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Edited on Tue Aug-02-05 01:42 AM by joemurphy
I've thought about it some and here's what I think:
1. The rich. They basically own this country. The top 4 or 5% own around 45% of the wealth. They vote Republican because it's in their
economic interest to do so. Republican governments make them richer.
They like it when unions are castrated, free trade lets them do what they want (unless things go south -- then they get subsidies), and they really like having their taxes cut. Most didn't do much to get their money. Mostly they inherited it. But they take it for granted. Unfortunately, they are numerically few and need the votes of others to win elections. This requires distasteful compromises and strange bedfellows. Hence they throw in with these others to continue to run things:
2. The fundies. These worry about permissiveness and the irreverence of the Democrats. Abortion genuinely troubles many of them. They see homosexuals as perverts. They aren't deep thinkers. They are uncomfortable with change and find their answers to most of their problems in one passage or another of the Christian Bible. A multicultural society worries the hell out of them. Jews, Blacks, and Muslims are strange, foreign, and troubling. These people want certainty in a world that isn't black and white and are, as a consequence, never really happy. They fortify themselves in their home and family. These are the people that home-school their kids. The rich, who really run the Republican party, throw the fundies an occasional bone -- a pro-life Supreme Court appointee, an anti flag-burning amendment, a proposed Constitutional amendment allowing prayer in the public schools. But they never really let them run things because the rich don't really get on with them either. John Ashcroft was something of a joke even within his own party. Having the fundies around doesn't worry the rich much because they know that outside of the Republican party the fundies have nowhere else to go.
3. The libertarians. This is a strange group of people espousing laissez-faire economics and social permissivism. The economic side, however, is more important to them than the social side. They think that government is a bad thing, the only thing that is keeping them from climbing to the top. Lots of them are small businessmen. They all think they can be rich if government would only get off their back. They see themselves as intellectuals and rugged individualists. They claim they want to just be left alone and free to do what is necessary to maximize their potential. They are extremely naive about what kind of a world their philosophy would lead to. Most forget the reasons we have the Fed, the FDIC, Social Security, and an FDA. These guys, strangely, would legalize heroin and prostitution but ally themselves to rednecks and fundies. They like guns. Go figure.
4. The Anti-Liberals. This is the biggest group of Republican voters in my opinion. They are usually white, mostly but not always male, and their common denominator is an inability to empathize with anyone other than themselves. These are the kind of people that see affirmative action as reverse discrimination. If they've never been hungry or homeless, they simply can't relate to those that are. They see themselves as hard-working and the poor as lazy. They dislike blacks, Hispanics, other ethnicities, and gays because they have never been any of these things, can't relate to them and don't really want to understand them. They don't like people that are smarter than them because they've never been smart themselves. They are thus anti-intellectual because they can't relate to something they've never been or could ever be. They're the kind of people that called Adlai Stevenson an egghead and voted for Eisenhower. They like Bush because he's like them -- the kind of guy you could have a beer with. They don't read much and they revel in their own milieu --NASCAR, Fox News, and the latest missing white woman. They aren't often rich but would like to be and think they can be, chiefly by dint of their own effort. This group REALLY likes guns. They see Democrats as naive, lacking common sense, and as being stupidly tender-hearted. They love Rush Limbaugh.
5. The Supremacists. These are people that see themselves as superior to the unwashed masses that they perceive populate the Democratic party. They're the sort that think blacks are mentally inferior and Hispanics fit only for menial labor. Some are sort of effete racists sitting in ivory towers. Others are the sort that think the neighborhood is falling apart if a black family moves in. Still others fly the confederate flag and see themselves as the heirs of the old South. The effete shade off into the rednecks and the bigots. Lots of them are in the South or rural areas. The latter like guns too.
These, in my opinion, are the hard-core, mainstream Republicans. These are the 30%-40% of the country that would vote for Bush come hell or high water, in good times or bad no matter how badly he screws up. They're the enemy -- the ones that run things now.
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