This was originally posted at MyLeftWing on 8/6/05. With the mid-term elections coming soon, it's time for this series to get a new lease on life.
So, without further ado, welcome to the first entry of the Basics Series.
JUMP!
The context of politics over the past 25 years has changed, and, what has emerged are very distinct parties, very distinct underlying themes, dreams and strategies.
For the most part, the liberal and progressive wings of both parties have been caught flat-footed as the right wings of both parties took hold.
I think, in order to establish a firm foundation to move forward, we should get firm footing. I have always found that, if you look hard enough, you can get to the small kernel of truth around which everything else is built. But it is so true that it's exposure is, at once, obvious and eye-opening.
This will be a bit of a serial. We'll start where we are, we'll see where we're going, and we'll track the road between.
I think this is important because we can spot strengths and weaknesses (generally the same thing but utilized differently), and get out of the losing strategy we've had for years and see if we can't subvert their strategy into the loser that it is.
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I'll start with the Republicans here, because it is so "in your face" that the elephant in the room must be acknowledged.
Here, then, is the underlying sales pitch of today's Republican party. Ready?
I. AM. BETTER. THAN. YOU.
My skin color is better than yours. My religion is. My sexual orientation is. The language I choose to express myself is. My car is. My town is. My company/school is. I am God's gift to the world. My family is the only one that matters. My values should be the driving force by which the world is governed. My country is the best in the world. Oh, and, by the way, you suck.
Think about it. Everything that the Republicans tell their base that they stand for can be boiled down to five measly words.
That one sentence also means:
1) People (other than me) are less important than anything that might conceivably be important to me. My car matters more than your rainforest. My investments are more important than your wages and my buying cheap shit at Walmart is sureshit more important than some feriners' wages. My kid is the center of the universe, and if he beats up your kid, the jerk probably had it coming. My country can kick anyone else's butt but because my life matters and yours doesn't, I expect your kid to serve and die at my whim, but don't expect me to bust a grape.
and,
2) Because people who are like me control the government, every important aspect of your life should be controlled by it. Your birth, death and marriage should all be controlled by people I deem worthy. This is how people who are against abortion and euthanasia mysteriously become in favor of capital punishment. So long as they're the ones with their fingers on the buttons, it's one less person not like them in the world. That's also why they can kill abortion doctors, blacks, gays, Jews, sluts that won't sleep with them, sluts that will sleep with them, sluts in general. Whoops. I mean women. The world is better off with more people like me and fewer people not like me.
Then there's the special kind of Republican: the dangerous fuckers. I'm not just talking about the scary fuckers who commit hate crimes and blow up buildings in Oklahoma. I'm talking about the dangerous fuckers. Let's just call them Bush Republicans.
Because, you see, the regular Republicans are just bad people. The driving force of their personality, their raison d'etre, is some combination of greed, ego and stupidity. They aren't dangerous individually, although, collectively, their lifestyle is destroying the planet.
But the Bush Republicans are dangerous because they are religious zealots. And Bush is their God. These are dangerous fucks because they are the mob which can be mobilized (notice that mob is a root of mobile) whenever the fascists really show their hand. These are the people who could perform a Kristallnacht here. These are the people who would first put on the brownshirts, who would turn in their neighbors, and think they were being patriotic. These people are monsters waiting to be unleashed.
Normal Republicans can be stripped away from these junior fascist pigdogs like wheat from the chaff, and it's our job to do just that before it is too late. It is also possible to wake these people up, but it's not easy, and it takes a very special kind of persuasion to do it.
More on that in subsequent diaries.