Open Secrets

In a nation that is closely divided politically, neither party can afford to alienate people. And this leads to something of a paradox, given that many Americans have little in the way for people who they perceive as being culpably different from themselves. The Kansas Republican Party has been forced to disband the state's Young Republicans after the leadership of the group was found to have made racist and anti-Semitic comments in a Telegram chat.

Part of this is the pretense that a group that's open to any Republican between the ages of 18 and 40 can somehow be prevented from having some significant number of assholes in it. And in order to maintain that pretense, Republican leaders have to be shocked, shocked, that anyone would make such statements. But part of this is also the pretense that Republicans don't need the votes of racists, anti-Semites and other varieties of undesirable in order to win, and so there's a "zero-tolerance" policy.

Everyone knows there isn't, however. Especially not from a party that decries "political correctness" and sees being "woke" as some sort of heinous crime against all that's right in the world. When speaking one's mind, even if it would deeply offend public sensibilities to do so openly, is seen as not only as virtuous behavior, but an entitlement; a right wrongly stifled by oversensitive people, this sort of thing is to be expected.

And it likely was expected. I'm not sure that anyone who manages to make it anywhere in politics, especially in an environment where the politics of grievance are so front-and-center, wouldn't have seen something like this coming. And in that sense, the problem is as it always is, not in the words and sentiments themselves, but in the fact that they came out publicly. (Not that I'm sure that it matters; one wonders who would be swayed in their vote by this sort of thing.) As negative partisanship has grown, in large part intentionally driven by the political class, closed partisan groups become a breeding ground for this sort of behavior, as being willing to go farther in openly disrespecting groups that are seen as unreachable (and thus have been written off) is a path to respect and status within the group. Such is the nature of an Echo Chamber... this phenomenon has been well-established for years now.

Not that I suspect that the Democrats don't have their own problems with this sort of thing, but there aren't any real slurs that one can use for straight White male Christians that are considered as transgressive as calling people "faggot," "retarded" and "nigga," words that the Politico article wouldn't even print. Likewise, there's no historical act of genocide, or a leader thereof, that one can claim to want to emulate to show one's disdain for the stereotypical middle American.

In any event, the Republican Party has put itself in a difficult position; it can neither stringently police such behavior privately within its ranks, nor own it publicly when it comes to light. One pushes out people the party needs, the other damages the image of itself that it seeks to present. Personally, I'd ditch the latter... I suspect that few enough people are genuinely taken in that it won't make much difference.