Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/10/20/former-gop-chairman-michael-steele-endorses-joe-biden.html
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He has been so upset with the GOP for years now.
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Steele isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer and I don’t know which of his fellow Americans listen to him. This election, though, I’ll take any GOP figure’s endorsement of Biden as long as Uncle Joe tells them to piss off when they come to collect on the “favour” they did him.
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September:
For Steele, Trump is “the P.T. Barnum of the 21st century, on steroids,”
October: “Hold my beer!”
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The editors keeping this Wikipedia entry up to date have been very busy lately:
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You built this, Michael.
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Well he certainly never expected leopards to eat his face!
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Don’t worry. He’ll come to them:
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But hang in there queer and female Republicans- we swear the party is really all about fiscal responsibility, despite every single policy and action taken in the last 100 years. Oppressing you will be worth balancing that budget!
/s because you can’t roll the dice with Poe these days
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In a different timeline, the GOP grudgingly followed Rove’s plan to court socially and fiscally conservative Latinx voters to serve as new base upon which to build state coalitions, and the country is a very different place than it is today.
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That’s ignoring like 40 years of history of conservativism in America. He played a role, for sure, but he isn’t singularly responsible for the current right-wing turn of the GOP. Much of that had been built long before he became the GOP chair.
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Right—as a group Latinx people are
- More likely to go to church and support traditional “Christian” values
- More likely to have blue-collar jobs like laborer or agricultural worker
- More family-centered in general
Yet the GOP still hasn’t made any major inroads winning over their votes, because Republicans are racist AF.
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I really do wonder what course this country would be on–on the one hand, the GOP likely isn’t taken (given?) over by white nationalists of the particular strain we’re seeing, on the other hand, a bunch of states go from being tossups or leaning Democratic to being firmly GOP territory for the foreseeable future. What gets emphasized as GOP policy in that world? What does the Democratic party look like in that world?
I suspect both parties would be better in such a world, because if the GOP wasn’t the party of racism and xenophobia then the Democrats would be forced to work harder to earn the Latinx vote.
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The surprise isn’t that the GOP marriage of overtly and covertly racists voters with the well off and the wealthy his fraying. They aren’t natural allies because in high doses, racism can be bad for business. But Trump has kicked over the rock, said the quiet parts out loud and exposed just how many racists their are in this country. People of color may have been aware, but for those of us who are white, it was a big surprise.
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that’s ummmm… kind of a broad brush. so please don’t speak for me.
the things surprising to me have been: a minority of people can elect a manifestly unfit businessman to become a manifestly unfit president, the government has little ability to reign in a president who doesn’t want to play by the rules, the senate majority leader is way powerful, and the police are much more broken than i thought.
the country is built on racism and bigotry. it’s never been surprising that overcoming it - and all of the conservative fear of non white cis hetero people - is a lot of work.
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It probably also doesn’t help that when stats tell us Latinx people are more likely to go to church and support Christian values does not mean their values align with the Republican party’s version of Christianity.
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That is true. For all its faults, the Catholic Church generally walks the walk when it comes to things like “providing services to the poor” and “welcoming immigrants.” Not a lot of Catholic priests and nuns out there preaching the prosperity gospel on TV.
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But also religious organizations other than US white evangelical Christians espouse mostly some kind of values, as opposed to just being mouthpieces for an authoritarian political movement.
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While latinx still tend to largely be Catholic, unfortunately there has been a notable trend in recent years towards evangelical identities, including the prosperity gospel variety.
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