The New York Times had a headline that read: “Roy Moore’s Alabama Victory Sets Off Talk of a G.O.P. Insurrection.” Here’s a headline from the Washington Post: “After Alabama, GOP anti-establishment wing declares all-out war in 2018.” Let me reference the words of a wise philosopher: Please.
Republican incumbents have been challenged and beaten by more extreme right-wingers over and over in the past few years. Last week’s defeat of Alabama Sen. Luther Strange, who never actually won an election to the Senate seat he held, and who was appointed in what looked very much like a corrupt bargain (a headline at Breitbart called it that, but I won’t link to that site), is no more evidence of a Republican ‘civil war’ than the defeat of multi-term incumbents like Sen. Robert Bennett of Utah or Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, not to mention the victories of crazies like, among others, Sharron Angle, Todd Akin, or the wicked witch of the mid-Atlantic, Christine O’Donnell, all of whom won open seat primaries against establishment figures. Trump himself pulled off a similar type of anti-establishment victory. This is not new. More importantly, it is kabuki theater of the highest order.
Roy Moore, Donald Trump, and all the Republican culture warriors out there—along with the supposed ‘establishment’ types who issue the mildest of protests against their divisiveness every once in a while—march together in lock-step on the issue that is the foundation upon which the Republican Party has rested for many decades now. It isn’t religious fundamentalism (the fact that twice-divorced, non-church going Trump, of all people, claims evangelical whites as his strongest supporters should make that clear enough), and it isn’t even racism or white supremacy.
Waving the cross and blowing racist dog whistles—hell, Trump is just using regular whistles at this point—are the tools by which the GOP gets enough support from working- and middle-class white voters to put them in office. But when they get there, the one thing Republicans from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush to Donald Trump want to do most of all is enact a rich man’s tax cut, along with other economic policies that favor those at the top.