What’s striking about the republican legislative agenda is how much of it is completely gratuitous. Consider, for example, their recent ban on socially conscious state investing. This gesture has nothing to do with economic return, and it will complicate the job of gubernatorial contender Dale Folwell. But the red-state hell-raisers in the ugly Jones-Street building banned ESG nonethless.
I highly doubt the average Republican base voter has strong opinions, or even more than a fuzzy idea about, the practice of socially conscious investing. But the acronym does exude a whiff of hippie-ness, and the trappings of bohemia trigger a potent twinge of resentment in the GOP voter. The ban is undergirded by a keen understanding of how to motivate white grievance voters.
That these voters’ resentments range so widely across the spectrum of cultural institutions is why Republicans so fervently pursue the culture war. This, in short, is the red-state formula: a plutocratic party of business wins elections with a less-educated base of the aggrieved. Republican politicians monitor the indicators of their base for instruction on what grievance to legislate. Then, they reward the faithful with a penny-and-pound of cultural vengeance against the loathed liberal “elite.”
In North Carolina as across the South, this formula has yielded fruitful electoral results. The Republican Party has succeeded in forestalling a long-anticipated political transformation by extracting every imaginable iota of support from a shrinking demographic base. As a quantitative illustration, the Republican Party has achieved a more-than-10% gap between their share of the registered electorate and their share of the voting electorate. And much of their legislative agenda squarely derives from this calculation.
If the Republican base continues to respond potently to every cultural provocation, the South will remain deeply red. But Republicans do face the challenge of arithmetic. At some point–perhaps some point soon–there will be no blood left in the white-grievance turnip. So, to retain their hegemony, the Republican tribe may grow even more belligerent in their 50-year effort to keep a state in motion standing still.
Alexander Jones is an original contributor to PoliticsNC.
0 Comments