The party of thugs

The party of thugs

By Paul Waldman

Columnist

October 25, 2021 at 1:11 p.m. EDT

In 2020, Joe Biden repeatedly insisted that once Donald Trump departed office the Republican Party would become more reasonable. Instead, it has become even more of a party of thugs, where basic norms of polite behavior are held in contempt.

Biden can see it for himself as he drives down the road, as The Post reports:

The ubiquity of Trump signs, especially in rural stretches of the country, has long been striking, and possibly unprecedented for a losing candidate — especially nearly a year after the election. But now, in towns like Boise — in states both red and blue, and almost all across the country — anti-Biden signs are cropping up as well, frequently with angry and profane insults.

Some of the signs are scrawled by hand. Others are bought on Amazon. Still others are professionally procured. The crude signs are held by people lined up along Biden’s motorcade routes and clustered near his events. Protesters shout obscenities from outside his appearances.

Then there are the chants. In early October, a “F--- Joe Biden!” cry broke out among the crowd at Alabama’s Talladega Superspeedway. Kelli Stavast, an NBC Sports reporter, was interviewing NASCAR driver Brandon Brown live on air at the time, and she quipped, “You can hear the chants from the crowd, ‘Let’s go Brandon!’ ”

Conservatives have now turned “Let’s go Brandon” into a meme, something they can repeat with a giggle in contexts where swearing is still considered inappropriate (one congressman even ended a speech on the floor of the House with it). It’s sort of like when a newspaper writes “f---” — the meaning has been communicated, but the paper can say it didn’t actually swear.

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Anyone active on social media has noticed a recent acceleration of anger directed at Biden himself, which is striking because it has taken some time to develop.

Recall that Biden became the choice of Democratic primary voters in 2020 precisely because they believed he would be the least offensive candidate to independent and even a few Republican voters.

So ask yourself this: If Republicans across the country are reacting to the simple fact of having a president from the other party by scrawling their simian grunts of rage on cardboard and placing them in their front yards, can you imagine what they’d be doing if the president was Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris?

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Biden hasn’t been easy to hate. So much of the right’s anger comes from conservatives’ belief that they are being displaced, that society’s proper hierarchies are being undermined, but Biden himself can’t be a symbol of that displacement. He’s friendly, old Uncle Joe. He isn’t up with the latest lingo on race and gender, and like 44 of his 45 predecessors, he’s a White man.

Which is why the conservative propaganda apparatus has struggled to define their attacks on Biden; the best they can come up with is that he’s incapacitated and senile, leaving other sinister forces to pull the strings.

So while people may be painting signs and leading chants of “F--- Joe Biden” (or “Let’s go Brandon”), Biden himself is almost incidental. This is a means for conservatives to communicate with one another, and what’s being communicated more than anything else is “I take pleasure in flouting norms of polite behavior.”

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This is now considered by many to be the way you establish your conservative bona fides. Your commitment to low taxes or light regulations is not nearly enough; you have to show that you’re willing to be rude and crude. Can you give offense, can you make people cringe, can you do your part to make our politics as mean and unpleasant as possible? That’s what will get you attention and praise. As one Republican official texted to CNN’s Jake Tapper, “being a horrible person is now actually a job requirement in this party.”

The problem isn’t just that a few individual thugs have been so enthusiastically making their nastiness known. It’s that their thuggishness becomes part of a feedback loop running back and forth between the mass and the elite.

Republican members of Congress monitor conservative media to see what their constituents are seeing and saying, then they echo it back to them. That in turn validates thuggishness as an approach to politics, encouraging the rank and file to go even further.

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And in many cases, those conservative elites actively work to create and encourage thuggery. They create a phony “issue” such as critical race theory, work to get people as enraged as possible, then when that rage erupts in threats and intimidation of school personnel and board members, they defend it and celebrate its potential to yield them political benefits.

This isn’t new; the election of a Black man in 2008 made Republicans vibrate with fury for eight years. The difference today is that after four years of Trump, almost no one in the GOP acts as though there’s value in conducting political debates like adults.

That was, after all, the heart of Trump’s appeal: He told Republicans that being polite was for suckers and losers, liberating them to let their worst selves come out loud and proud. Every bigot, bully, sexual harasser and lunkheaded goon seemed to gravitate to his cause, recognizing a kindred spirit.

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And while there are still polite and courtly Republican officeholders out there, everyone knows where the party’s heart is today. If you want to express your kinship with Republican voters, you insult the weak, you defend the indefensible, you celebrate violence, you give offense for its own sake.

That these impulses are still so powerful even with the relatively inoffensive Biden leading the country and Trump on the sidelines should make us frightened for what is to come. What if, for instance, Biden decides not to run for a second term (he’ll turn 82 not long after the 2024 election), the Democrats nominate Harris or someone else who isn’t a White man, and Trump runs and loses to them?

The degree of rage that outcome would produce on the right is almost unimaginable. And vulgar signs in people’s front yards will be just the beginning.