Denialism about what Republicans actually believe

A claim floating around both never-Trump and progressive circles right now is that the Republican party has become nothing but a personality cult centered on Donald Trump, who himself stands for nothing but the self-aggrandizement of Donald Trump. Ergo the Republican party is now an almost purely negative ideological phenomenon, that stands for nothing more concrete than opposing whatever liberals and leftists support.

This claim is wrong. It’s true that the GOP is becoming a personality cult: but the fact that Donald Trump is the center of that cult is not in any way random. Trump himself is too lazy and stupid to have anything resembling a coherent political ideology, but he is a racist old white man who watches Fox News all the time, which means that he’s basically a perfect vessel for the core commitments of the Republican party and its electoral base.

David Frum, who ought to know, lays out his take regarding what Republicans currently believe. I’m paraphrasing and condensing his points, and adding a few others:

(1) It’s extremely important to maintain low tax rates for rich people, and to lower them even further, both because rich people are rich because they are smarter and harder-working than other people, and because doing so is the key to economic growth, which in turn is the key to general prosperity.

(2) COVID is a hugely overhyped issue, if not an outright hoax. It’s no different than a really bad flu season; it will soon burn itself out, and Democrats are fomenting a moral panic about the virus for nefarious self-interested reasons.

(3) Climate change is like COVID: overhyped, possibly imaginary, and in any case not requiring any serious government intervention.

(4) Hyper-nationalistic neo-isolationism is the right foreign policy. Get out of long-standing treaties and alliances. Bomb some weak country occasionally pour encourager les autres, but build a wall around America.

(5) Health care is an ordinary good that should be provided via private marketplace structures such as Medicare, not by the government If you can’t afford health care, work harder, beg for charity, or die.

(6) Only white people can be trusted not to commit widespread voter fraud. Here I’ll just quote Frum directly, otherwise people would think this was some sort of lefty slander of our conservative brethren: “Voting is a privilege. States should have wide latitude to regulate that privilege in such a way as to minimize voting fraud, which is rife among Black Americans and new immigrant communities. The federal role in voting oversight should be limited to preventing Democrats from abusing the U.S. Postal Service to enable fraud by their voters.”

(7) Racism against black Americans is now a rare and socially unimportant phenomenon. The real racism in America today is against white people generally, along with Asian-American university applicants. Federal civil rights laws should be deployed vigorously to protect these two groups.

(8) The constitutional right to privacy is a judge-created fiction, and it should not be used to protect against the supposed ongoing threat to women’s sexual autonomy, which is another greatly exaggerated or wholly invented “crisis.”

(9) Private money in politics is good, and shouldn’t be restricted by campaign finance laws, which are another quasi-socialist intrusion into the wisdom of the Market.

(10) Related to (9), claims that Donald Trump is fiscally corrupt are greatly exaggerated.

(11) Immigration into the United States should be very strictly controlled, and preferences should be given to people who come from good countries.

(12) We’re in the midst of a crime wave caused by Black Lives Matters and associated protest movements, which keep police from doing their jobs. Almost all so-called “abuses” on the part of the police are either exaggerations or fictions.

(13) Donald Trump’s twitter etc. tirades are somewhat regrettable, but they’re an understandable reaction to the unfairness he, like all conservatives, faces from the mainstream media in general and the Deep State in particular.

To these I would add:

(14) American universities, and especially elite universities, are cesspools of leftwing agitprop, that are poisoning the minds of our youth. They need to be brought to heel.

(15) The liberal-left belief that gender identity can be fluid and sexual orientation is not a matter of moral concern are prime examples of how a libertine sexual ethic is destroying traditional family values and the culture those values undergird.

(16) America is quite literally God’s favorite country, and turning away from God (this means the God of white evangelical Christianity, with some allowance made for the God of reactionary Catholicism, and the God(s) of whatever it is Mormons believe) is at the root of all of America’s problems.

(17) America is a white country, founded by white people, who were and are the products of an objectively superior civilization, that is, European civilization in general, and northern European civilization in particular. Non-whites are welcome to be considered Americans, more or less, as long as they accede to this most self-evident of truths, and conform their behavior to its requirements. (That this truth is so self-evident is why it must be suppressed by Cancel Culture, formerly known as Political Correctness).

That’s not a comprehensive list, but it rounds up the key points pretty well. So why aren’t Republicans broadcasting these beliefs at high profile events like the just-concluded national convention, or in the party platform? Why were those two publicity vehicles employed for nothing but giving egregious rhetorical tongue baths to Donald Trump’s increasingly corpulent form? (It’s not as if Trump himself would actually disagree with any of this, were he capable of shaping his addled stream of consciousness into something resembling a set of ideological beliefs. This is just Fox News etc. greatest hits after all).

The answer is straightforward: The Republican party isn’t putting a lot of public emphasis on what the melange of plutocrats, social conservatives, and white supremacists that comprise it — there is of course considerable overlap among these categories — actually believes, because these beliefs are all anywhere from somewhat to extremely unpopular with a very clear majority (around 60%) of the American public. Recall that when voters are presented with standard Republican policy proposals, they tend to react with literal incredulity, refusing to believe that anyone is actually advocating these things.

And advertising that is not good for business. Neither, of course, are what American observers in third world countries have traditionally referred to as “free and fair” elections (see #6 above).