(Note: I'm not quite sure what a "cracker" is in slang anymore. Here I am using it as white people who take on the views of southern white red-neck racist with a barely concealed hatred towards African Americans. Also please note that by ghetto-ization I mean a composite abstraction of inner city highly self destructive dysfunctional culture that is strongly correlated to poor african-americans)
In the 1990s and the Oughts, the GOP used cultural manipulation to get people, that is mostly white people to vote GOP.
Might they now be engaged in a massive campaign to use fear of ghettoization of the middle class to transform masses of white people to think, behave and most importantly vote for the GOP and consequently against their own interest?
Here's some circumstantial evidence:
The GOP, was, is, and always has been the party of BigMoney (mostly right wing conservative) elite.
BigMoney wants one thing: more money - they seek to get 7% return on their investment, annually because that means their holdings double every decade. BigMoney, the 1%, will do just about anything to increase their money. As the old saw says - morality is a middle class characteristic, the poor can't afford it and the rich don't need it. They care nothing of patriotism, community, or morality. They don't care what they do to you, or our country, to get more of what they want.
If the economy is not growing the 1% must get that money from the 99%.
If the economy is not growing then they need to use politics to get that money.
They have a classic problem: by defininition, the rich just don't have the numbers to succeed in electoral politics. To succeed in that they must get poor, working and middle class people to vote against their economic interest.
To do that they must manipulate people at an emotional level, in order to cancel out their intellect.
In the past they have done this through cultural issues: religion, anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-african American.
Many of these won't work anymore. First many Americans have gone down a peg and so there are less persuadable people. Second, the anti-gay thing won't work anymore. Third, the religion thing has perhaps lost some traction - all they have are fundamentalist and that's not a growing population.
What they do have is a growing fear of increasing ghetto-isation of the middle class suburbs.
I saw this quite clearly earlier this month when I payed a visit to the town I grew up in, suburban St. Louis. There I found tons of people willing to pay enormous % of their declining wages to keep their children out of public schools. They send their kids to catholic parochial schools, even if they are not catholic.
There I heard stories of collapsing standards in even the best public schools. There I heard stories of an exploding Heroin epidemic amongst young high-school aged middle class suburban kids, a result, in part, of the price of heroin collapsing. Without much prospect of getting good jobs, even if they work and study hard, many youth are throwing up their hands.
In short, there is a perception that a lot of the characteristics of the ghetto is swamping the middle class suburbia: under performing youth, unwed pregnancies, spread of drugs, high unemployment.
As a result, there I found tons of people willing to pay enormous % of their wages to keep their children out of public schools - the cheapest tuition I was told was $9,000 a year and $13,500 is not uncommon.
While I haven't lived there in a long time, I can say in St. Louis, the people moved out into the suburbs, and now even farther out into the distant suburbs, for the single purpose of providing their children with middle class surroundings, middle class values, middle class education, a society that is functional as oppossed to the dysfunction that was left behind in the urban core way back in the 1950s and 1960s.
While I was there, two inner ring school districts had lost accreditation. Earlier, apparently, a Missouri Judge ruled that a child living in an unaccredited school district may attend a school in his or an adjacent county and his school district must pay their tuition (about $8,000). Moreover, the unaccredited school district must choose a target accredited school district in their or an adjacent county to which they will provide transportation for the child. Each of the unaccredited school districts, to discourage kids from going out of their district, and thus incurring the tuition expense, chose school districts as far away as possible from their district - meaning the school distant in the far distant suburbs.
You can imagine the reaction. There was direct complaints at all levels. But the people in the distant suburbs learned that moving out to the distant suburbs hasn't protected their children from the prospect of collateral cultural ghetto-ization. Their outcry had strongly racist over tones.
Like the law and order fear that Nixon was able to manipulate in 1968, this has added to the idea that the spread of ghetto culture to the proximate reach of their children has induced fear amongst remaining white middle class people of suburbia.
Set in the context of the Zimmerman trial, the outcome was hardly surprising. I left before the outcome was announced, but all the people I talked to believed Zimmerman would get off. The implied belief was that the jury pool was made up of people just like Suburban St. Louis.
St. Louisans are the most stodgy, stubborn, least open minded people I have ever met. I feel I can say that because I grew up there and lived most of my adult life there, but most of my relatives lived else where (I was born in Evanston, Illinois, where both halves of my family came from - so I was familiar with multiple cultures). But I think St. Louisans are just a more pronounced encapsulation of what is going on every where.
We are in a continuous negative feed back loop: the rich undermine society (schools, jobs, employment, education, etc...) for their own enrichment; the dysfunctional underclass expands; the remaining middle class reacts by becoming ever more conservative.
I think this cycle is hitting a new inflection point as it's taking on ever more racial undertones. If it continues, we could become a highly fascist society with highly racist reactionary norms (overtones) and undertones.
Those people, lucky enough to remain in the middle class, feel threatened - perhaps more than ever before. And as a result are near the point of abandoning the pretense of racism being a negative thing. The ghetto culture is flooding into their neighborhoods, and they have a sense that it's out of their control to do something about it.
I think this is part of the GOP plan to succeed by becoming an even whiter party. The GOP wants to wreck government. They don't mind if society gets wrecked in the process. It all saves them money because it comes with lower tax burdens. They undermine livelihoods by destroying wages, push some out of the middle class, let the educational system collapse (undermining teachers unions) and allowing dysfunctional self destructive ghetto culture to spread. The reaction is for the middle class, especially the white middle class, to move to the hard right and start taking on tones that seem a lot like the white redneck racist we associate with the south.
How is it that an illegal and highly dangerous drug like heroin, (HEROIN !!!!) is selling in suburbs at rock bottom prices? What's behind that? Someone at the boarder is looking the other way why the stuff is coming into the country.
I teach overseas, in east asia. I am shocked by what I saw and heard from people I know in St. Louis. I can guarantee this - Missouri is becoming a deeper, redder state by the day, if not by the hour.
And, I think this is all by design and by plan. Personally, I see the United States becoming like apartheid South Africa. This is stuff that is almost impossible to reverse.
Please tell me that I am all wrong. I was only there for a week and that I picked up all the wrong signals.
But the circumstantial evidence is there. The rich need everyone else to vote against their interests. People only vote against their interest over cultural issue that have strong emotional reactions taking place below the surface. The spector of ghetto-ization of the once great middle class American suburbia is just one way to prevoke people to voting Republican.
The implied message is getting hammered home by events. First there was the Zimmerman verdict; Now the bankruptcy in Detroit. The meta-message is clear. (Mostly) White, middle class America is under threatened by the unrelenting spread of (mostly) african-american ghetto culture of the intercity. The spread being a byproduct of past Republican policies that came with tax cuts and government shrinkage.
I think this is all by "intelligent design.'
In a better world, we would be working to shrink the dysfunction of the ghetto into non-existence. Instead we have a major political movement that is trying to spread this dysfunction far and wide.
This is the world of the GOP.