A funny thing happened the other day on Martha’s Vineyard.
While I was visiting there with family, we got word that car traffic was immobilizing nearby Edgartown. Turned out, local citizens were flooding in – with food, toys, bedding and medical supplies – to help the 50 migrants who’d been lured onto planes in Texas under false pretenses by Florida Man Ron DeSantis, who had the bright idea of using humans as political pawns in order to supposedly “own the libs” and boost his bona fides with duh Republican base.
The stunt, financed by Florida taxpayers, was obviously despicable, but it was hilarious to watch it backfire. The MAGA 2.0 leader of DeSantistan seemed to think that when the “lib elite” came face to face with a few of the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, that the islanders would presumably be as cruel and racist as he is. Maybe he assumed that the migrants would be herded into woke reeducation camps, where they’d be “groomed” for the gay lifestyle before being thrown into a gutter.
Instead, the migrants were treated with support and compassion – the same Christian ethic that folks on the rabid right purportedly avow. Some outlets within the conservative media bubble tried hard to lie with impunity – The Federalist declared that Vineyard liberals were “melting down” about the migrants’ presence – but most Americans, those who don’t gargle MAGA Kool-Aid, know what really happened.
It’s not hard to see what this episode is really all about. We’re on the cusp of another election season – the midterms that will decide who controls Congress, and whether democracy itself will survive – and whenever the Republicans are in trouble, as they were on the eve of the 2018 midterms, they gin up fears about “alien” invasions and caravans. Job number one is to propel MAGAts en masse to the polls; maybe fear can do the trick. They especially need a reason to vote in a year when their messiah – the criminally-probed thief of nuclear secrets – is not on the ballot.
DeSantis sees a trifecta: He wants to bestir his Florida base while he’s running for re-election as governor; he wants to put down markers for the 2024 presidential race, regardless of whether Trump is on the stump or stuck in a courtroom; and, perhaps most crucially, he wants to help his fellow Republicans by changing the subject.
Here’s the subject: Democrats are doing far better than expected in the run-up to the November balloting. They’re not burdened with clowns and extremists (witness Senate GOP hopefuls Herschel Walker, J. D. Vance, Blake Masters, Dr. Oz, et al). Their president has been racking up legislative victories. Gas prices have plunged since June. And the theocratic Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has blown up in Republicans’ faces (in the polls, Roe gets landslide support); the surge in pro-choice women signing up to vote has compelled many Republicans to delete forced-birth rhetoric from their websites.
So what the GOP needs is a mass distraction. And what better way to gin up MAGA voters than to recycle a racist tactic pioneered 60 years ago by the White Citizens Councils – the southern segregationists who opposed civil rights measures during the Kennedy era? They had the bright idea of luring southern Blacks onto buses with promises of jobs up north. Some of those Blacks were dumped at Hyannis Port, near the Kennedy family compound. A white organizer sneered, “We’re going to find out if people like Ted Kennedy – and the Kennedys, all of them, really do have an interest in the Negro people, really do have a love for the Negro.”
Does that drivel perchance ring a bell? As Mark Twain supposedly said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
Granted, we do have an overburdened immigration system that needs major fixes. But it’s a matter of record that in 2007, when President Bush supported a bipartisan immigration reform plan, it was sabotaged in the Senate by the Republican right; and that in 2013, when the Senate made amends by passing a bipartisan immigration reform plan, it was sabotaged in the House by the Republican right. The cult doesn’t do policy; it merely seeks to exploit fear and grievances in the pursuit of power.
Stunts don’t solve complex problems. But for someone like DeSantis, people are props and cruelty is policy. If there’s any justice, socially and morally, cheap tricks like his will backfire in November.