No…I Will Not Stand Side-By-Side With The Likes Of You…
A one time shooting buddy of mine offhandedly remarked that my support of gun control democrats over right to keep and bear arms republicans was, of course, all about my favoring sex and my sexual orientation over my right to self defense. I countered as I usually do when that comes up, simply by stating that while I think a lot of gun control rhetoric is simplistic and naive at best, at least it’s grounded in one basic fact, that guns are dangerous, whereas getting whipped up in a hysteria over homosexuality not only makes no sense whatsoever, by attacking people’s ability to love and accept love from another you’re actually making civilization that much harder to sustain. To nurture civilization, nurture things in its people like love, sympathy, trust, kindness. A little more love, or for that matter even a little more carefree happy sex, would probably go a long way toward making this poor angry world a much more peaceful one. If I have to come down on one side of it, I will come down on the side of love, Every Time.
Last week, we reported that Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America joined conservative talk show host Stan Solomon to warn about President Obama’s alleged plans to incite violence and bring about a race war against white Americans.
I can’t begin to describe how much I despise it that people like this man have so thoroughly identified their cheapshit racism and hatreds with gun ownership. I can appreciate how it is that bigots and thugs like guns. But in a decent world they’d be keeping their mouths shut about it for the same reason Klansmen kept their faces hidden. No sense in telling the cops who to talk to when there’s been a beating or a lynching.
Behold, the human gutter…
Later, Solomon mused that “the best thing that can happen to a liberal is to be mugged,” and wondered why Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) still supports gun control after she was mugged in 1995, to which Pratt replied: “Well, maybe she liked it.”
There’s the other reason I’ll stand with the democrats on this issue, even if it means they go further than I’d care to see on it. This element needs to be thoroughly defeated, humiliated, at the polls, so we can set about building a more peaceful and prosperous tomorrow. The root of violence, the root I put it to you of all criminal behavior, is right there, in that man’s sneering contempt for a women who was mugged.
That Pleasure You Feel While Victimizing Others That You Keep Mistaking For A Sense Of Humor
The thing sociopaths never get is the difference between laughing at the powerful and laughing at the oppressed. Apparently some Colorado state representative spoke up recently in favor of a bill banning the carrying of guns on college campuses. Now I happen to think that’s a perfectly reasonable position for everyone, gun owners and second amendment believers like myself to take. I also understand perfectly that the likes of the NRA and other Kultur Krieger would howl bloody murder over it for reasons that have essentially nothing to do with the ability of people to defend themselves from violence.
To the extent that any argument is being made here, it’s that guns in the hands of women can prevent rape, therefore banning guns from college campuses makes rape more likely to happen to young women, therefore if you believe in banning guns on college campuses you must think rape isn’t so bad really. The level of cheap bar stool demagoguery here is breathtaking. But wait…there’s more…
Naturally the right wing noise machine kicks into gear and tries to make this Colorado state representative into some kind of liberal Todd Akin. The problem with doing that when you never saw anything wrong with Akin’s crack about legitimate rape in the first place completely escapes them…
There’s this new hashtag #LiberalTips2AvoidRape that’s now on its second day of trending on Twitter: A really, really great expression of our shared humanity, and of the possibilities of feel-good, thoughtful conservative satire… this is not…
Satire, as every political cartoonist knows, is a powerful weapon against the brutal and the ignorant. And never more so than when the brutal and ignorant try wielding it themselves. It’s like one of those magical swords in fantasy stories that turns on its unworthy bearer. Behold…
If you have the stomach for a torrent of rape jokes you should go browse that hashtag on Twitter. Pay attention to what’s going on here. This isn’t about guns. This isn’t about the second amendment. This isn’t about the ability of people to defend themselves from violence…
The ability of the common man and woman, and particularly of the weak and vulnerable, to be secure in their homes and their streets, to defend themselves from violence, is an eminently liberal concern. That is not what the reactionary right is about. They vigorously thump for their own right to self determination and self defense and sneer when the powerless and outcast assert those same rights. This is about culture war. Nothing else.
Here’s how some liberals are responding to the hashtag…
That’s the right approach. And in that spirit I have some of my own.
