The monsters we create: Republicans and their battle against the zombie apocalypse

You can tell a lot about a people from the monsters they use to frighten themselves.

During the height of the Red Scare, Americans feared a communist conspiracy taking over the world — converting their friends and neighbors, staffing U.S. institutions with secret enemies. So their entertainment was filled with extraterrestrials who could mimic humans.

Notably, some of those monsters — such as the “body snatchers” and “The Thing” — reappeared just as the Cold War between Communist Russia and Reagan’s America was about to heat back up.

The late 1980s brought new threats: the scourge of drugs, the AIDS epidemic, contaminated needles. Who better to scare and entice Generation X than vampires – a monster that symbolizes corruption of the blood and stands for appetites that, once fed, might prove irresistible? The vampire genre rose from its coffin.

Trying to identify a monster who embodies the Trump Era gets tricky, because so many things frighten Republicans today.

I don’t solely mean that GOP politicians whip up fears, because Democrats do that, too.

I mean: You should take pity on any conservatives in your life, because they occupy a world much scarier than where everyone else lives.

People who see the world as a hostile place are more likely to lean rightward. Show a video with something lethal, like a snake or spider, and conservatives focus more on the threat. Make a loud noise; they’re more likely to react. Show a yucky photo and their gag reflex kicks in faster.

With so many fears and aversions to encapsulate, it might be tempting to give up on identifying one creature that haunts Republican nightmares – instead settling on a show like “Supernatural,” which sent brothers Sam and Dean careening across the flyover states to battle a rapid rotation of beasts.

But no, one monster did enjoy special cultural resonance leading up to Trump’s presidency: Zombies!!!

It began with a handful of surprisingly popular zombie movies during the Bush years. The Resident Evil franchise — which combined infected former humans with a sinister deep-state conspiracy — also kicked off then, reaching its “Final Chapter” immediately after Trump’s inauguration.

Most obviously, “The Walking Dead” first aired in 2010 and achieved the height of its popularity before Trump’s election.

Created by two Kentuckians and overwhelmingly popular in culturally conservative areas — most notably Appalachia — that show’s central characters were a lawman, a redneck hunter, and a former housewife. Threats included a former high-school staffer, a collectivist artist and, amusingly, a Center for Disease Control scientist.

Zombie entertainment, the non-comedic sort, portrays a constantly threatening setting that demands toughness and favors strongmen. It’s a Trumpian fantasy.

View today’s GOP as though it’s fending off a zombie apocalypse, and disparate policy initiatives suddenly fit together. It’s only partly a tongue-in-cheek observation to note that conservatives see zombies all around them.

A zombie horde shambles toward the southern border, carrying foreign diseases (like drugs and terrorism) with them. Let’s build a wall and send troops!

City-dwelling zombies clamber on top of each other, colors blended until they’re a uniform gray, making metro areas dangerous as they satisfy soulless hungers. Let’s dispatch more cops and militarize them! Let’s make it easier for property owners to run them off and root out their hives!

Big institutions to which citizens are vulnerable — government, corporations — are staffed by inflexible and heartless zombies, bound by rules that ensure nothing gets better. “You can’t even get a human on the phone.” Let’s elect an unpresidential president who ignores the rules and shakes everything up!

Conservatives teach their children, including their daughters, traditional values. But when they’re sent off to school, teachers infect them with a progressive virus that makes them part of the zombie hive. They lose their faith, their self-control, their gender, their identity — returning home uncommunicative (if not hostile), hypnotized by flashing smartphones as they sullenly shovel food into their mouths.

So let’s help keep kids out of public schools! Let’s limit funds for education, try to control teachers and librarians! Let’s ban TikTok and confiscate student phones! Let’s politicize school-board elections and encourage school prayer!

Zombies want nothing except to eat. So maybe that explains the conservative inclination to starve programs that feed people, not just food stamps but also free school lunches and even a program intended to improve nutrition for pregnant Women and Infant Children.

And conservatives envision streams of zombies who know little about government — they vote for Democrats, after all — mindlessly casting ballots (or passively allowing their ballots to be “harvested”) on behalf of the wicked conspirators who set this apocalypse off in the first place.

So their impulse is to make voting harder. Aren’t zombies less likely to surmount small barriers? And in places where Democrats dominate, let’s make elections nonpartisan so it’s harder to cast a brainless party-line vote.

That’s where Republicans lose the plot.

Until now, my zombie analogy has just been a playful way to represent a sad truth about the culture war. Whether progressive or right wing, ideologues view their positions as obviously correct — and so morally superior that opponents must be mindless, soulless, or both.

But at least the policies conservatives usually pursue to combat “zombies” have some hope of beating back their rivals. They’re not irrational.

The same cannot be said for voting restrictions, such as the attempt to gut what remains of early voting in Kentucky or the ongoing effort to make elections in Louisville nonpartisan.

Interfering in Jefferson County’s election rules is unlikely to help conservatives. As I explained to town leaders in Hopkinsville recently, when they brought me in to summarize research on nonpartisan elections, they rarely prevent party-based voting. Usually, a light hint or two is sufficient for almost everyone to identify the “Democratic” candidate and vote accordingly.

To the extent going nonpartisan keeps voters from following their herd, expecting Democrats to struggle reflects an outdated conception that their side relies on, well, zombies.

Listen to what campaign workers out in the field are saying. They’ve never seen Democratic voters so attentive, so fired up (or so networked by smartphones and social media).

Look at the numerous disappointments Republican politicians have suffered since 2018. Educated voters are switching sides.

Note the consistent Republican underperformance in special elections, most recently New York’s.

It’s grassroots Republican supporters who have become listless, unfocused, and unmotivated. Making it harder to participate, such as by hiding who the GOP’s candidates are, just increases the odds their party is the one like a dead man walking.

Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com. Follow Kentucky Lantern on Facebook and Twitter.