King of the Hill Illustrates the Fall of the GOP

I was excited last fall when Hulu finally added Fox’s King of the Hill to their service.  Except for a few episodes on Adult Swim, I hadn’t seen that show pretty much since it ended in 2010.  I always liked it, especially when it came after The Simpsons because it was a good complement to that show because unlike Family Guy it wasn’t the same show with slightly different animation and a lot of asides.

The show centered around Hank Hill, who lived in the small Texas city of Arlen with his wife Peggy and 12/13-year-old son Bobby.  (He started as 12 and then eventually he was 13.)  Unlike Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin, Hank wasn’t a blundering oaf; he was a fairly normal blue-collar guy who sold propane and propane accessories.  He was obsessive about propane, grilling, and caring for his lawn.  Most of the time (starting in the credits) he’d be drinking beer in an alley with his friends Bill, Dale, and Boomhauer.

Hank was basically the Republican ideal:  patriotic, hard-working, middle-class, white, conservative, Christian, male.  He has a pick-up truck and a hunting rifle but not a bunch of guns.  But the things he wasn’t:  racist, homophobic, and fear-mongering.  Not that he had a lot of black or gay friends (when a Laotian family moves in, he and his friends ask the patriarch of the family:  are you Chinese or Japanese?) but he wasn’t burning crosses in their yards or petitioning the government to drive them out of town.  Casual racism/homophobia at most. 

Contrast that with his friend Dale who isn’t racist or homophobic but is a big time conspiracy nut and gun nut.  And he loves wearing hats to cover his baldness.  If you added some racism and homophobia, Dale could trade that orange hat in for a MAGA hat.

Watching the show in 2018, you can see a Before-and-After of the Republican Party.  Hank is what the GOP was until Rush, Newt, Fox “News,” Karl Rove, Bush/Cheney, Sarah Palin, and ultimately Donald Trump drove it ever farther right.  The GOP in 2019 looks a lot more like Dale than Hank.  Which is sad because when King of the Hill aired Dale was supposed to be a nut, a doofus who never even figured out his wife had been cheating on him for about 15 years (even getting knocked up by the Native American guy) and now he’s mainstream.  He’s the one at the Trump rallies chanting “Build the Wall!” and threatening journalists.

Doubly sad because Hank’s Republican Party wasn’t all that bad.  It disagreed with the liberals but it was at least sane and mostly reasonable.  It was willing to find compromise.  We could have differences and still be friends at the end of the day.  Back in those days you actually had the feeling of a real choice.

But then it all changed when W Bush lied us into a costly war and everything became win at any cost, no matter how you have to lie and cheat to get there.  The environment that caused the most recent government shutdown and Trump’s bogus “national emergency” is a product of that.

A problem I think is a lot of people still think the GOP candidates they’re voting for are part of that Hank Hill version of the party.  They haven’t realized yet that the Dales are running the show now and that 30% is bringing the rest of us along for the ride.  By the time they do wake up to reality, it’ll probably be too late.