The Republican Party Is Building The Electorate That Will Keep It In Power

[Jimbo101]

The Concourse

The Trump administration is moving ahead with its retraction of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration policy, which allowed people who’d immigrated to the United States as children the opportunity to receive work permits and two-year deportation deferrals. This is horrible, breathtakingly cruel, and of course a moral atrocity; like so much else this nightmare government has done or tried to do, it trades the well-being of millions of people for the good will of a hard core of vile racists. Everything about it is awful.

So maybe, like me, you found yourself reaching for “It’s political suicide!” as a form of meager consolation this morning. After all, poll after poll shows that something like eight out of 10 Americans agree with the basic premise of DACA: that people who come to this country as children ought to have the opportunity to stay and build lives and gain citizenship. Easier than listing all the vast swaths of voting-eligible Americans whom you could expect to be alienated from the Republican party by this decision is listing the ones that won’t: Nativist white people, and pretty much nobody else. In absolute terms, that’s not a huge portion of the country’s population; it’s certainly smaller than the minority share of the vote Donald Trump received last November.

The context for all of this—not just the withdrawal of DACA, but the practical death of the Voting Rights Act’s enforceable protections; the innuendo about widespread voter fraud; the pardon of immigrant-brutalizing border sheriff Joe Arpaio, and what that signaled both to like-minded cops and to the communities they terrorize; the appointment of Confederate revanchist Jeff Sessions to head the Justice Department and his predictable gutting of its civil rights division; the immigration checkpoints along evacuation routes out of Houston; the assaults on equitable healthcare and the push to remove the tax burden from the wealthy; right-to-work laws; gerrymandering; the drug war; welfare reform; stop-and-frisk; and on and on and on—is a concerted effort to preserve the United States as a society in which only white people’s rights count for shit, and where enough of them—us—can be counted upon to vote for whatever keeps it that way.