#LiberalTips2AvoidRape: Focus on putting violent offenders in jail, not pot smokers
#LiberalTips2AvoidRape: Remove judges that think women provoke rape by dressing slutty and walking alone
#LiberalTips2AvoidRape: Teach boys their manhood does not depend on their ability to dominate women
#LiberalTips2AvoidRape: Prosecute those who protect rapists from the law, even if they happen to be Catholic priests or the Pope
#LiberalTips2AvoidRape: Fire any politician who even utters the words “transvaginal probe” in the context of an abortion bill.
Joseph Weisenthal â€@TheStalwartThere’s no empirical evidence or theoretical basis for arguing that cutting taxes is a means towards smaller government.
After the recent revaluations from former Florida GOP members that all that talk about voter fraud was itself fraud, you’d think people would finally stop listening to the rhetoric, and pay more attention to the behavior.
Yes, yes…they yap about “smaller government all the firggin’ time, but you need to understand what is meant in the first place by “smaller government”. It was never about reducing its staffage or its costs. Size is a relative matter.
What they’re talking about isn’t size, it’s power…specifically the power of the federal, not state level government. They want it small enough it can’t enforce equal rights laws. They want it small enough it can’t stop Wall Street and big corporations from raping the middle class. They want it small enough it cannot defend the rights of women, minorities, the poor, and the powerless. That is all that was ever meant by the term, “small government”.
Is Your Problem That You Don’t Get Math, Or You Don’t Get Democracy?
So Romney is complaining that president Obama won because he promised the hoi polloi a lot of gifts. But Romney was no slouch in that department either…promising even bigger tax cuts to the rich, less oversight of Wall Street and the finance industry. So Obama promised gifts to the 47% and Romney promised gifts to the 1%. So the reason Obama won is 47 is greater then 1. Or in other less cynical words, you win elections by appealing to more voters then the other guy does.
I think the complaint here is that elections are still too fair to suit republicans. Or maybe democracy.
The Hudson (NY) Register-Star fired reporter Tom Casey after he refused to allow his byline on a budget meeting story that had two paragraphs inserted by an editor, who apparently wanted to create controversy for an editorial. Here are the inserted grafs:
At the start of the meeting some in the audience were upset over Third Ward Alderman John Friedman’s decision not to stand for the pledge of allegiance. While Hudson City Code does not require council members to stand for the pledge, Fifth Ward Alderman Robert Donahue, who had complained about the matter at a previous meeting and asked Friedman why he did not stand, was visibly upset.
No comment could be reached from either party concerning the matter, and it did not interfere with the meeting.
Sam Pratt reports “Casey had been under pressure by higher-ups at the paper to make an issue of Friedman’s choice, which the Alderman had exercised at some but not all previous meetings. Getting the matter into the body of a news story would give the paper’s management a predicate for writing an editorial about it. The day after the dispute, Casey was reportedly fired by editor Theresa Hyland at the insistence of publisher Roger Coleman.”
So…dig it…Casey’s editor inserted two paragraphs into his story just so the paper could write an editorial, presumably attacking Friedman’s patriotism. The reporter then refused to allow his byline on the story and so the publisher had him fired. Because not standing up for the pledge of allegiance is a greater crime against America then not standing up for honest journalism and freedom of the press.
Hey Roger…you’d be running a much more efficient operation if you just got rid of all that pesky news gathering fluff you really don’t care about anyway and make your paper just one big opinion section. All your opinions of course…
Not going to link to them, but Politico is repeating the babble of some republican nutcase in Maine who can’t figure out where all the darkies were coming from on Election day…
The head of Maine’s Republican Party is claiming unknown groups of black people showed up in the state’s towns and cast ballots on election day.
“In some parts of rural Maine, there were dozens, dozens of black people who came in and voted on Election Day,” Charlie Webster told Portland, Me.’s NBC affiliate on Wednesday. “Everybody has a right to vote, but nobody in town knows anyone who’s black. How did that happen? I don’t know. We’re going to find out.”
Psst…hey Charlie…one of these days why not take a wee stroll outside your little all-white Maine neighborhood over to the colored side of town? Wow…didn’t know all those people were there did ya?
