{"id":308,"date":"2018-06-21T12:43:08","date_gmt":"2018-06-21T16:43:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/?p=308"},"modified":"2018-06-21T12:44:13","modified_gmt":"2018-06-21T16:44:13","slug":"308","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/?p=308","title":{"rendered":"What to Watch For: Corey Stewart and Virginia Republicans"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Photo from Monthly Review Online<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Last week, Corey Stewart\u00a0<\/a>won the Republican nomination to run against Senator Tim Kaine\u00a0<\/a>for US Senate this November.\u00a0 This means that the de facto leader of the Virginia Republican Party<\/a> is a white supremacist from Minnesota.\u00a0We know he\u2019s a white supremacist because he thinks monuments to men who committed treason against the United States in defense of slavery belong in the public square<\/a>.\u00a0 The guy made his bones harassing people of color and trying to cleanse Prince William County of immigrants<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Corey Stewart likes to pal around<\/a> with people like Paul Nehlen\u00a0<\/a>and Jason Kessler<\/a>.\u00a0 Nehlen is an anti-Semite who jokes on Twitter about killing political opponents.\u00a0 Kessler organized the Unite the Right\u00a0<\/a>Rally in Charlottesville last August.\u00a0 A rally attendee and Kessler supporter killed Heather Heyer<\/a>with his car.\u00a0 Two Virginia State Troopers, Lieutenant H. Jay Cullen, 48, of Midlothian, Virginia, and Trooper-Pilot Berke M. M. Bates, 40, of Quinton, Virginia, died when their observation helicopter crashed on their way to assist authorities on the ground.\u00a0 Kessler plans a sequel, by the way<\/a>.\u00a0 Wonder if Stewart will attend.<\/p>\n

Stewart\u2019s less-than-subtle nods to racists and white supremacists will make him yet another turnout machine for Democrats \u2013 along with Trump, gun violence, attacks on health care, separating immigrant parents and children, and shifting America\u2019s alliances away from the network of democracies in favor of closer relations with autocratic states.\u00a0 Making Corey Stewart the face of the Republican Party in Virginia will infect down-ballot races for Congress and probably improves Democrats\u2019 chances to flip red districts in the Commonwealth.<\/p>\n

What does this mean for the Republicans in the Commonwealth?\u00a0 Stewart has already attached his brand to the RPVA, and his run for a Senate seat as a state-level Donald Trump begs a question: will institutional Republicans in Virginia line up behind him as Mitch McConnel and Paul Ryan have?\u00a0 How often will Barbara Comstock\u00a0<\/a>and Dave Brat<\/a> campaign with him? \u00a0Stewart\u2019s win created a conundrum for conservatives with respect to optics versus policy.\u00a0 The political right in the US has happily dog-whistled race\u00a0<\/a>for decades, but Trump and Stewart say the quiet parts out loud and that makes Conservatism look bad. \u00a0But Trump effectively changed no conservative policy goals, so the GOP backs him up. \u00a0And since he won, some politicians will copy this strategy.\u00a0 The trouble is that after two years of open race-baiting, most Americans now know what they\u2019re getting and don\u2019t much like it.<\/p>\n

This includes some conservatives.\u00a0 Writers at Bearing Drift\u00a0<\/a><\/em>and The Bull Elephant\u00a0<\/a><\/em>agree that Stewart\u2019s nomination reflects an acceptance by the Virginia GOP base of a white nationalism that will hurt their chances down ballot<\/a>.\u00a0 Matt Walton<\/a>complains\u00a0<\/a>that Stewart lied about whether Democrats hold responsibility for the breakup of immigrant families under Trump.\u00a0 Norman Leahy<\/a> calls Stewart \u201ca rebel flag-draped bridge too far<\/a>\u201d and argues that Dave Brat\u2019s \u201c\u2026biggest problem is how he can separate his campaign from that of Trump\u2019s mini-me, Corey A. Stewart<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cStewart answers the rhetoric of minority grievance and resentment with the rhetoric of white grievance and resentment<\/a>,\u201d writes James Bacon<\/a>, noting that \u201cI\u2019m an educated suburbanite, and Stewart isn\u2019t appealing to people like me.\u201d On primary election night Steven Brodie Tucker\u00a0<\/a>wrote, \u201cThe Republican Party of Virginia is the party of White-Identity Politics<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

These guys apparently don\u2019t like having a white supremacist nominee as the face of the GOP.\u00a0 But it\u2019s not clear what actual Stewart policy proposals they reject.\u00a0 I suspect they agree in principle that the US should severely restrict immigration.\u00a0 I can find no examples of these guys objecting to the kind of voter suppression laws and racial gerrymandering that Stewart would vote for.\u00a0 They would support religious freedom laws that permit discrimination where treating everyone the same would violate a claimed religious belief.\u00a0 They back misogynistic restrictions on a woman\u2019s right to reproductive health care.\u00a0 I doubt they would object to more liberal gun laws like concealed carry reciprocity.\u00a0They would happily support higher government debt in order to further shift the tax burden from the wealthy to the poor.\u00a0And of course they would, like Stewart, enthusiastically back the kind of judges who would uphold these laws.<\/p>\n

And this reflects the larger problem with the GOP writ large: they don\u2019t mind Trump saying the quiet parts out loud with regard to race and look the other way when he fills his pockets with taxpayer money as long as they get the tax cuts, deregulation, voter suppression, and judges they want. They plug their ears when Trump riles up the base with false tales of MS-13\u00a0<\/a>because it gets out the vote for politicians who will suppress votes, deregulate corporations, cut taxes, and ignore gun violence.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve met Corey Stewart in person and heard him speak at a Mechanicsville Tea Party\u00a0<\/a>meeting a couple of months ago.\u00a0 This was an intimate setting, with only about a dozen people in the room.\u00a0 He delivered a fairly standard-issue conservative stump speech \u2013 climate change can\u2019t be real because it\u2019s cold outside today, gun-free zones invite gun violence, Democrats just want to expand government for the sake of expanding government.\u00a0 He also claimed that \u201cthere\u2019s a lot of things out there people don\u2019t know about Tim Kaine.\u201d\u00a0We didn\u2019t hear much about confederate monuments, so perhaps he\u2019s learned to moderate his message.<\/p>\n

I expect Kaine will wrap up Stewart with Trump and Nehlen and Kessler in Confederate battle flags to both motivate Democratic activists and keep that bad taste in the mouths of institutional Republicans in the Commonwealth.\u00a0 Stewart will win the Tea Party and Trump voters, but it will be interesting to see whether or not principled conservatives have the backbone to distance themselves with control of the Senate \u2013 and with it control over judicial appointments \u2013 in play.\u00a0 If he can only get a dozen Tea Partiers to show up when he speaks, he\u2019ll need their help.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, Corey Stewart\u00a0won the Republican nomination to run against Senator Tim Kaine\u00a0for US Senate this November.\u00a0 This means that the de facto leader of the Virginia Republican Party is a white supremacist from Minnesota.\u00a0We know he\u2019s a white supremacist because he thinks monuments to men who committed treason against the United States in defense […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[98,37,78,25,26],"tags":[99,88,101,97,100],"class_list":["post-308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2018-virginia-senate-race","category-politics-and-elections","category-treason-in-defense-of-slavery","category-virginia-elections","category-virginia-republican-party","tag-corey-stewart","tag-republican-party","tag-treason-in-defense-of-slavery","tag-virginia-politics","tag-virginia-republican-party"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=308"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308\/revisions\/311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}