The Next Republican Uprising Is Underway

Roy Moore’s victory in Alabama does not represent some social conservative upwelling. His (And Steve Bannon’s) victory was primarily about blowing up Washington and making the DC folks uncomfortable, not a rebirth of The Moral Majority.

(From NBC News)

Roy Moore’s easy victory in Alabama’s Republican Senate runoff says something about President Donald Trump, who tried and failed to sell Moore’s opponent to the party base. But it says a lot more about the toxic disconnect between the GOP’s Washington establishment and its grass-roots voters.

That’s a far bigger story, with implications for the 2018 midterms, Trump’s re-election, the futures of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker Paul Ryan, and maybe even the nature of politics.

Moore’s win is best viewed in the context of a series of uprisings within the Republican Party that began during Barack Obama’s presidency. The circumstances have varied, but the pattern is consistent: candidates who would once have been easy to dismiss as marginal figures knocking off impeccably credentialed men and women of the establishment in primary elections…

…By contrast, Moore declared himselfagainst that same bill, but insisted it wasn’t an act of defiance. He was offering himself as a different kind of Trump loyalist — the kind of who would curb the influence of McConnell and the Washington insiders and allow Trump to be Trump.

In that sense, Moore’s appeal is very similar to Trump’s. He’s positioned in fervent opposition to the party’s establishment and draws his identity from cultural politics of a variety even more inflammatory than Trump’s. Strange was offering Alabama Republicans a Capitol Hill-ized version of Trumpism, but it was the Moore model they wanted.

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