Using Their Outside Voice

CPAC has always been a bit of a freak show, but this year's is especially freakish.  The thuggish , the xenophobic , the racist and the bloodthirsty all had prominent speaking roles.  And then they rolled all of those into one person!

Again, I hesitate to call whatever the hell CPAC is "conservative," except they seem to do it a lot.  This leads to bitter tears from people like Kevin Williamson, who sees his vision of what conservatism is besmirched by the actual people who believe this crap.

I think the problem is that for all the people who say that they belong to the Party of Reagan, the reality is that they are the Party of Nixon.  They always have been. Not the Nixon who signed whatever a Democratic Congress placed in front of him, but the Nixon of the Southern Strategy and "law and order" and "ratfucking" and "Watergate."  They are the party of "just win, baby."

In order to "just win," they have had to embrace the sordid underbelly of racism and hatred and conspiracy mongering.  Once the John Birch Society got their own news channel it was really just a matter of time before the "conservatives" started using the voices that they normally kept locked behind closed doors.

The simple electoral fact is this: There aren't that many votes for principled, small government libertarianism, because principled, small government libertarianism is essentially the ideology of wealth and status.  The vast majority of Republican voters fall into the "Keep government's hands off my Medicare" camp.  They desperately want and need all those programs that Paul Ryan wants to get rid of.  So, in order to get votes, Paul Ryan and his ilk have to animate the fearful, the racist, the xenophobic, the bigoted...because there are a lot more of them.

This moment of Trump - the ultimate user of his outside voice - has exposed all this.  It's freaking out those principled, small government libertarians, because they thought all those steelworkers were voting for lower tax rates on the rich and deregulation of Wall Street.

Eh...no.

Right now, looking at the Far Right is to look at the Republican Party.  The takeover of the Party by the angry, fearful, older white people is complete.

Do you want to know why the Trump Administration is likely to set records for corruption and criminal convictions?

Because these really are the worst people.  The Dana Loeschs and Roy Moores and Paul Manaforts and Steve Mnuchins and Mick Mulvaneys and, yes, goddamnit, Donald Trumps are just awful human beings.  And Trump's unique immoral awfulness is "emboldening" the awful amongst us to let their outside voices fly loud and clear.

To bring it back to the gun debate: There is no "debating" or convincing the ammosexuals about reasonable gun safety measures.

There is only beating them.  Wholly and utterly beating them.

They have shown us who they are.  It's on us if we don't do everything in our power to send them back to the holes they crawled out of.

UPDATE: Jeet Heer has more context.