Krugman: "the base turns to candidates who drop the euphemisms while going straight to the racism

[pampango]

and xenophobia.

The basic liberal diagnosis of modern conservatism has long been that it was a plutocratic movement that won elections by appealing to the racism and general anger-at-the-other of whites; there’s nothing too surprising about an election in which the establishment candidates continue to serve plutocracy while the base turns to candidates who drop the euphemisms while going straight to the racism and xenophobia.

Brian Beutler has a good piece about the liberal reaction to Trumpism ... Beutler says that

The only people who claim to be befuddled by the Trump phenomenon are officials on knife-edge in the party he leads.

But surely the people most taken by surprise, least able to handle the phenomenon, are the self-proclaimed centrists, the both-sides-do-it crowd, who denounced the plutocrats-and-racists diagnosis as “shrill,” insisting that we are having a real debate with just a few fringe characters on either side. Some of those people are still trying to portray the parties as symmetric: Bernie Sanders calling for single-payer health insurance is just like Trump calling for mass deportations and a ban on Muslims.

That was always a silly position. And as Beutler says, those of us who were clear-headed about conservative politics are almost bored by the repeated revelations of what we already knew.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/the-banality-of-trumpism/

Since they have nothing legitimate to campaign on, republicans turn again and again to racism and xenophobia to turn out their voters.