A lot of people think Trump and his followers are the Base now, and some say that means that the Alt Right is the Republican Party Base now. I agree that the Trumpkins are now the Base. There are other groups in the Base, but the Trumpkins have drowned them out with sheer numbers, I’m afraid.
Base would seem to imply a group with large numbers. The RNC crowd is no longer the base of the Republican Party, if it ever was.
One might also argue that the Base is the hardcore party supporters and volunteers on the ground who man the phone banks, knock on doors and get out the vote. In that case, the Democratic Party Base would be the Daily Kos crowd or the left wing of the Democratic Party. The right wing of the Democratic Party lacks mass support. All they have is money. But it’s that group that elects the candidates of course. Money talks and bullshit walks, right? This year, I would say that the Democratic Party Base was pretty well split between Hillary and Sanders. We would have to count Blacks and Hispanics as part of the Base if we are being fair. I doubt if union members make up much of the Base anymore, but they used to.
If we want to refer to the Base as the basic constituent elements of the Republican Party, we can say that the party is now made up of:
- Alt Right Deplorables
- Christian Right Pro-Life Churchies
- Small Government Conservative Corporations and 1%’ers
Alt Right Deplorables, including the far moderate end of the Alt Right in the Breitbart Crowd. The talk radio crowd, Dittoheads, the militias, the Oath Keepers, the preppers. You get the picture. At this point, this group is the majority of the party and is able to swamp the other elements.
And yes, it is as vicious, ugly and deplorable as the Republican Party carefully crafted it over all of these years, like ostriches refusing to believe that the monster they were feeding would one day grow up to be a Frankenstein/Tyrannosaurus menace that scares the crap out of even its RNC creators.
See, they thought they could nurture this monster forever without birthing it into an actual living, breathing entity. Instead it would just be confined to the lab as a experimental meme to be fed like growth hormone to the Base every election so they could get elected. They always thought this monster would never escape from the lab to stomp around menacing the nation, but of course that’s exactly what happened. If you don’t want to loose terrifying monsters on your fair land, then don’t create them in the first place.
Expecting your monster creations to stay happily in the lab forever without busting out some time is hopelessly naive, but hopeless naiveté and blind optimism without side mirrors is after all an essence of our momentary high time preference egos. In other words, refusal to predict logical bad outcomes or even figure the probable future consequences of present behavior is essential human nature, and may even be adaptive in a sense. People who worry and fret all day never get anything done, and when they get too scared, they can barely leave the house. And so we humans plunge blindly forward, damning all of the tomorrows.
Christian Right Pro-life Churchies: This group was never a good fit with the decadent 1% or the increasingly degenerate White working class now squandering into debasement, raw indulgence and general wiggerdom in broken guns-and-pills blighted and bankrupted working class towns across Flyover Country. Most of these declining towns are also full of fundamentalist churches, which makes no sense in light of their general decline, monetary, moral and otherwise. Or perhaps it’s an antidote. Or maybe it’s like going to Confession. Or maybe it’s that classical crazy American mix of Puritanism and Wild Hedonism while claiming to be morally coherent which has long defined our people.
At any rate, many in this group are still quite upright and proper or at least try to be, and this group is in increasing conflict with a morally degenerate Alt Right group and a 1% class which has always been as depraved as the rich have ever been. It’s a combustible mix heading for head-on collision. The pieces of the puzzle just won’t fit together anymore.
Small Government Conservative Corporations and 1%’ers: Really this is the Alt Right crowd, but it’s also long been the Christian Right crowd too, which makes no sense as Jesus himself was Big Government socialist. But this group also includes the usual decadent 1%’ers and the large corporations. It’s the rich and the large corporations, in other words. These are the ideological Libertarians pushing the minarchism model that Paul Ryan and the rest of shill for. The rich and the corporations have long cynically used the Alt Right-Breitbart and Christian Right bases, but the whole idea was to string them along and collect their vote without ever implementing the Base’s actual projects. Rich men want their daughters to have abortions too, you know.
The RNC is mostly made up of the small government conservatives, the 1% and the corporations who are now fleeing the Alt Right base like a lethal stampede at a stadium.
The whole mess is fracturing, not that it ever made sense anyway.
There is now some movement on the Christian Right of outrage over the most un-Christian behavior of the lecherous misogynistic rake, Mr. Trump. Trump after all is the antithesis of everything these Christian Right folks stand for. Asking these churchies to keep voting for the worst sinners on Earth would seem a tough sell, and one wonders how long this fragile, insensible scaffolding of an alliance can even hold up without collapsing under the weight of its violently clashing contradictions.
The Alt Right is increasingly at war with the 1%’ers and corporate crowd at RNC, Inc., who they regard as cucks and general sellouts.
The RNC crowd has been holding barf bags all this time while urging everyone to vote Trump, but now they are actually using the bags and denouncing the man who left them heaving at the porcelain throne. A human being can only take so much contradiction, you know.
There’s no real split between churchies and Alt Right at the moment, except that the Alt Right is swamping the Churchies numbers-wise. Churchies Rubio and especially the vile Mr. Cruz lost big to Alt Right Trump in the polls.
The RNC poster boy Jeb Bush and finally the hail Mary pass called John Kasich didn’t stand a chance.
The Alt Right is storming the Party Committee Bastille and screaming for the heads of the leadership. The party types run in terror from the villagers with torches.
It’s a revolution all right, but it’s the wrong kind.
Oh Lord steady our hand as we go forward, feeling our way in the plunging gloom.