I just finished watching Rachel Maddow deliver a smokin’ hot riff on republican shock and confusion, as displayed on Fox last night, that the numbers they were certain were going to go massively in Romney’s favor didn’t. She showed clips from past Fox News predictions of a Romney landslide, showed that stunning live TV moment that’ll almost certainly go down in television history, when Rove got angry that the Fox News vote analysts called Ohio for Obama. Then…brilliantly…she added that no, the polls were not skewed, Obama was born in Hawaii, he didn’t raise taxes, the deficit hasn’t gone up, unemployment figures were not cooked, Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, climate change is real, evolution is real, FEMA isn’t building concentration camps…
…and god I hope I can get my hands on a video clip of it because it really said it all…especially how at the end of that grotesque litany of decades of republican right wing and religious right hallucinations she said that it is profoundly damaging to our democracy when one party is trying to cope with things as they really are and the other is living it it’s own detached insular fantasy world.
We need, she said thumping her pulpit, honest, good faith arguing and debating about policy…real argument not phony crap ginned up just to drive people to the polls or satisfy the pathetic conceits of religious and political fanatics…because it is in that honest debating of the issues that we have the best hope of finding answers that work. By cocooning in their own fantasy world the republicans have made that honest, good faith arguing and debating nearly impossible.
She said she hoped the shock of that collision with real numbers and real reality last night might break the bubble. I’ve heard others expressing this since last night, but I am not so sure. But there is the problem we face as a nation. It’s the problem we need to address before we can really and truly get down to addressing any of the others. The polls were not skewed. The unemployment numbers were not rigged. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Climate change is real. Evolution is real. FEMA is not building concentration camps. Homosexuals are not demon possessed tools of satan. Two plus two equals four. If any of this distresses you be assured that reality does not care about what you believe or about you. It just is what it is. You need to care about reality. If you can’t bring yourself to do that critically, honestly, with your eyes wide open, without letting your cherished preconceptions blind you to simple facts, don’t be bellyaching about the moral relativism, hedonism, nihilism whatever of the world around you. The nihilist is you.
In 2006 Romney went on to stop the publication of an anti-bullying guide for public school students, because the term “bisexual” and “transgender” were used in a passage discussing harassment against students. These and other actions were a stark turnaround from when Romney had, in his Senate run in 1994, told gay activists that he was better on gay issues than Ted Kennedy, claiming to support an array of rights for gays and saying that his voice would have more weight on the issue than Kennedy’s.
What seems clear now, looking at Romney’s record, in which he made a lot of promises to gays in those early years but never delivered, is that the pandering he did was to gay activists and the voters of Massachusetts, as the devout Mormon used that state as a stepping stone to the presidency.
This. Romney’s constant verbal flip-flops and outright lying over the years make him appear to be a total panderer. But he isn’t. Look at his record, both in and out of public office. There’s the man. Bigoted. Cruel. Predatory.
The Libertarian Facade: What John Birchers Wear When They Want To Look Cool
Winger Eugene Volokh of the ersatz libertarian leaning Volokh Conspiracy gleefully passes on notice this morning that a lawsuit against Avis for discriminating against a straight customer can proceed. The gist of it is that because Avis gave a discount to the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association and the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce they were discriminating against heterosexuals by charging them more in violation of California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act. If you thought that libertarians were opposed to such laws to begin with you’d be right. If you thought that most people who oppose such laws are libertarians you would be sadly mistaken. And especially when they claim to be libertarians.
Pay attention:
Another thread of argument runs through AVIS’s briefs: … since Plaintiff could have become a member of the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association or the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce and thus qualified for its favored discounts …, there was no pricing discrimination…. [But this] assumes an evidentiary showing which has yet to be made…. [A]lthough AVIS repeats it often as fact, there is no evidence that membership in either International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association or the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce was open to Plaintiff when she rented her car….
Okay…but where was the evidence that membership in either organization was not open to this Plaintiff? There isn’t any. And even if it was, that still doesn’t make a case that Avis itself is discriminating against heterosexuals. Perhaps they give a membership discounts to the International Heterosexuals Butthurt Because Gay Bars Can’t Be Raided And Their Customers Thrown In Jail Anymore Association as well. Surely Plaintiff could have found solidarity there.
But never mind that. Didn’t I hear somewhere that libertarians don’t like anti-discrimination laws to begin with? Hahahahahaha….
