Republicans Learned What Democrats Forgot

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10. "The message is clear: Those liberals are coming for you and your family. Though you are the truest Americans,

they hate you and everything you stand for. They call you a racist and a redneck. They want to force their perverted ideas about sex and family on you. And the best way to fight back is to vote Republican -- and forget about those democratic principles you learned about in school. This is a war, and it's no time to play fair.

"It may seem strange to think that a person in rural Nebraska or Oklahoma could be instructed by a pundit from Washington, D.C., on a TV network owned by an Australian media magnate, on how to understand their own identity. ... It isn't just the conservative media; these kinds of messages are reinforced even by the mainstream outlets ... . If a small town, blue-collar man is the most authentic American, then the fact that his vote counts for more than a Black urban lawyer or a Latino suburban government worker won't arouse the outrage and demand for change that it might had he not been so valorized."

Tom Schiller and Paul Waldman, "White Rural Rage"