Nearly all the 2020 ballots are counted. President Donald J. Trump received 47.7% of the popular vote to Vice President Joe Biden’s 50.6%.
Liberals and progressives are staggered with disbelief. Those on the left overlook a very important fact. Republicans are united in their testing of a single hypothesis within the context of America’s ongoing democratic experiment.
The Republican Party is a big tent, so it is difficult to ascertain what unites all of the GOP factions — what hypothesis they, as a united polity, are putting to the test.
The GOP’s establishment base remains a constant 10-20% of the population: bankers, financiers, CEOs, small business owners, gentlemen farmers and retirees whose chief concern is that their 401k accounts remain ever on an upward trajectory.
The GOP’s populist base includes: aggrieved members of the working class, real farmers, Christian fundamentalists, QAnon and other conspiracy theorists, Second Amendment gun-rights devotees, Bundyite sovereign citizens, white supremacists, whites who fear the loss of their majority status due to demographic shifts and members of ultra-right-wing militias such as the Oath Keepers.
What unites all these diverse GOP factions? Their opposition to America becoming a “one-person-one-vote” representative democracy provides them with their common cause.
Stated positively, Republicans advance a very straightforward hypothesis: Government of, by and for a privileged minority — a minority of people who avidly pursue self-interest — will also best promote the interests of the less-advantaged majority.
Republicans continued to vote for Trump because no politician more strongly opposes “one-person-one-vote” representative democracy and more adamantly advocates a privileged minority’s pursuit of self-interest.
No politician has ever been a more dedicated Republican than Donald J. Trump.
Andrew G. Bjelland, Salt Lake City
from The Salt Lake Tribune https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/letters/2020/11/09/letter-what-unites/
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