Volokh commenter 1: “Is it me, or is this a case where the discrimination laws are shown to be working across the board, that is against gay discrimination against straights as well, and yet the two most ‘voted up’ posts here are of the ‘gays get special rights under this law’ variety. What in the world?”
Volokh commenter 2: “It’s not you. It’s principled libertarians exercising outrage and protesting about a private company’s business decisions, as they always tell us disadvantaged minorities (like straight white people) should do.”
Except of course, this is not a case about discrimination and that first commenter needs to look, really look, at why it’s getting applause from the gays get special rights pew. Special rights are when that smaller kid you enjoyed beating up gets a protector and now you’re having to answer for your abusive behavior and being a bully isn’t fun anymore.
A libertarian would tell the person filing this lawsuit to go to hell, Avis can do as it damn well pleases. Eugene Volokh and his peanut gallery enjoy the spectacle of laws intended to protect a despised minority being used against them. How dare they think they were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
You Obviously Don’t Understand Our Revolutionary New Ideas About Government
Radley Balco tweets: “Surprised the Cato crowd is so big on Ryan. Votes don’t match rhetoric on fiscal policy, and he’s awful on social, civil liberties issues.”
Uh-huh. I see you’re still taking their libertarianism seriously. Something I discovered back in my libertarian days was you scratched the surface of a lot of them and you found a John Bircher who figured pot decriminalization would appeal to younger voters.
And Speaking Of The Long History Of Heterosexual Marriage…
This started coming across the wire the other day and I just have to repost it here. Alas, I’m suspecting many of my fellow Americans won’t even get it…
Yes, yes…I can hear it already. King Henry didn’t redefine marriage, it was still one man and one women. And the next woman. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next.
The Sexual Degenerates Are In Your Bathroom Mirror…Looking Back At You…
Jesus’ General (an 11 on the manly scale of absolute gender) points us to a discussion about women wearing pants, which Thinking Housewife regards as a despicable feminist renunciation of feminine femininity, and quotes Thinking Housewife Contributor Jesse Powell thusly…
If there was a general societal norm that men wore pants while women wore dresses it would be very clear that there was a difference between the sexes.
To which my low key apologetic libido says…
Or a guy’s ass. Seriously…pants make it easier to tell a person’s sex. If both sexes are wearing pants it would not typically be very difficult to identify the sex of the person wearing them. I admit you can still occasionally be fooled. I once mistook a gal named Martha for a guy and no she was not big and ugly, she was lithe and handsome and very very cute. But she had small hips and butt for a gal, and she liked wearing big floppy jackets so I never got a good look at her breasts and it threw me. But that’s not the usual case. The usual case is it’s pretty obvious.
But you’d only know that if…you know…you ever looked carefully. In the A Coming Out Story episode above the joke is I was only looking at guys. Little teenage me grew up without much of an interest in girls and tons of interest in guys and it showed, to my embarrassment whenever it was pointed out to me, in my artwork. The joke here I suspect is we’re witnessing more firsthand evidence that a childhood drenched in right wing sexual mores result in grown adults with pitifully arrested sexual development. If you need gender restrictions in clothing and dress in order to tell the boys from the girls it isn’t society that’s sexually degenerate.
Oh I know…I know…it isn’t that they can’t tell the difference…it’s that clothing as a personal expression of beauty and sexuality is a symptom of evil taking of joy in life. The clothes you wear should remind you of your place and reenforce keeping you in it. More then a uniform, clothes must be a prison within which, hidden and contained, is the shameful flesh, within which is doubly imprisoned the damnable human soul. Else the person inside might escape and have a life of their own.
In the 1950s Evelyn Hooker realized that all extant studies of homosexuals were conducted on homosexuals who had been imprisoned for sex crimes, in therapy or committed to mental institutions, and so they were concluding homosexuals were sick because they only studied sick homosexuals. Her 1957 study, The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual was the first to systematically examine homosexual men who weren’t in prisons or mental institutions or undergoing therapy and, surprise, surprise, discovered that if you study gay men the same way you study straight men they look pretty much alike.
In 2012 Mark Regnerus studied broken families with gay people in them, compared them to intact families headed by heterosexuals, and concluded that gay people make lousy parents, thereby proving that the religious right wants social science and the view of gay people to stay back in the early 1950s.
