The Right’s Identity Politics Take a Bizarre Turn

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If you want a snapshot of how the right has changed over the past decade, here’s one data point: MAGA activists think Sarah Huckabee Sanders is too woke now.

That’s the same Sarah Huckabee Sanders who is the daughter of the GOP fixture Mike Huckabee and a former White House press secretary for President Trump. Now governor of Arkansas, she’s facing criticism from right-wing influencers over an ad boosting the state’s imposition of work requirements for recipients of the state’s Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. These requirements are a long-standing Republican priority, but my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote last year that they are “a terrible idea”: The requirement creates new taxpayer costs and red tape without really solving any problem, because most Medicaid recipients who are physically able to work already do.

That’s not why the activists are mad, though. They’re upset because the face of loafing in Sanders’s ad is a cheese-ball-snarfing couch potato named Brad who is a young white man. The “Pizzagate” influencer Jack Posobiec labels it “Antiwhite.” Sean Davis of The Federalist calls it part of decades-long, systematic discrimination against white men. The openly bigoted investor James Fishback, fresh off getting trounced in a GOP primary for governor of Florida, traveled to Little Rock this week to rail against the “false and disgraceful ad.”

Assessing the accuracy of a fictional character in an ad feels a little absurd, but for the record: More than 60 percent of Medicaid-expansion enrollees in Arkansas are white, and 18 percent are Black, according to The New York Times. (The state overall is about 75 percent white and 15 percent Black.) A little more than half are women. Sanders rebuffed criticism, writing, “Next thing you know they’ll say I should have used cookies instead of cheese balls.”

The immediate and obsessive focus on a throwaway character in a 30-second ad is a lurid reminder of how identitarianism has become influential in segments of the American right, particularly young voters. This is a matter of how members of the movement understand politics, as well as how they attempt to communicate to the American public.

For decades, the right—as well as some centrist Democrats, such as Bill Clinton—criticized progressives for embracing identity politics. They argued that a focus on demographic segments was divisive and unhelpful. Ronald Reagan preached that “a rising tide lifts all boats” (though in practice this often meant support for trickle-down policies that helped mostly the already-thriving) and called for “color-blind” policies (which also tended to result in worse outcomes for people of color). This impulse persists in some segments of the Republican Party, most notably in the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, led by the former Reagan aide John Roberts.

This didn’t mean that people on the right hesitated to use race as a political wedge. They just did it elliptically. The avatar of this strategy was Lee Atwater, an adviser to Reagan and George H. W. Bush, whose 1981 explanation was as vulgar as the impulses he courted. “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’” he explained. “By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights,’ and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

In 1980, for example, Reagan delivered a controversial speech at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, not far from where the civil-rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered in 1964, and spoke about “states’ rights,” a phrase that segregationists had adopted. In 1988, a pro-Bush group aired a commercial that attacked his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, for allowing a convicted criminal named Wlliam Horton furlough from prison, during which he nearly killed someone. The ad didn’t mention Horton’s race and didn’t need to; it included his mugshot and called him “Willie,” which Horton (among others) interpreted as a dog whistle. “It was created to play on racial stereotypes: big, ugly, dumb, violent, Black—‘Willie,’” he said later.

And, perhaps most relevant to the “Brad” brouhaha, Reagan often spoke about someone who became known as the “welfare queen.” As the journalist Josh Levin has written, this referred to a real individual, a woman in Chicago named Linda Taylor. Reagan never talked about her race, yet “welfare queen” became entrenched as a trope of lazy Black women grifting off the welfare system.

This may explain why people such as Posobiec and Fishback are so agitated about the Arkansas ad: They understand how powerful a political weapon racial associations can be in shaping policy. But they don’t have Atwater’s finesse or plausible deniability. The right has gone from insisting that its rhetoric about entitlements was color-blind to demanding that it include racial signifiers. And though the number of Americans willing to tolerate or embrace gutter racism in politics appears to be growing, it remains a marginal group. The hardest-core activists, hyping one another up in group chats and on Discord servers, may have lost sight of that, failing to recognize how bizarre they look freaking out over a forgettable advertisement.

If these identitarians looked around, they could see cautionary tales about the wholesale embrace of identity politics, such as the impression among many voters that the Democratic Party is more interested in niche groups than in ordinary people. They could learn from the first wave of the MAGA movement, which was willing to accommodate racism and bigotry for electoral gain but apparently believed that they could be contained and channeled. The commentator Erick Erickson, for example, has spent years tolerating Trumpism but now reacts with horror at neo-Nazis in the movement. Or they could consider the plight of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who defended Trump’s every move from the White House lectern and now finds herself accused of treachery by his zealous followers.

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Evening Read

a broken trans flag — Illustration by *The Atlantic*. Source: Getty.

The GOP’s Culture-War Hail Mary

By Elaine Godfrey

Last week, as the war with Iran dragged into its seventh month, gas prices shot up to an average of $4.50 a gallon, and polling showed President Trump about twice as far underwater with American voters as he was at this point in 2018, Republican senators determined that the time had come to discuss something else entirely: youth sports. “Girls’ sports are for girls. Boys’ sports are for boys,” Senator Marsha Blackburn said in a news conference.

With 32 days to go until the midterm elections, Republicans’ closing strategy is obvious: They’re going all-in on trans.

Read the full article.