Why Shaming Republican Candidates For Their Bigotry Won't Work

The Democrats and media are correct in calling out the unequivocally bigoted campaign rhetoric coming from numerous Republicans, but at this point, it's very moot. Now this is by many of these heads openly taking that shame, and turning it into a badge of honor. Some on the left have every incentive to pin this spike in hateful speech on Donald Trump, but they're thoroughly going after the wrong person.

Trump is the figure who's been blurting the quieter part of the Republican Party's numerous coded and bigoted tropes out loud, which had invariably marked a change in tone. But he's not the cause for all of this, especially not the direct one. That honor falls onto greater figures of yesteryear. These are people such as James Buckley and Robert Welch, both of whom had entirely opposed the ending of segregation and the onset of Civil Rights. Doing so starting right back in 1954 with the ruling of Brown v. Board. 

So for all this bigoted horseshit that Republicans have been saying on the campaign trail, it's a clear sign that the party so taking a chapter out of Trump's playbook. But at the same time, it's also a sign that all these new Dixiecans are picking up from where their Dixiecrat ancestors were stymied in the 1960s and 1970s. Trying to get rid of the Civil Rights laws which outlawed Jim Crow. All with its unremittingly mandated segregation and discrimination.

For Republicans, it's not so much about gaining power as a party, it's about a section of America seeking total revenge for what it determines as encroachment on its rights: the White South, specifically of its elites. Some members of this clique have a thoroughly long history of using such bellicose language whenever they don't get their way. To them, it's about preserving a power structure which can actually only run smoothly upon the suffering of non-Whites, especially Blacks. They and Hispanics/Latinos are overwhelmingly targetted for either their dark skin tones, or for speaking in the wrong language, or both. Bear in mind, this is only a small fraction of this group which we're talking about, not the overwhelming majority.

What Donald Trump And The Republican Party's Race-Baiting Shows

This is a truth lost on no one, which is that Donald Trump is flailing in the various polls that have come out. This would also explain the reason for his and the Republican Party's continual race-baiting; they have nothing to run on, except for that. The economy has gone out the window and with the Trump Administration's bungled response to COVID-19, no one in their right mind would want to keep the Republicans in power. Dishonest, corrupt and incompetent; those are the best words to describe the Republican Party these days. The fact that they're being brazenly open about their not bothering to govern is a travesty in itself.

Trump and the Republicans turning to race-baiting illustrates that they've acknowleged that their credibility has disappeared and that they need a scapegoat of some kind to serve as a perfectly placed distraction. No amount of lying can get them out of the jam they're in, and they know this. The only way for them to save what power they do have is for the Democrats to nominate a candidate that no one wants as an alternative. This is classic Republican campaign tactics at work: make someone else the problem, make something else the issue. This didn't help the Republicans in both the 2006 and 2018 midterm elections, nor in the 2008 presidential election. Those 3 election cycles saw the Republicans take steep losses at the polls from having nothing to campaign on.