The more things change, the more they stay the same…
We went through this yesterday, but it’s a stark reminder of where we are.
The deal, though, fails to address a fundamental issue that has been spooking markets: This is the worst possible time for Spain to borrow 100 billion euros. Under the agreement, any amount used to bail out Spain’s banks will be added to the country’s government debt, potentially pushing it to a net 70 percent of gross domestic product, from about 60 percent today.
According to Our Galtian Overlords, austerity is necessary. Except, of course, when it comes to massive failing companies known as banks. Just keep lighting billions of taxpayer money on fire, paying massive salaries to the people who are destroying the world. And nobody mention moral hazard, because that’s what happens when you give someone an extra $10/week in food stamps.
There are lots of reasons the banks are having problems, but one reason is that people have no jobs and no money. And the Galtian Overlords are determined to keep people broke and unemployed, while extracting everything possible from the economy to give to the banks.
There’s stupid, but also a whole lot of evil. Bad people run the world.
-Atrios
This has been another edition of What Atrios Said…
This post on his blog is apparently a talk he gave at the second Berkeley Faculty Club symposium on American Politics and Democracy. He begins by noting he is out of his comfort zone discussing these matters, being an economist and not a political scientist. You should read it anyway because he brings to it the same thoughtful, insightful thinking he brings to economics.
I want to quote some of its passages…
An economist is going to start thinking about democracy with Tony Downs’s economic theory of same. First-past-the-post electoral systems and office-seeking politicians should produce a two-party system. Office-seeking candidates simply won’t join any third party because their chances of election will be too small. Only those who want to make some ideological or demonstrative point rather than to actually win office and then make policy–cough, Ralph Nader, cough–will do so. Hence the stable configuration has two parties. And then the two parties hug the center and follow policies attractive to the median voter.
Ideology will matter–politicians do not run purely for love of office but rather to then make the country into what they regard as a better place. There will be swings to the left, to the right, to the up, to the down, to the forward, to the back. But the policy views of the median voter ought, according to Tony Downs, function as a strong attractor and we should not expect the policies implemented by the politicians who get elected to deviate far from them.
Now there are qualifications. It is the median voter, not the median citizen.George W. Bush became president not because his policies came closer to the preferences of the median person who voted on that Tuesday in November but because his policies came closer to the preferences of the median Supreme Court justices Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor. Gerrymandering and misapportionment–cough, the Senate, cough–matter a lot. But these are qualifications. Tony Downs made a very strong case that first-past-the-post electoral systems will produce policies that the median voter likes. Thus in this sense the electorate gets the government it deserves. If there are problems, the problems are in the minds of the voters rather than in the Democratic system.
That is the economist’s not theory, not analysis, but rather prejudice. theory. Political scientists will scorn it as hopelessly naïve. But it is the benchmark from which I start.
In a democracy…in a healthy functional democracy, the middle will act as a check on the extremes. This isn’t necessarily a good thing, like when the middle position still favors segregation of the races and the second class status of women as it did here in the 1950s. But the point is the voters generally get the government they asked for, or in H.L. Mencken’s lovely phrase, “Democracy is based on the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
But the middle does not like republican policies. I could go on and on about that but it’s basically a fact that the polls show next to no public support for republican economic policies, which are generally understood to benefit only the richest of the rich. Yet those are the policies we get, often with lackluster democratic opposition, if any. So what happened?
Now let me shift and talk about our experience here in America since I got to Washington in early 1993, carrying spears for Alicia Munnell in Lloyd Benson’s Treasury Department in the Clinton administration.
Clinton was a centrist Democrat. The Clinton administration’s priorities were by and large, with exceptions–gays in the military–what you might call “Eisenhower Republican” priorities. Expand healthcare coverage so there were fewer uninsured and fewer people dumped by ambulances on the corners of the Tenderloin. But also control government healthcare cost which were then ballooning out of control–even though we didn’t know what “ballooning out of control” really meant. Balance the budget. End welfare as we know it–thus buying into the Republican critique of the Depression-era belief that raising children was real work–even if you were not married to a rich husband who was the chief executive of Bain Capital–and a socially-valuable task. Passing NAFTA. Creating the World Trade Organization. Strengthening Social Security through a combination of tax increases, benefit cuts, retirement=age increases, mandated private accounts requiring individuals to contribute their own money over and above Social Security (as an add-on but not a carve-out, as a supplement to and not a substitute for Roosevelt’s New Deal’s Social Security).
