This WaPo article on the worries of Republicans concerning the 2020 election reminded me of one of the subtle tactics of Republican campaigning:
The Trump campaign has been paying attention to the Philadelphia suburbs and Trump’s gaps with suburban women. Last month in King of Prussia, Pa. — a short drive from Fitzpatrick’s district — it launched its 2020 Women for Trump coalition. The gathering featured Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, who touted the Republican overhaul of the nation’s tax code.
“Is your life better now than it was before Donald Trump got elected? Do you have a little more money in your bank account, did you get a break on your tax return this year?” Lara Trump asked the crowd.
Reinforcing, albeit unconsciously:
“This whole area [i.e., Chamblee, GA] is going a little more liberal, a little more to the left,” Brent Darst, a 48-year-old accountant and Trump supporter, said this week at the nearby Lowe’s. “Republicans are going to benefit from all of these Democratic presidential candidates moving over there, but that doesn’t mean you can take it for granted.”
Darst added: “I drive an hour to get to work. If you remind people that you’re the party that doesn’t want to take away more of your money, you’ll do all right.”
In other words, it’s the focus on the money in the pocket issue. Yet humanity doesn’t exist simply to amplify its personal, individual wealth, now does it? It can’t, because that wealth is simply the top of an edifice, an edifice consisting of an efficient and just government, in turn built on a political structure which guarantees certain rights, built on the importance of a civil society, and etc. All of those elements must achieve a certain level of health in order for the rest to be healthy.
By focusing on the health of a single element, we by default then ignore the health of other elements. We’ve been seeing the results of that mis-focus in the non-financial activities of the Republican Party – the nomination and confirmation of far-right, sometimes incompetent, judges, the concentration on banning abortion (opposed by 77% of the electorate), the unlimited right to guns – and the consequences of that in a society made up of irrational actors.
But is your pocketbook fatter?!
This little head feint involves the most definite and intimate of self-interests, luring the voter away from considering the overall health of the Republic, always a difficult topic to evaluate, and to one’s own personal wealth. This, while a highly subjective and wildly interpreted topic, is also the most easily evaluated, a lazy exercise which appeals to just about anyone who has not been trained to think of the greater good. I have, in fact, been subject to this very ploy: a late, conservative friend of mine implored me to consider how President Trump’s policies must surely be benefiting my 401K, and I had to explain earnestly to him that it just didn’t matter: if the nation was nearing collapse, or the planet ecological collapse, then my personal wealth, or lack thereof, had no relevance to evaluating Trump’s performance as President. He failed to reply.
So the trick, in the final analysis, is the false metrics ploy. We see that in many segments of society, the use of one measurement, such as Our profits are sky-high! as a distraction from the more important metric, such as Our sloppy manufacturing methods have polluted the environment! I don’t necessarily mean to say this is a purposeful deceit, but it is up to the voter to contemplate proper metric selection – and whether an entity promoting an inappropriate metric is merely mistaken, or maliciously selecting the wrong one.
And then contemplate the available measurements of the best metric and how the political parties are representing those measurements, and how they intend to deal with them, or not. And vote accordingly.
