbi, writing for Rolling Stone, the Trumpification of the Republican Party has turned the entire American political debate into a full-blown war over race, and specifically the terrible time of it that whites have had in this country.
Trump's supporters are people who are tired of being told they have to be part of some kind of coalition in order to have a political voice. They particularly hate being lectured about alienating minorities, especially by members of their own party.
Taibbi notes that the Republican base's collective, almost instinctual impulse to shrug off reams of polling data warning of electoral disaster from alienating African-Americans, Latinos and Hispanics any further than they've been alienated by the Party over the past decade represents a watershed development in the American political landscape:
The point is that Trump clearly feels he can afford to flip off the Hispanic community and win with a whites-only strategy. And his supporters are loving the idea that he's trying.
The decision by huge masses of Republican voters to defy D.C.-thinkfluencer types like George Will and throw in with a carnival act like Trump is no small thing. For the first time in a generation, Republican voters are taking their destiny into their own hands.
In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it.
The classic scam perpetrated by the GOP on its voters is that it cares about the same issues that they do. That pesky hot-button social issues like abortion or gay marriage actually matter to billionaire hedge fund managers and the CEO's of fossil fuel conglomerates who actually foot the bill for maintaining the Party as a going concern. Or that the insanely profitable cheap labor provided by immigrants or poor, desperate foreign workers is something the GOP elites would actually want to scuttle:
They made sure their voters' idea of an elitist was Sean Penn hanging out with Hugo Chavez, instead of a Wall Street bank financing the construction of Chinese factories.
It's seemingly never occurred to the poor Republican sap protecting his gun cabinet from the Kenyan Marxist that the real money interests hire flown-in private nurses to facilitate abortions for their thin and silent mistresses, that financial titans don't think too much about gay marriage from their cocaine island playgrounds and yachts, and that the private security companies these folks employ enjoy a permanent pipeline of impossibly lethal high tech weaponry that will never, ever be disturbed by any Executive or legislative action.
All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Then you push forward some dingbat like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin to reassure everyone that the Republican Party knows who the real Americans are. Call it the "Rove 1-2."
That's literally all it's taken to secure decades of Republican votes, a few patriotic words and a little over-the-pants rubbing. Policywise, a typical Republican voter never even asks a politician to go to second base.
That time has passed, Taibbi suggests. In the age of Trump there is an insatiable demand for the type of immediate gratification that only a cynical blowhard demagogue can promise with any shred of credibility. Trump has taken the wholly contrived immigration "issue" the GOP elite has flirted with on occasion to churn up nativist sentiment just when it was useful to them, and blown it up into a casus belli, a visceral imperative that will not be denied, flying in the face of dire warnings by establishment GOP voices that this strategy risks electoral suicide. He's invited the Republican voter to make a lover's leap with him into the abyss of an imagined racial purity, while transforming the debate in this country from issues that could conceivably matter to its actual citizens into a "moronic referendum on white victimhood:"
For reasons that are, again, obvious to everyone but Republican voters, this "woe is us" narrative is never to fly with the rest of the country, including especially (one imagines) the nonwhite population. Few sane people are going to waste a vote on a sob story about how rough things have gotten for white people. But Trump supporters are clinging to this fantasy far more fiercely than red-state voters were ever clinging to guns or religion.
That leaves us facing a future in which national elections will no longer be decided by ideas, but by numbers. It will be a turnout battle between people who believe in a multicultural vision for the country, and those who don't.