All of these seemed to us in the early 1990s to be bang-on the median voter’s preferences, Eisenhower Republicans. Clinton Democrats. We in the Bentsen Treasury at the start of 1993 looked forward to doing an awful lot of technocratic work–cranking out centrist legislation approved by large bipartisan majorities.
We found Republicans cooperative on NAFTA.
We found Republicans pushing for welfare reform–but only to the extent of passing things that were so highly punitive that they could not believe any Democratic president could in good conscience sign them. But Clinton fooled them. He signed welfare reform–and then spent some time in 1996 campaigning on the message: “re-elect me because only I can undo some of the damage that I have done to the welfare system”. Which was true. And which he did.
Otherwise…
That was the old game. Hammer out compromise legislation and move on because at the end of the day what was important to both sides was keeping the country strong and prosperous, even if they had different ideas of how to go about that, even if it meant their individual constituencies didn’t get everything they wanted. Everyone agreed at the end of the day that the government still had to function and it’s work needed to get done.
But notice how the center as defined by Bill Clinton was by then way further to the right on economic policy then it was at any time since The New Deal. What was happening was since Watergate the republicans had become more radicalized and the democrats just kept playing the old game of Find The Center. And over a span of just a few elections that had moved the center way to the right. What happened next was the logical outcome of that.
Otherwise the Republicans when I got to Washington at the start of 1993 decided that they were going to adopt the Gingrich strategy: oppose everything the Democratic president proposes, especially if it had previously been a Republican proposal and priority. That is not a strategy that would ever be adopted by anybody who wants to see their name written in the Book of Life.
But Gingrich found followers.
And so things that we in the Bentsen Treasury all expected to happen, did not happen. We had expected that sometime between January and June 1994 Lloyd Bentsen’s chief healthcare aide would sit down with Bob Dole’s chief healthcare aide. We had expected that they would hammer out a deal so that people in the future would never be as dependent on on charity for their healthcare as Bob Dole was when he returned injured from World War II.
That meeting never happened. Bob Dole decided he would rather join Gingrich to try to portray Clinton as a failure. So Bob Dole never got a legislative accomplishment out of his years in Congress. Instead, he got to lose a presidential election. And I now remember Bob Dole not as the co-architect of health care reform in 1994 but as somebody who denounced Roosevelt and Truman for getting us into those Democrat wars that saved Europe from the Nazis, China and the rest of Asia from Imperial Japan, and that have allowed South Koreans to grow five inches taller than their North Korean cousins.
As my friend Mark Schmitt wrote in his review of Geoffrey Kabaservice’s book about the moderate Republicans, Rule and Ruin, the moderate Republicans were partisan Republicans first and Americans second…
Exactly. He goes on to give an account of this just getting worse and worse, first with Clinton and the impeachment circus, then, massively so, with president Obama.
Then came Obama in 2009 and 2010. My friends–Christina Romer, Lawrence Summers, Peter Orszag, and company–headed off to Washington to plan a Recovery Act that they thought would get 25 Republican votes in the Senate. It was a squarely bipartisan fiscal stimulus: this tax cut to make the Republicans stand up and applaud, this infrastructure increase to make the Democrats applaud, this increase in aid to the states to make the governors and state legislators applaud.
It didn’t get 25 Republican votes in the Senate. It got 3.
On healthcare reform, Barrack Obama’s opening bid was the highly-Republican Heritage Foundation plan, the plan that George Romney had chosen for Massachusetts.
RomneyCare got zero republican votes.
On budget balance Obama’s proposals have not been the one-to-one equal amounts of tax increases and spending cuts to balance the budget of Clinton 1993 or Bush 1990. Obama’s proposals have been more along the lines of $1 of tax increases for every $5 of spending cuts.
And the Republicans rejected them
And so on… DeLong starts the time of the breaking of our democracy with Gingrich. That’s likely because he saw it first hand there in Washington. But Gingrich was the next logical outcome down a course the republicans have been relentlessly following since Nixon and the Southern Strategy.
