Bare Left's Diary Entry, The Real Mission Accomplished - Revised & Expanded, does a great job of explaining how Republicans have sown mistrust of government and the media for the last 50 years. It inspired me to explain the reason behind those activities.
None of the Republican actions in the last 50 years make sense without understanding the reason for the Republican Southern Strategy. This is the real reason for Ronald Reagan, in 1986, echoing the widespread Republican claim that the most terrifying nine words in English are, "I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help."
That reason is very simple. The South is still fighting the Civil War, or as they call it, The War of Northern Aggression, and the Federal government to them is a bunch of Damn' Yankees determined to "help" the South by doing in the South's Peculiar Institution (slavery) and all of its Jim Crow remnants. The Republican Party officially joined this movement at the 1964 convention, which Jackie Robinson compared to Hitler's Germany. Nixon later called this racist program the Republican Southern Strategy.
Every Progressive measure that would benefit the poor in general and Blacks and other People of Color in particular is anathema to the self-proclaimed Southern Aristocracy, particularly the Good Old (rich) White Boys, and to the lily-white Bible Belt churches that pretend that God is a racist and an all-around bigot just like them. They then draw in people on other Southern church issues such as anti-feminism and later anti-teh Gay, and add them to the traditional Republican corporate base, including anybody who lives by greed alone, who doesn't want to pay any taxes to help anybody else, and who doesn't want the government interfering with the corporate theft that pays their salaries and bonuses, or taxing their ill-gotten gains. These people don't necessarily hate or despise minorities, women, and the poor in general. They simply don't care as long as they get theirs. Creationism got layered in with all of this, presumably because you can't tell Southern Whites that they are descended from monkeys, which seems to be Yellow Dog Whistle code for our Black African ancestors of 100,000 years ago and more.
Major progressive actions include
- President Truman desegregating the military in 1948
- the California Supreme Court becoming the first to strike down an anti-miscegenation law, also in 1948
- Brown v. Board of Education in 1953 (hence "Impeach Earl Warren")
- President Eisenhower sending in troops to enforce desegregation of schools in 1953
- Medicare in 1965
- The Civil Rights Acts and Voting Rights Acts under Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s.
- Roe V. Wade in 1973
- Health Care in 1994 and again today
Hence Democratic "Socialism", "tyranny", "Fascism", etc., and the chorus of shrieking accusations that President Obama in particular is all of those and the Antichrist besides.
The riff-raff to be kept down includes women, unions, Progressive churches (Christian and non-Christian), Islam in any form, those Devil-worshiping Secular Humanists, and most especially the "Darwinists" who claim that Good Old (rich) White Boys are descended from Black Africans just like the rest of us.
In order to understand what is going on in Southern/Bible Belt politics, you have to know the code, and how the code applies. The rule is simple. Any objection they raise applies only to their enemies, not to them. Basic Orwellian Newspeak.
- Family values? Sure, throw away Democrats John Edwards and Elliot Spitzer, and especially Bill Clinton for having affairs or using prostitutes, but not Republicans Sanford, Ensign, McCain, Gingrich, Craig...
- Activist judges who do not respect the Intent of the Founders means Earl Warren, for Brown v. Board of Education (school segregation), and Warren Burger, for Roe v. Wade, of course. But it does not include the current conservative Court majority when they overturn a century of precedent to allow unlimited corporate spending on elections in spite of Thomas Jefferson's horror of corporate power. The reason is that Warren helped Blacks and other riff-raff, and Roe helped women, while the Citizens United decision helps corporations and the rich, who have allied themselves with the bigots.
- States' Rights means the right to oppress the lower orders, not the right to legalize medical marijuana.
- The War on Drugs began in the 1920s as a war on "cocainized N*****s", but never on cocainized corporate managers. Hence the later disparities for crack and powder cocaine. It then extended to hippy N*****-lover outside agitators and marijuana.
- Socialism for the rich, Social Darwinism for the poor.
- Calls for a balanced budget have nothing to do with the deficit. They mean trillions for war (and for tax cuts for the rich and bailouts for too-big-to-fail banks), but not one penny for social programs. In fact, huge deficits are part of the plan, spearheaded by Grover Norquist, to cripple the Federal government and make more social spending impossible. Thus racist Reagan, the Great Prevaricator: "Deficits don't matter."
Later addition: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander, documents how the US, going back to the Nixon and Reagan administrations, targeted Blacks for political suppression, including Reagan's War on Drugs and other means of creating millions of Black non-voters. A third of Black males cannot vote. Discussed on Bill Moyer's Journal.