The anti-Trump furor on the Right has only two motivating factors.
The main impulse comes from the folks who man the Great Right Wing Noise Machine. This machine’s function is not at all to spread conservative thought, to win converts to any sort of conservative ideology. It’s purpose is to put a respectable face on the racism that has been the actual source of their electoral success since the Ds handed over the segregationist franchise to the Rs in the 1960s. It has been thought that they needed to use a dog whistle when they made racist appeals, because they didn’t want to scare off non-racist voters, and because racist voters themselves presumably would mostly prefer something with a fig leaf, over nakedly racist appeals.
If The Donald is throwing away the fig leaf, then the folks who man the noise machine aren’t needed anymore. To use the business term of art, Trump is disintermediating the racist appeal industry. He intends to just say racist things openly, with no need for a group of middlemen to buffer the impact by spinning elaborate rationalizations in the attempt to convince everyone that the racism is actually everything but racism.
Nobody likes to lose their job, so, sure, what Douthat refers to as “elite conservatives”, self-styled thought leaders, are not going to like having their jobs made obsolete. They will die trying to defeat Trump in order to make an example of him, to prove that, no, the Rs need the dog whistle that they provide, and a candidate who tries to bypass their obfuscation services is doomed.
The second group of folks, those people whose jobs aren’t directly threatened if the dog whistle is thrown in the garbage, are Rs who believe that, yes, the dog whistle is still necessary to prevent a fatal hemorrhage of non-racist swing voters. But what The Donald is in the process of proving, is that, no, the dog whistle is no longer necessary.
That only makes sense. Sure, back in the 60s, the R coalition still included people who were pro-civil rights, or at least anti-segregationist. The Ds owned the segregationist franchise right up until the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. A lot of people who voted R, or swing voters who might vote R, might be jolted out of voting R if all those segregationist votes were courted openly, thus the need for the subtle wiles of the dog whistle. But, really, there was a sell-by date on those voters. They’re all gone now. Voters today have grown up with the new alignment.
And, really, only voters who had formed their political worldviews before 60s were not fully aware of what the new R party stood for. These noise machine types could never resist the temptation to publicly congratulate themselves on their cleverness. They boasted quite publicly about their genius Sothern Strategy, how smart they were to say racist things only in code that the segregationist voters could understand, while non-racist voters would be gulled. Well, guys, the first rule about secret plans for deception on a mass scale is that you don’t boast about the secret plan on national TV.
In the end, and, yes, we have reached the end of this process, the only people left who still think the dog whistle is necessary, are those clever dog whistlers. Their supposed marks have long since wised up. They are racists, out loud and proud of their racism. It’s like a family in which the kids have long since wised up to the non-reality of Santa Claus, but the supposed adults in the family still think it’s important to keep up appearances that the fiction is real.
The longer The Donald succeeds without a dog whistle, the more convincing the demonstration that it is no longer necessary. It pretty clearly is no longer necessary within the R electorate, so the dog whistle is pretty clearly dead within the party. What many of us are trying to tell ourselves right now is that the general electorate is different, that the very success of open racism within the R party dooms their candidate among the general electorate.
I don’t think that’s a safe assumption. Swing voters grew up in the same political universe as the rest of us. I see no reason to believe that they have been any more naïve about R racism than the rest of us, and therefore no reason to believe that open R racism will cost that party any voters they haven’t already lost a long time ago.
If we’re going to convert the end of the dog whistle, the open embrace of racism by the Rs, into political advantage, we’re going to have to work for it, it won’t just happen automatically. We’re going to have to make racism an issue. That may seem bland and obvious, but actually would involve a major shift on our part. We have tried up until now to have it both ways, to embrace every racially motivated bit of public policy (the War on Crime, the War on Drugs, Law and Order, “Welfare Reform”, “Secure Borders”), while still claiming to stand for racial equality and justice.
We can’t have it both ways. The dog whistle helped us avoid the hard choices too. Our party went along with every single fake rationalization for racist public policy out of fear of defeat at the polls. Now that it’s all out in the open, we not only can choose differently, we have to choose differently or become irrelevant. Why would anyone vote for a party that supports racist public policy, just because it says nice anti-racist things, when there’s an actual out loud and proud racist party to vote for?