In the years after the civil war and the first and second world wars, we thought of ourselves as one country. Regardless of where people stood on the left/right spectrum there was this general sense that at the end of the day we were all Americans and there was a love of country that moderated all but the lunatic fringe. Nixon understood that this e pluribus unum mindset would leave a party that by then existed simply to represent the interests of big business, the rich and the powerful in a permanent minority status.
Working Americans were fine with The New Deal. As long as the prosperity of the working class was rising the tide for the upper classes too the republican establishment was fine with just tinkering around the edges. But it couldn’t last. Eisenhower was conservative on many social issues, weak on civil rights and civil liberties, but not overtly hostile as the Nixon/McCarty branch of the party was. He was the last of the moderate republicans who believed that a healthy middle class was necessary to the vitality of the economy and the security of the United States.
Nixon hated the elites, the intellectuals, the liberals. He positioned himself as the champion of the common man against the elites. But it was those elites who had improved the status of the common man, and now threatened to do the same for women and minorities. Nixon was no great friend to the rich and powerful either, but as they would decades later in a man called Dubya they saw in Nixon’s paranoia and bottomless hatred someone who might just break the New Deal coalition of labor, rural and urban voters. And then they could go back to what they were doing back in Hoover’s Day…getting rich quick in the Wall Street casino.
Divide the country and we’ll have the bigger half Pat Buchanan told Nixon. But without a doubt Nixon took that advice because he was already considering it. Divisive pit American against American campaigning had been his method of winning elections since his first run for congress. They simply scaled the Nixon technique up and made it a permanent American against American cold war. Very deliberately they sought to replace in the working class voter love of country with love of tribe. No more of this e pluribus unum communist socialist nonsense. And like Gingrich would decades later, they found allies. White blue collar workers who hated black people. Males resentful toward independent women. Rural voters who loathed big city people with their big city morals and ideas. Poor people jealous of union workers with their union paychecks. Christian fundamentalists who loath the people in the church across the street.
When you got right down to it, America was a country of the imagination only. It wasn’t a nation by blood and ancestry. Our shared history is very brief compared to what the peoples of Europe, Asia and South America see as their own. The United States is a nation based on a political ideal of liberty and justice for all. The social contract was simply that we had each others backs when it came to that liberty and justice for all thing. Your freedom in the pursuit of happiness is as dear to me as my own. We are all Americans. As long as that held true a party of the rich and powerful would never win very many elections or wield enough power to impose its will on the majority. But the New Deal majority was a coalition of many diverse parts of working America and the republicans became expert at playing them against each other, that they might rule over all.
When Scott Walker was caught talking about using a divide and conquer strategy he wasn’t just talking about himself or just breaking the unions: this has been the essential republican strategy for gaining and keeping power since Nixon. Divide the country, set working American against working American, and in the end the rich and powerful take all. And it’s worked.
One thing I have learned from watching the Wall Street boys run the country is they’re not very good at it, and at some level they might even know they’re not very good at it. But they don’t care about running the country, they just want to get it out of their way so they can chase some more money. It’s all about the money chase with them. When the economy tanks, when the stock market goes bust, when banks and businesses go bankrupt right and left, they blame everyone but themselves. They’re like a bunch of drunk drivers convinced they’re fit to drive because they haven’t killed anyone yet, and when they do it was an accident and it was dark and that pedestrian just jumped right out in front of them and they didn’t mean to do it so stop treating them like criminals. Once upon a time the nation had laws against their sort of drunk driving. Those laws were there to protect the rest of us. But those law got in their way. Who are you to tell me I can’t drink and drive…it’s my car and my taxes paid for the highway and if I can’t drink and drive then it’s not a free country and all you other drivers on the road are socialists.
The money chase is all they care about. The New Deal coalition got in their way so they set about busting it apart. If in the process of doing that they ripped America apart too and put the nation at risk of catastrophic social upheaval that isn’t important. If once the brakes are off their reckless driving crashes the economy to smithereens and the lives of honest hard working Americans are destroyed and the future strength and security of the nation is placed in jeopardy that isn’t important. They don’t care about America. They are citizens of the stock market.
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