The General US Politics Thread

China's economy collapses. Ours is not hurt at all.

Then “cuckservative” started showing up in my Twitter mentions last week, after I suggested Donald Trump supporters might not be the brightest bulbs. As I clicked around, I came to a shocking conclusion: I’ve been uncharacteristically downplaying the amount of racism and misogyny powering the right today. The spread of the epithet “cuckservative” is a sign that the crudest psycho-sexual insecurity animates the far right.

“Cuckservative,” you see, is short for a cuckolded conservative. It’s not about a Republican whose wife is cheating on him, but one whose country is being taken away from him, and who’s too cowardly to do anything about it.

OK, that’s gross and sexist enough already, but there’s more. It apparently comes from a kind of pornography known as “cuck,” in which a white husband, either in shame or lust, watches his wife be taken by a black man. Lewis explains it this way: “A cuckservative is, therefore, a race traitor.”

This is not merely a new way to shout “RINO.” It’s a call to make the GOP an explicitly racist party, devoted to the defense of whites. It’s no accident it’s taken off in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign launch/performance art, where he attacked illegal Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and “criminals.”

White nationalist Richard Spencer of the National Policy Institute explained Trump’s appeal to Dave Weigel: “a) he is a tougher, superior man than ‘conservatives’ (which isn’t saying much), and b) he seems to grasp the demographic displacement of European-Americans on a visceral level. We see some hope there.”

Rush Limbaugh helped spread the term to the mainstream when he praised Trump like this: “If Trump were your average, ordinary, cuckolded Republican, he would have apologized by now, and he would have begged for forgiveness, and he would have gone away.”

...

Jared Taylor, the white nationalist behind American Renaissance, is thrilled at all the attention.

They are squirming because a single word–cuckservative–lays bare the rot at the heart of your movement: American conservatism can conserve nothing if it cannot conserve the nation’s founding stock. I’ll put it bluntly: Nothing you love will survive without white people.

By last week, alarm about the use of the blatantly racist slur was beginning to spread on the right. The blogger Ace of Spades is a little concerned about what all of it means for the conservative movement, writing:

I am right now thinking that there are more white supremacists than I previously acknowledged, and am currently up in the air as to whether to dismiss this solely as a fringe-of-the-fringe phenomenon.

Other righties are refusing to dismiss it as “a fringe of the fringe.” At “Trial of the Century” blog Monday morning, Daniel Payne told the boys who bray “cuck” to “Go Cuck Yourself:”

Conservativism certainly needs a lot of work if it’s going to survive as a viable political philosophy in the twenty-first century and if it’s going to effect the kind of change conservatives themselves wish to see. But if we want these things to come about, we don’t need to be listening to the Chuck Johnsons or the cuckservative slingers or the people who actually use the term “real fighters” to describe themselves. They will not help. They’ll only make us look ridiculous and unintelligent, as they’ve already done quite handily for themselves.

This is not the Iowa I visited. The Donald Trump Make America Great Again Rally and Family Picnic was held in Oskaloosa, a small town 60 miles east of Des Moines. Oskaloosa is like a lot of small Midwestern towns right now: crumbling houses, shuttered businesses, half-empty strip malls. You are surrounded by loss here. One of the few thriving businesses I saw in town, apart from a kickass bar called The Cellar Peanut Pub, was a video store. An actual video store. They didn’t even have to rent porn to stay solvent. They had customers, and they were hiring.

Oskaloosa has been left behind in the Information Age. What has left here is never coming back, no matter what any politician or businessman promises. And people in Osky—the locals call it “Osky”—don’t look pleased about this. Contrary to friendly Midwestern stereotypes, they look PISSED. Every man I saw in town looked like your father-in-law the first time you met him at the door. Out on the empty roads, the only vehicles are big, angry pickup trucks with huge side mirrors sticking way out, like they wanna punch your car. People here are aggrieved. People here have had a lot of disappointment, and they are sick of it.

Like Karen and Diane. Along with a bunch of friends and family, they showed up early this morning to the 696-seat George Daily Community Auditorium (which Oskaloosa’s middle school and high school share) so they could get as close to their billionaire savior as possible. To “see the color of his eyes,” Diane said. I greeted their group as they waited by the door, many of them sitting in nylon golf chairs, nervous about losing their spot in line.

“I like that Trump won’t back down,” Karen told me. “He says what he means and he means what he’s saying. He ain’t going to say he’s sorry. Sometimes he likes to say things not politically correct, but they all better get used to that. The people who do speak politically correct have been losers.”

“They constipated America!” Diane said, rocking a House of Blues t-shirt. “What we have had is politicians and lawyers who have constipated America. Let’s get a businessman in there and get things moving! We need our new Mira LAX!”

Do you believe everything Trump says?

“At this point, I’m inclined to say he’s not lying.”

Do you think he exaggerates sometimes?

“Oh yeah. Who doesn’t?”

“He is for America,” Karen says. “He is for the elderly. He is for the quiet people.”

Who are “the quiet people”?

“The people like us, that a lot of times walk around with the attitude that, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter what I think. I’m just from Osky.’ You know? The quiet people. The people who don’t think they have a voice.”

Karen used to live in Arizona, where she had a job at a semiconductor plant, adding gold buttons to each chip in on anassembly line. But the plant was relocated to China, and so she lost her job and relocated here. As you could probably surmise, she likes Trump’s tough talk about foreigners stealing our jobs. I had arrived in Iowa just as Trump was doubling down on his comments that Mexico was sending “rapists” across our border; people here loved it, and seemed oddly emotional about the subject of immigration, even though Iowa is nowhere near the border. Apparently, it’s not just the immigrants from Mexico that concern Iowans for Trump. “We need to get the Muslims out of the country,” a man named Bob with a swirling white beard told me, “before they start killing our families!” Everyone around him nodded.

Advocates of the new law contend that efforts to increase the minimum wage across various municipalities could potentially harm local business communities.

"This bill provides a level playing field for all municipalities in Oklahoma," state Rep. Randy Grau (R), a backer of the bill’s House version, said on Monday, according to the Associated Press. "An artificial raise in the minimum wage could derail local economies in a matter of months. This is a fair measure for consumers, workers and small business owners."

Opponents of the measure view the move by Oklahoma Republicans as retaliation against an initiative underway in Oklahoma City, where organizers have been gathering signatures to raise the city’s minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10, in line with President Barack Obama's federal minimum wage proposal.

The petition, filed by the Central Oklahoma Labor Federation and attorney David Slane, would need to collect 80,000 signatures to reach a statewide vote.

Slane called the measure disappointing, criticizing the state legislature for stripping "the right of the people to decide minimum wage."