Then Donald Trump backed JD Vance in the race for the Republican Senate nomination from Ohio. Will Trump’s gesture tip the scales? I have no idea, and frankly I don’t care.
The Republican primary in Ohio, after all, has been a race to the bottom, with candidates seemingly vying to see who can be the most vulgar, who can dumb down the debate the most. Vance insists that “what is happening in Ukraine has nothing to do with our national security” and that we must focus on the threat of migrants crossing our southern border.
Josh Mandel, who leads the polls, says Ohio should be a “pro-God, pro-family, pro-bitcoin” state. And so on. Any one of these candidates would make a terrible senator, and it’s impossible to predict who would be the worst.
But the thing about Vance is that while he gives cynical opportunism a bad name these days, it wasn’t always that way. In fact, not long ago it seemed to offer some intellectual and perhaps even moral weight. Her 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Ellegy” [Elegia do caipira]attracted wide and respectful attention because it offered a personal view of a real and important problem: the fraying of society in the Appalachians and more broadly of an important segment of the white working class.
But neither Vance nor, as far as I can tell, any other notable figure in the GOP is advocating any real policy to address this issue. They are content to exploit white working-class resentment; but when it comes to doing something to improve the lives of his supporters his implicit slogan is “Let them eat hate”.
Let’s talk for a minute about the reality that Vance wrote about at a time when many took him seriously.
I still meet people who imagine that social dysfunction is a problem that mainly involves non-white residents of big cities. But that image is decades out of date.
The social problems that have plagued America in the 21st century — notably the large number of working-age men who do not work and the widespread “deaths of despair” from drugs, suicide and alcohol — have fallen most heavily on rural and small-town whites. cities, especially in parts of the interior that have lagged behind, while a knowledge-centered economy increasingly favors higher-educated metropolitan areas.
What can be done? Progressives want to see more social spending, especially in families with children; it would do much to improve people’s lives, although it is less clear whether it would help revive decaying communities.
As early as 2016, Trump offered a different answer: protectionist trade policies that he claimed would revive industrial employment. The arithmetic of that statement never worked, and in practice Trump’s trade wars appear to have reduced the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States. But at the time Trump was at least pretending to address a real problem.
At this point, however, neither Trump nor any other major Republican is willing to go that far. I would say the Republican campaign in 2022 is all about culture war, all along, except that would be giving the Republicans too much credit. They are not fighting a true culture war, a conflict between rival visions of what our society should be; they are instigating the base against ghosts, threats that don’t even exist.
This is not hyperbole. I’m not just talking about things like the panic over critical race theory, although that has come to mean virtually no mention of the role slavery and discrimination played in US history. Florida is even refusing math textbooks, claiming they contain forbidden topics.
This is bad. But we’re seeing a growing focus on even more bizarre conspiracy theories, with frantic attacks on Disney’s social awareness, etc. And roughly half of those who identify as Republicans believe that “high Democrats are involved in child sex trafficking circles.”
What people may not realize is that anti-immigrant rhetoric is almost as far removed from reality as QAnon-type theories about pedophile Democrats. I mean, yes, there are undocumented immigrants. But the idea that they pose a major threat to public order is a fantasy; in fact, the evidence suggests that they are considerably more law-abiding than Native Americans.
And making alleged insecurity on the southern border his main campaign theme is especially bizarre when you’re running for office in Ohio, where immigrants make up just 4.8 percent of the population — about a third of the national average. (Nearly 38% of New York City’s population and 45% of its workforce are immigrants. And it’s not exactly dystopian hell.)
But see, none of this is a mystery. Republicans are following an ancient playbook that would have been all too familiar to, say, pogrom instigators in the tsarist era. When people are suffering, you don’t try to solve their problems; you distract them by giving them someone to hate.
And history tells us that this tactic often works.
As I said, I have no idea whether Trump’s support for Vance will matter. What I do know is that the GOP as a whole has resorted to hate-based politics. And if you’re not afraid, it’s because you’re not paying attention.
Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves
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