Now that John Kasich and Ted Cruz have dropped out, it’s pretty much official: Donald Trump is the 2016 Republican nominee for president.
The pundits never saw this coming, but they should have. The Republican Party has been running a scam on its base for decades now, and voters were bound to discover this scam sooner or later.
Ever since Nixon initiated the Southern Strategy, Republicans have tricked millions of mostly white Americans into voting for them by giving lip-service to old-timey racism and anti-immigrant xenophobia.
The purpose of this all this pandering, of course, was to rally the masses around the real goal of the Republican elites, which is to push through economic policies that help out the billionaires and corporations that fund the Republican Party.
This strategy worked best when it conflated economics with race.
Reagan advisor Lee Atwater
described this process in pretty blunt language back in the 1980s.
That kind talk, talk that essentially converts the language of racism into the language of economics, is powerful, and it’s been important - perhaps the most important piece - of the scam Republicans have been running on their base for decades.
But it was always a risky way of rallying people around the GOP brand because it depended on the Republican base continuing to believe their economic interests are aligned with those of the Republican donor class.
But, at some point, the Republican base was going to realize that the Republican elites didn’t actually give a damn about them.
At some time the scared and bigoted white people who vote Republican were going to realize that the people they were voting into office only cared about the billionaires and big corporations who wrote their campaign checks.
At some point the mask was going to fall off and the base was going to revolt against the elites.
Well, “some point” is now, and with Donald Trump’s clinching of the nomination, the base has finally had its revenge on the Republican elite.
The irony, of course is that the racism and xenophobia that’s motivated the Republican base for the past few decades hasn’t gone away.
If anything, Trump has made it more explicit.
But one thing that Donald Trump hasn’t done is bow down before the altar of small government.
