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Unconventional-Meyerson-GOPNight1
On Monday, Republicans worked with who they had, and who they had was Tim Scott.
Every Republican convention of the past half-century has had its Diversity Night, a desperate attempt to convince upper-middle-class white swing voters that the party’s not as racist as … well, as it is. This year’s convention was no exception.
Two South Carolinians—former governor and U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and current senator Tim Scott—provided this year’s patina of tolerance. Haley referenced her move to take down the Confederate battle flag from atop the state’s capitol after the 2015 Charleston church massacre. It was a particularly artful reference, since Haley, who hopes to win the party’s presidential nod in 2024 with the backing of old-school Republicans but also just enough support from Trump’s crazies, alluded to her display of sensitivity without actually mentioning that it was a Confederate flag she displaced.
Scott extolled Trump’s concern for the Black and Latino poor by highlighting the “opportunity zones” that offer wealthy investors tax breaks for putting money into minority communities. The policy derives from a nearly identical initiative from Jack Kemp, who devised the policy as HUD secretary under George H.W. Bush, and who, like Scott, was invariably trotted out to demonstrate that Republicans actually did care for Blacks. Like Kemp’s zones, Trump and Scott’s have done nothing to alleviate inner-city poverty, but have offered plenty of opportunity for corruption. Many zones have been designated in already-gentrifying areas, so investors get tax breaks for development that would have happened anyway and doesn’t particularly help the poor.
I’ve covered six previous Republican National Conventions before this week’s, and at each, Diversity Night has invariably produced a sense of cognitive dissonance, as minority-group speakers have extolled the party’s racial bona fides to television viewers, in a hall packed by 25,000 delegates, alternates, and spectators who are at least 97 percent white. Haley, Scott, and the evening’s other racial vouchers were spared that challenge, but getting around Trump’s overt racism and nativism posed obstacles of its own. Haley, whose parents emigrated from India, and Maximo Alvarez, a gas station magnate and six-figure GOP donor who fled Castro’s Cuba to make a new life in Florida, both hailed America as a refuge and a land of opportunity. But neither addressed whether they’d be Americans at all had Trump’s immigration and asylum policies been in effect some decades ago.
The purpose of Diversity Night has never been to win over a significant number of voters of color. Rather, it’s intended to reassure swing whites—this year, white suburban women who’ve been appalled by Trump—that there are still sufficient pockets of sensitivity in the Republican ranks to merit a second look.
But even Diversity Night made clear that the main goal of this year’s convention isn’t to win swing voters; it’s to bring to the polls those remaining Americans who would be Republican base voters if only the party could get their attention by scaring the living hell out of them. That has required the Republicans to create and then attack an entirely implausible Joe Biden, and since that was their goal even on their one night of reaching out to the occasional stray moderate, we must assume we’ve only heard the overture so far.
The Biden of Republican strategists’ imagination isn’t merely the sworn foe of capitalism but actually controlled by communists who only pretend to be socialists. (Never mind that it’s Trump who has an affinity for authoritarian regimes.) The Republicans’ Biden would destroy small businesses by encouraging rioters to run amok. (Never mind that this year’s ratio of businesses destroyed by rioting to businesses destroyed by Trump’s failure to arrest the pandemic is roughly 1 to 10,000.) We were told by Patricia McCloskey (the notorious St. Louis gunslinger) that Biden would “abolish the suburbs.”
The Biden of Republican strategists’ imagination isn’t merely the sworn foe of capitalism but actually controlled by communists who only pretend to be socialists.
In a sense, Republicans have fallen back on a hardy perennial. Democrats bringing minorities to the suburbs and raising taxes on the middle class, another of last night’s refrains, have been GOP talking points for the past half-century. Voiced as stridently as they were last night, however, they’re more red meat for die-hard Trumpians than they are arguments that can win back more-affluent suburbanites. The Trumpified Republicans have lost their dog whistle, and sound more like George Wallace than either George Bush. These attacks may win back some more elderly suburban whites, for whom such attacks have worked since Nixon’s days. But I doubt they’ll move many of their younger counterparts.
The implausibility of the attacks on Biden were matched last night by the implausibility of the claims made for Trump. Hailing the president for his success in dealing with the pandemic (despite the fact that the U.S., with 4 percent of the world’s population, has had 23 percent of the world’s COVID fatalities) is the one least likely to strike Americans as accurate; it’s a fair measure of his strategists’ desperation. My favorite, though, was voiced by the evening’s first speaker, a young Republican automaton named Charlie Kirk, who extolled Trump as “the bodyguard for Western Civilization.”
All available evidence suggests that Trump either slept through or ditched Western Civilization, and that his sister did his homework for him.
The most revealing thing about today’s Republican Party isn’t what they showed us last night or what they plan to inflict upon us in coming days. It occurred at yesterday’s one, and only, business session of the convention, in Charlotte, where the party renominated Trump and Mike Pence and adjourned until 2024, without enacting a platform. Apparently, Republican policy until 2024 is to support any and all of Trump’s impulses—that is, whatever is on Fox & Friends on any given morning. In 2020, the Republicans have become less a party than a well-funded cult with a ballot line.
Apparently undaunted by the nonexistence of a platform, Tim Scott closed his remarks by declaring, “Our side is working on policy,” even though after ten years, they’re still unable to come up with a replacement for the Affordable Care Act. By contrast, Scott continued, Biden is working on “transforming what it means to be an American” into something unutterably awful.
