Republican Plutocrats Hold a Convention that Fans Fear, Racism and Rage
Despite its sensational title, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s new book, Let Them Eat Tweets, is a basic and thorough examination of what we are watching in this week’s Republican Convention. Hacker is a respected professor of political science at Yale and Pierson at the University of California at Berkeley. Their new book, published on July 7, is important for its careful analysis of what has happened to today’s Republican Party.
Hacker and Pierson explain that Republicans have, for years now, been pursuing an agenda that promotes extreme economic inequality—a political strategy unlikely to be popular with voters. But they have figured out a way to win elections by divisively hyping rage, racism and fear: “This book is our answer to the ‘how’ question. As the GOP embraced plutocratic priorities, it pioneered a set of electoral appeals that were increasingly strident, alarmist, and racially charged. Encouraging white backlash and anti-government extremism, the party outsourced voter mobilization to a set of aggressive and narrow groups: the National Rifle Association, the organized Christian right, the burgeoning industry of right-wing media. When and where that proved insufficient, it adopted a ruthless focus on altering electoral rules, maximizing the sway of its base and minimizing the influence of the rest of the electorate through a variety of anti-democratic tactics, from voter disenfranchisement to extreme partisan gerrymandering, to laws and practices opening the floodgates to big money… In short Republicans used white identity to defend wealth inequality. They undermined democracy to uphold plutocracy.” (Let Them Eat Tweets, p. 4)
Hacker and Pierson remind us: “The tax cuts of 2017—passed after a presidential campaign in which the Republican standard-bearer suggested he would turn the GOP into a ‘worker’ CONTINUE READING: Republican Plutocrats Hold a Convention that Fans Fear, Racism and Rage | janresseger
