Is the Racism Here So Subliminal As To Be Invisible, Or Is This the Message the GOP Wants To Send?

This is quite a question, the one that we are about to be pondering here. The backstory of the image that you see above is that Mother Jones Magazine commissioned an artist named Woody Harrington to illustrate a story on Stuart Stevens, (chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign) that explored how the GOP was weaponizing bigotry during the 2020 campaign.

That story itself is fascinating and more on it in a bit. What brings us to that story today, in August of 2022, is that the obviously racist image in question is apparently not so obvious. Or, Republicans are more comatose than we know. Or, they like the image just the way it is. In any event, the implications are frightening.

Here’s where we are with the image today.

Two years ago, we commissioned this art from Woody Harrington to reference how white supremacy was taking over the GOP. Not only didn't they not get it, they appropriated copyrighted art. https://t.co/lxEJoXjhap https://t.co/FxwRMo9Mqd

— Clara Jeffery (@ClaraJeffery) August 18, 2022

This is a link to the 2020 Mother Jones article.

Stevens, an erudite fellow who is also a novelist and a travel writer, has become an emblematic ex-Republican. He once believed in GOP ideals and ideas. Now he saw it all as a huge con. His new book is a confession and cri de coeur. The first line is blunt: “I have no one to blame but myself.” In these pages, Stevens self-flagellates, calling himself a “fool” for his decades of believing—and lying to himself—that the Republican Party was based on “a core set of values.” Acknowledging his role, Stevens writes, “So yes, blame me. Blame me when you look around and see a dysfunctional political system and a Republican Party that has gone insane.” The book offers one overarching prescription for the GOP: “Burn it to the ground and start over.”

In our conversation, Stevens exploded with loathing for the party he once faithfully (and lucratively) served. He rejected the common view that Trump had hijacked the GOP. No, he explained, the triumph of know-nothing Trumpism marked the culmination of an internal conflict that had existed for decades between the party’s “dark side” and its professed ideals. Even William F. Buckley Jr., often hailed as a grand public intellectual and the founding father of the modern conservative movement, was “a stone-cold racist” in the 1950s, Stevens pointed out. (Buckley at that time considered white people more “advanced” and more fit to govern.)

“A lot of us in the party liked to believe the dark side was a recessive gene, but it’s a dominant theme,” Stevens, a seventh-­generation Mississippian who was named for Confederate Gen. Jeb Stuart, told me. “And it’s all about race. The Republican Party is a white party and there still are more white people than non-white people.” So that is whom the party aims at—even if this will eventually be a losing proposition as the nation’s demographics continue to shift. Ronald Reagan achieved a landslide victory in 1980 by bagging 56 percent of white voters; 28 years later, John McCain lost with 55 percent of white voters. Perhaps the party’s fixation on white voters can work one more time with Trump in 2020. “But we’re talking about the Confederacy—literally,” Stevens said.

Nothing has changed in the past two years except to get worse. MAGA hats and Confederate flags are proudly sold side by side nowadays, as we roll into the midterm elections.

Stevens went on.

And Nazi Germany. On his own, with no prompting, Stevens went straight to the Defcon-1 analogy: “I tell my GOP friends, ‘It’s crazy to say it’s 1934 in Germany…when it’s clearly 1936.’” He insisted that the 1930s are important for understanding the current moment. “When there was rising anti-Semitism, isolationism, and pro-Nazi sentiment, why did the US not become fascist?” Stevens asked. “Because of FDR. Leaders matter, and the GOP has now completely abdicated its role.” Instead, the party has yielded completely to demagoguery and race-baiting to exploit the racism and resentments of certain white voters. Throughout his decades as a Republican, Stevens considered this racist element a bug in the system. He now realizes it has been a feature.

It is a feature and not a bug. And the likes of Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz have no problem with that.

Here’s the part that I find frightening.

Stevens now argues that Trump’s rise was not a fluke that the party can sidestep or survive. “This is the complete moral collapse of a governing party of a major superpower,” he remarked. He wonders how he could have been blind to the GOP’s racism and turpitude for so long. “It is hard to see this when you’re in the middle of it,” he said. “The only analogy I can find is the collapse of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, when the difference between reality and what is believed became so disjointed. I should’ve seen this. I did see this, but I wanted to believe the crazies were a minority.”

The GOP is morally bankrupt and bereft of policies, plus the MAGA movement is all for fascism. For the first time in American history, we see a fascist candidate perhaps about to go on the 2024 ticket. If you read Twitter threads, MAGAs say things like, “only president Trump can get the government into a structure that will work.” The MAGAs are welcoming fascism with open arms.

As to the racist cartoon, maybe they literally don’t see the hoods and the eyes. Or, maybe that’s so normal in their culture that they don’t find it objectionable and use the art until the truth is pointed out to them and they pull it down because they can’t get away with it.

Again, even the fact that we are discussing this issue, the GOP elephant juxtaposed with KKK hoods and MAGA hats being sold side by side with Confederate flags, tells you everything you need to know about the state of politics in this country.