Cliven Bundy–Republican Id 0

Edit: This post is over two years old. Links are broken. Stuff happens and life goes on. The post itself stands.

After idolizing Cliven Bundy for a week, the Republican establishment and its propaganda machine (also known as Fox News) is now backing away from him with all indeliberate speed. Just what did he do?

He let the cat out of the bag, and it’s one damned ugly cat.

Cliven Bundy is the voter that Nixon’s odious “southern strategy” was designed to woo and succeeded in wedding to the Republican Party. He’s the fellow down the street with the stars-and-bars decal in the rear window of his pick-up truck; he’s your cousin who is convinced that President Obama was born in Kenya; he’s your co-worker who claims that climate change is a plot by scientists to get research grants; he’s your boss who believes that there is or can be such a thing as “reverse discrimination.”

He is the Republican base.

In Wingnut World, Cliven Bundy’s error was not in what he said. It’s that he said it at all.

Now the Wingnut noise machine is backing away from him because, as the Gloomy Historian explains, to use the catch-phrase of the day, associating with him is “bad optics” (follow the link for the rest):

So why is open racism, as espoused by Cliven Bundy, bad for Fox and the Republicans? Simple economics. The vestige of middle class America, safe from the world in their tucked away suburbistans, forms a plurality if not majority of conservative voters. They like to believe they are above vulgar racism and shy away from open declarations such as Bundy’s. Suburban conservatives and their even more remote cousins in exurban McMansions are the beloved demographic of advertisers, the Americans who have slightly more income than required for subsistance. I’ll admit it looked like this bulwark of polite society seemed to have been overrun with the emergence of the tea party and it’s myriad racist appeals, but Fox did manage to gloss that over and pretend did not happen to reassure the skittish suburbanites who do not want to support an openly racist party. But it keeps popping up.