In the span of just two weeks, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has catapulted into Republican superstar status. Mitt Romney's premature withdrawal from the 2016 presidential race cracked open the doors for the emergence of a hardline right-wing alternative to the party establishment's lone remaining consensus candidate, Jeb Bush. And with his surprisingly animated speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit, Walker smashed those doors down and jumped to the front of the pack in Iowa and New Hampshire.
With his rhetorical guns blazing at every enemy of Wall Street Republicans and tea party conservatives alike, Walker has emerged straight from central casting as a Tarantino-like hero for the GOP. For the faithful, he is unambiguously good. Like them, he believes his Democratic foes aren't just wrong, but unambiguously evil. Whether the villains are unions, pro-choice supporters, the poor, minority voters, public schools, or pointy-headed "liberal elites," the righteous Walker, too, hates them all. He talks and fights tough, which for the right wing is not a means but an end in itself. And after the Republicans' two humiliating defeats at the hands of Barack Obama, Walker possesses the most important quality of them all. At the end of the movie, he wins.
Walker's rapidly evolving persona goes well beyond the post-Vietnam lesson of Rambo ("Do we get to win this time?") that so entranced President Ronald Reagan. Against impossible odds, the Republican uber avenger doesn't just miraculously avoid defeat and certain death. Free of any doubt and unencumbered by any moral constraint, he inspires not just fear but abject terror in arrogant enemies once viewed as invincible. As with the Nazi leaders and Southern slaveholders in Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained respectively, he slaughters the evil-doers of his age and thus rewrites history itself. It's no wonder Tarantino's actors described the brutal justice meted out by Jewish-American commandos and French resistance fighters to Hitler and his minions as "Jewish porn."
That's why the Scott Walker story belongs to a genre that could aptly be called "Republican porn."
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