As the polls tighten in the last few days of the presidential election campaign, it’s interesting to see the reluctant GOP establishment start scurrying back into Donald Trump’s fold. Apparently, prominent Republicans are all making the bet that Trump will at least come close enough to make it necessary to back him, lest they be blamed for his failure. The most famous of those who’ve re-endorsed Trump after walking away when he was cratering is House Oversight Committee chair Jason Chaffetz, who probably secretly hopes Hillary Clinton will win so he can run his endless witch hunts in front of the cameras, but felt it was necessary to back Trump just in case. (Chaffetz is also likely to throw his hat into the ring for speaker if there’s a rebellion against Paul Ryan which is a real possibility.)
Sen. Deb Fischer of Nebraska, Rep. Scott Garrett of New Jersey, Rep. Bradley Byrne of Alabama and Sen. John Thune of South Dakota have all come creepinb back to Trump after initially dropping their endorsements in the wake of the “grab ’em by the pussy” tape. Even Trump skeptic and beloved Beltway conservative Hugh Hewitt has now decided to run with the pack.
It’s been a tough time for Republican officials and elite conservative pundits, and that’s understandable. They’ve just discovered that their voters have a different interpretation of conservatism than they thought they did. The elites define Reagan’s famous “three-legged stool” of conservatism as “economic conservatism,” “social conservatism” and “defense conservatism,” which they would further describe as a belief in small government, family values and patriotism, all dressed up in fancy philosophical paeans to freedom and the founders and the constitution.
Trump has shown that the base of the party also believes in those three pillars, but they have stripped away the intellectual veneer that made them socially acceptable and laid bare that the three legs actually represent racism, sexism and nationalism. Economic conservatism is simply a way to stop the federal government from spending money on “the wrong people.” Social conservatism is simply a way to keep women in their place. And defense conservatism is a chauvinistic belief that America is for Americans and foreigners had better watch their step.
Elites had always known that many Republican voters held these views, but they thought that over time these ugly impulses would gradually fade away and become more ideologically abstract. Infamous GOP strategist Lee Atwater explained how he expected this to evolve:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N***er, n***er, ni***er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni***er” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other.

Source: Salon: in-depth news, politics, business, technology & culture > Politics
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