Speaker 1: All right.
Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about something else.
Many of you have written to me and said, David, I came in with a sort of open mind and said,
I want to figure out on policy.
Do I agree more with Democrats or Republicans?
Great approach.
I think that that's a worthy thing to do.
But then many of you who write to me say.
It doesn't really seem like Republicans talk about policy anymore.
Like.
Yeah.
If you look at a campaign website, you'll see a policy section for a Republican and
it'll include a lot of buzzwords and seemingly kind of like focus group paragraphs that don't
really say very much.
But when it comes to the campaigns that they run, Republicans don't really seem to talk
about policy anymore.
And that's exactly what I want to talk about today.
I want to talk about how the Republican Party has completely abandoned policy.
It started before the Trump era, but acutely since since the Trump era, to the point where
now, instead of actually talking about issues that affect Americans lives, the Republican
Party has become focused on grievances, fear based politics, based on lies about what Democrats
are immigrants or others will do, and a resurgence in extremist social views focused primarily
on abortion and anti-trans recently.
Now, let's start with a recent example.
After the 2020 election, Republicans refused to accept the results of the election, claiming
that there was widespread fraud.
They failed to win the hearts and minds of the voters based on policy and when they lost.
Instead of saying, Hey, we're going to put forward a policy set of ideas, the pillars
that will be helpful to us in 2022.
They spent two years and now it's been more than two years claiming that that election
actually was rigged, that it was won by Donald Trump and not by Joe Biden.
And despite multiple court rulings and recount audits, they continue to peddle that lie.
And it is a way that they make voters afraid.
They make voters afraid and angry, which are the main emotions at this point that are being
utilized by Republicans to try to convince people to come to their side.
And that is at the core of so much of the rhetoric that comes from the modern Republican
Party.
Another example is the focus on extremist social views.
Republicans have now become fixated on pushing anti-transgender legislation in multiple states,
hundreds of bills arguing we need to protect women's sports and we need to protect kids
in bathrooms and we need to protect the integrity of.
But I'd rather not wait.
Two of we can't have drag shows because it's bad and they're obsessed with that stuff.
All of it is based on false premises, like trans people are pedophiles or sexual predators.
There aren't already laws to protect against harassment in bathrooms when in fact they
are the reality that the concern, even around sports, is a slice of a slice of a slice of
a slice of all that is going on within sports.
And it's all about making people afraid and angry that people like, for example, trans
women who they say are really men are going to take they're either going to take your
child's innocence or take your child's sports trophy or whatever the case may be.
Fear.
Anger.
That's the person who I should be angry at on immigration.
It's the fear of supposedly lazy brown people leeching off of social welfare programs, but
also taking all of our jobs.
And that's always a funny one.
These insanely lazy people who are willing to abandon their families and everything they
know, risk arrest and death to come to the United States are then going to come here
and work in jobs that you would actually be working.
That's very confusing, but it doesn't matter.
It's about the fear, as Tucker Carlson has said, of people coming into the country from
Central and South America, making the country dirtier and poorer and taking jobs and being
on social welfare and whatever the case may be.
It's an insane juxtaposition.
Lazy welfare recipients who take our jobs.
But it is about making you afraid and angry at those people rather than at the very corporations
that have lobbied against regulations which would actually punish them more severely if
they hire undocumented immigrants.
And on and on and on.
Republicans have also been obsessed with cancel culture and perceived threats to free speech.
And again, it's all about fear and anger.
They're going to take away your ability to even speak at a school board meeting.
Are they or are they going to ask me to stop when I've ranted for 12 minutes about masks
and I'm not letting anybody else speak?
Well, it is true.
I've said before, sometimes there can be an overreaction to someone's speech, but for
the most part, the issue of cancel culture has been blown completely out of proportion
by the Republican Party to distract from important policy discussions.
I'm not going to redo my segment on do the victims of cancel culture actually end up
canceled?
The answer is no.
I've already talked about that.
But the reason for the focus on all of these fear and anger based elements is really easy.
You know, sometimes there's questions in politics which are very difficult answers.
The answer for why Republicans have abandoned policy is because Republicans are losing most
policy battles when it comes to the American public.
The American public is as against most of what were the Republican policies today than
they have been for a period of decades and decades and decades.
There's so many examples of this.
A majority of Americans support measures like universal background checks for any gun purchase,
even in between private people, gun show, whatever the case may be.
Most Americans support raising the minimum wage.
Most Americans support addressing climate change.
Exactly how differs.
But most Americans support doing something about climate change.
Most Americans support abortion being legal in most cases.
Most Americans now support gay marriage.
Most Americans support using taxes on the very rich to reduce income inequality.
Those are all positions espoused only by Democrats for the most part, with a few exceptions,
in the Republican Party.
So when you look at that and you realize why Republicans are opposed to all of that, or
at least they were when they used to talk about policy, all they can do is focus on
grievances, fear and anger.
And that brings me to the last part of this, which is populist rhetoric.
I've explained to you before that populist rhetoric is not a set of policy ideas.
It's not like, oh, populism means a higher minimum wage.
Well, it might or it might mean keeping brown people out of the country.
Right.
Populist rhetoric is often used to pull people in and then you dump the policy on them.
And the policy can differ dramatically.
The populist rhetoric is a tool that politicians use to rally supporters.
And usually there is some bad actor, right?
Is the bad actor corporations or is the bad actor Antifa?
Well, I don't know.
Depends on what sort of point you're trying to make.
And populist rhetoric can be used to pull people into your movement without actually
talking about policy.
The Republican Party has been particularly adept at using populist rhetoric to appeal
to its base, and much of that populist rhetoric uses fear and anger rather than actual proposed
policy solutions.
And so the totality of this is that we've seen a dangerous shift away from any substantive
policy from Republicans and instead towards increasingly extremist views on social issues
and focus on grievances and a focus on fear based politics and scapegoating.
And at the core, it is driven by the fact that they have lost the country on average.
Can you find anti-gay-marriage people?
Of course you can.
Can you find anti-abortion people?
Absolutely.
There's a ton of them.
But at the top level, it's a country that has continued to move to the left Akin.
Comically and socially Republicans have lost that.
And instead of saying maybe we'll revisit our policies, maybe we will.
No, we will use populist rhetoric to make people afraid and angry.
We won't talk about policy, and when we lose will claim we won and try to steal the election
anyway.
Extraordinarily dangerous.
But it's where we are now as we approach mid 2023.