The Republicans' racial culture war is reaching new heights in Virginia
Running for governor of Virginia as the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin appears to have a split personality – sometimes the generic former corporate executive in a fleece vest, the suburban dad surrounded by his sun-lit children and tail-wagging dogs, and sometimes the fierce kulturkampf warrior and racial dog-whistler. His seemingly dual personality has been filtered through a cascade of Republican consultants’ campaign images. His latest TV commercial attempts to resolve the tension by showing him as a concerned father who shares the worries of the ordinary Trumpster. In the closing hours of the campaign, he has exposed that his political identity can’t be separated from Republican identity politics in the decadent stage of Trumpism.
The Republican party has long specialized in fabricating esoteric threats, from the basements of Pizzagate to the stratosphere of “Jewish space lasers”. Youngkin’s campaign, though, has contrived a brand-new enemy within, a specter of doom to stir voters’ anxieties that only he can dispel: the Black Nobel prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison and her novel Beloved.
His turn to a literary reference might seem an obscure if not a bizarre non sequitur, at odds with his pacifying image, but the ploy to suppress the greatest work by the most acclaimed Black writer has an organic past in rightwing local politics and an even deeper resonance in Virginia history.
In his first TV ad, introducing himself as a newcomer who had never before run for political office, Youngkin warned voters not to misperceive him as yet another nasty Republican and to dismiss not-yet-stated “lies about me”. They should ignore whatever negative material they might hear about how he “left dirty dishes in the sink”. “What’s next, that I hate dogs?” Big smile. Cue: cute kids and puppies. Soundtrack: bark, bark.
For a while the nice guy Youngkin tried to walk his thin line, lest he lose the party’s angry base voters. He attempted to use the soft image to cover the hard line. He is vaccinated, but against vaccine mandates. He is inspired by Donald Trump, has proclaimed his belief in the need for audits and “election integrity”; opposed to abortion, but was careful not to appear with Trump at his “Take Back Virginia” rally. He appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News in a ritual cleansing to profess that his motive is pure.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/30/glenn-youngkin-republican-racial-culture-war-virginia
= new reply since forum marked as read
