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AUGUST

**25, 2020**

Harold Meyerson' s
National Convention Report

**Unconventional:** The Republicans, Night One

Even Diversity Night Was Nutcase Right

****

Every Republican convention of the past half-century has had its
Diversity Night, a desperate attempt to convince upper-middle-class
white swing voters that the party's not as racist as ... well, as it
is. This year's convention was no exception.

Two South Carolinians-former governor and U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley
and current senator Tim Scott-provided this year's patina of
tolerance. Haley referenced her move to take down the Confederate battle
flag from atop the state's capitol after the 2015 Charleston church
massacre. It was a particularly artful reference, since Haley, who hopes
to win the party's presidential nod in 2024 with the backing of
old-school Republicans but also just enough support from Trump's
crazies, alluded to her display of sensitivity without actually
mentioning that it was a Confederate flag she displaced.

Scott extolled Trump's concern for the Black and Latino poor by
highlighting the "opportunity zones" that offer wealthy investors tax
breaks for putting money into minority communities. The policy derives
from a nearly identical initiative from Jack Kemp, who devised the
policy as HUD secretary under George H.W. Bush, and who, like Scott, was
invariably trotted out to demonstrate that Republicans actually did care
for Blacks. Like Kemp's zones, Trump and Scott's have done nothing
to alleviate inner-city poverty, but have offered plenty of opportunity
for corruption. Many zones have been designated in already-gentrifying
areas, so investors get tax breaks for development that would have
happened anyway and doesn't particularly help the poor.

I've covered six previous Republican National Conventions before this
week's, and at each, Diversity Night has invariably produced a sense
of cognitive dissonance, as minority-group speakers have extolled the
party's racial bona fides to television viewers, in a hall packed by
25,000 delegates, alternates, and spectators who are at least 97 percent
white. Haley, Scott, and the evening's other racial vouchers were
spared that challenge, but getting around Trump's overt racism and
nativism posed obstacles of its own. Haley, whose parents emigrated from
India, and Maximo Alvarez, a gas station magnate and six-figure GOP
donor who fled Castro's Cuba to make a new life in Florida, both
hailed America as a refuge and a land of opportunity. But neither
addressed whether they'd be Americans at all had Trump's immigration
and asylum policies been in effect some decades ago.

The purpose of Diversity Night has never been to win over a significant
number of voters of color. Rather, it's intended to reassure swing
whites-this year, white suburban women who've been appalled by
Trump-that there are still sufficient pockets of sensitivity in the
Republican ranks to merit a second look.

But even Diversity Night made clear that the main goal of this year's
convention isn't to win swing voters; it's to bring to the polls
those remaining Americans who would be Republican base voters if only
the party could get their attention by scaring the living hell out of
them. That has required the Republicans to create and then attack an
entirely implausible Joe Biden, and since that was their goal even on
their one night of reaching out to the occasional stray moderate, we
must assume we've only heard the overture so far.

Support Independent, Fact-Checked Journalism

The Biden of Republican strategists' imagination isn't merely the
sworn foe of capitalism but actually controlled by communists who only
pretend to be socialists. (Never mind that it's Trump who has an
affinity for authoritarian regimes.) The Republicans' Biden would
destroy small businesses by encouraging rioters to run amok. (Never mind
that this year's ratio of businesses destroyed by rioting to
businesses destroyed by Trump's failure to arrest the pandemic is
roughly 1 to 10,000.) We were told by Patricia McCloskey (the notorious
St. Louis gunslinger) that Biden would "abolish the suburbs."

In a sense, Republicans have fallen back on a hardy perennial. Democrats
bringing minorities to the suburbs and raising taxes on the middle
class, another of last night's refrains, have been GOP talking points
for the past half-century. Voiced as stridently as they were last night,
however, they're more red meat for die-hard Trumpians than they are
arguments that can win back more-affluent suburbanites. The Trumpified
Republicans have lost their dog whistle, and sound more like George
Wallace than either George Bush. These attacks may win back some more
elderly suburban whites, for whom such attacks have worked since
Nixon's days. But I doubt they'll move many of their younger
counterparts.

The implausibility of the attacks on Biden were matched last night by
the implausibility of the claims made for Trump. Hailing the president
for his success in dealing with the pandemic (despite the fact that the
U.S., with 4 percent of the world's population, has had 23 percent of
the world's COVID fatalities) is the one least likely to strike
Americans as accurate; it's a fair measure of his strategists'
desperation. My favorite, though, was voiced by the evening's first
speaker, a young Republican automaton named Charlie Kirk, who extolled
Trump as "the bodyguard for Western Civilization."

All available evidence suggests that Trump either slept through or
ditched Western Civilization, and that his sister did his homework for
him.

The most revealing thing about today's Republican Party isn't what
they showed us last night or what they plan to inflict upon us in coming
days. It occurred at yesterday's one, and only, business session of
the convention, in Charlotte, where the party renominated Trump and Mike
Pence and adjourned until 2024, without enacting a platform. Apparently,
Republican policy until 2024 is to support any and all of Trump's
impulses-that is, whatever is on Fox & Friends on any given morning.
In 2020, the Republicans have become less a party than a well-funded
cult with a ballot line.

Apparently undaunted by the nonexistence of a platform, Tim Scott closed
his remarks by declaring, "Our side is working on policy," even though
after ten years, they're still unable to come up with a replacement
for the Affordable Care Act. By contrast, Scott continued, Biden is
working on "transforming what it means to be an American" into something
unutterably awful.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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The RNC Will Be a Strange Mix of Denial and Terror

Each installment of Trump's convention will resemble nothing so much
as an evening of Fox News. BY PAUL WALDMAN

More Nominees for Biden's Cabinet

Don't measure the drapes yet, but personnel really is policy. This is
another article in a continuing series on possible Biden appointees. BY
ROBERT KUTTNER

The Future of Health Care Hinges on This Primary

If Rep. Richie Neal prevails in Massachusetts's First District,
lobbyists and corporate donors will get the message that their profits
are safe. BY JON WALKER

Landlords Could Be Small Businesses' Silent Killer During the Pandemic

The plight of one small coffee shop in downtown Washington could reflect
a larger decline in small businesses. Here's how we could save them.
BY HAL SINGER

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