It’s likely that Darline Graham, who is actually refreshingly candid about her almost complete lack of knowledge about policy and legislation, is going to win her brother’s Senate seat in South Carolina. She doesn’t know what to do about Taiwan, but she sure as hell knows that girls should play on the girls’ teams, and boys on the boys’. This is in her benighted state, where they’ve passed a law banning trans kids from playing on sports teams matching their gender.
Since she lacks even the tiny bit of polish that most Republican candidates have, her explanations, when she has them, are straight out of the Republican id. And no part of that id is more deeply seated than feelings about people “deserving” health care. Yesterday, Joe detailed the whole “free market” wank that candidates like Mike Rogers spurt out whenever they’re asked for a healthcare plan. It’s bullshit, and it’s not what the people voting for these MAGAts believe. They believe what Graham believes:
Darline Graham, who just sashayed into the Senate seat of her late brother, Lindsey Graham, likes to tell a story about her parents. They both passed away fairly suddenly—her mother of Hodgkin’s lymphoma and her father of a heart attack. She was a preteen at the time, and it’s a compelling tale that lands well with audiences.
[…] [In her victory speech] Darline Graham cites “government-run health care” among a litany of evils that Andrews supposedly supports. She then segues into a discussion of her and her brother’s upbringing in living quarters behind a bar owned by her parents, to illustrate how her “vision” is “different” from that of Andrews.
“We didn’t take vacations—if they were sick, they had to go to work,” Graham continued. “My mother passed away when I was eleven, and my father just over a year later.”
Darline Graham’s vision, it seems, holds that because her own parents worked so hard, couldn’t take sick days, and died untimely deaths, others shouldn’t expect anything different. It’s a particularly clumsy rendition of the idea that anyone who works hard will automatically have health care access in keeping with what they justly merit in life, and only the lazy and undeserving would ask for Big Government health care.
The whole piece is worth a read. Graham’s position is somewhat incoherent, but I’m sure it’s deeply etched into her character, since it is one of the few policy positions she has been able to articulate. The “deserving” “hard workers” will get healthcare. The “undeserving” / “lazy” will not. You can substitute “white” for “hard workers” and “black/brown” for “lazy” and the sentences resonate even more, since what really motivates poor whites to vote against their “rational self interest” is the idea that someone of color will get a government benefit.
The problem is that the deepest “self interest” that poor MAGA voters have is irrational, and it’s to be above black and brown folks. LBJ got it, and it hasn’t changed much since he said this:
If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.
I wish I had some inkling of what can be done about this, but all I can think of is to make sure every black and brown person has access to voting, that districts are drawn fairly so they can be represented fairly, and that we crush MAGA at the polls.
