The Republicans Are Now Officially the Party of White Paranoia

Now that’s over. Trump has pulled all of those previously irrelevant voters completely out of pocket. In a development that has to horrify the donors who run the GOP, the candidate Trump espouses some truly populist policy beliefs, including stern warnings about the dire consequences companies will face under a Trump presidency if they ship American jobs to Mexico and China.

All that energy the party devoted for decades telling middle American voters that protectionism was invented by Satan and Karl Marx during a poker game in Brussels in the mid-1840s, that just disappeared in a puff of smoke.

And all that money the Republican kingmakers funneled into Fox and Clear Channel over the years, making sure that their voters stayed focused on ACORN and immigrant-transmitted measles and the New Black Panthers (has anyone ever actually seen a New Black Panther? Ever?) instead of, say, the complete disappearance of the manufacturing sector or the mass theft of their retirement income, all of that’s now backing up on them.

The party worked the cattle in their pen into such a dither that now they won’t rest until they get the giant wall that real-life, as-seen-on-TV billionaire Donald Trump promises will save them from all those measles-infected rapists pouring over the border.

Not far under the surface of Trump’s candidacy lurks a powerful current of Internet conspiracy theory that’s a good two or three degrees loonier than even the most far-out Tea Party paranoia. Gone are the salad days when red-staters merely worried about Barack Obama inviting UN tanks to mass on the borders of Lubbock.

Trump supporters have gone next-level, obsessed with gooney-bird fantasies about “white genocide,” a global plan to exterminate white people by sending waves of third-world immigrants across American and European borders to settle and intermarry.

The white-power nerds pushing this stuff don’t like the term RINO (Republican In Name Only) and prefer “cuckservative,” a term that’s a mix of “cuckold” and “conservative.” Cuck is also a porn term that refers to a white guy who gets off on watching his wife take it from (usually) a black man. A cuck is therefore a kind of desexualized race traitor.

So you can see why the Internet lights up when Donald Trump tosses Jorge Ramos from a presser and tells him “mine’s bigger than yours” (Trump was referring to his heart, but again, whatever). All of Trump’s constant bragging about his money and his poll numbers and his virility speak directly to this surprisingly vibrant middle American fantasy about a castrated white America struggling to re-grow its mojo.

Republicans won middle American votes for years by taking advantage of the fact that their voters didn’t know the difference between an elitist and the actual elite, between a snob and an oligarch. They made sure their voters’ idea of an elitist was Sean Penn hanging out with Hugo Chavez, instead of a Wall Street bank financing the construction of Chinese factories.

Trump similarly is scoring points with voters who don’t know the difference between feeling sorry for themselves and actually being victims. We live in a society that is changing for a lot of reasons, and some of those changes feel annoying to certain kinds of people, particularly older white folks who don’t like language-policing and other aspects of political correctness.

But as basketball star turned pundit Kareem Abdul-Jabbar pointed out earlier this week, PC isn’t a new thing, or even a thing at all. It’s just an “emotional challenge every generation has had to go through.” We get older, our kids correct our bad habits, it happens.

Not to Trump’s supporters. They’ve turned some minor cultural changes into a vast conspiracy of white victimhood. They’re eating up Trump’s “Make America Great Again” theme (which one supporter hilariously explained must be his true goal, because “it’s on his hat“), because it’s a fantasy tale of a once-great culture ruined by an invasion of mongrel criminals.

For reasons that are, again, obvious to everyone but Republican voters, this “woe is us” narrative is never to fly with the rest of the country, including especially (one imagines) the nonwhite population. Few sane people are going to waste a vote on a sob story about how rough things have gotten for white people. But Trump supporters are clinging to this fantasy far more fiercely than red-state voters were ever clinging to guns or religion.

That leaves us facing a future in which national elections will no longer be decided by ideas, but by numbers. It will be a turnout battle between people who believe in a multicultural vision for the country, and those who don’t.

Every other issue, from taxes to surveillance to war to jobs to education, will take a distant back seat to this ongoing, moronic referendum on white victimhood. And there’s nothing any of us can do about it except wait it out, and wonder if our politics only gets dumber from here.