Today, many conservative political pundits and establishment Republicans recoil in disbelief as two of the Party’s worst of the worse candidates in terms of intolerance emerge as its Presidential frontrunners. In August the pundits and politicos smugly scorned that Trump would be history by September. But they couldn’t get enough of him. Whenever Trump opened his mouth the media fell all over itself to cover every syllable spoken.
Many of us regular guys and gals laughed at Trump’s outrageous comments because they are so absurd, though some have a ring of truth to them. I will admit I laughed out loud when Trump trumpeted Rick Perry’s willful ignorance and the rationale for the former Governor’s need to take an IQ test. Trump played the same tune about Jeb Bush’s lack of energy.
All of a sudden it is November. Trump continues to gain traction. Trump TV rocks on the cable TV news channels.
Fast forward to January. The holidays are over. It’s time to get serious.
Few among us are laughing anymore. The pundits and politicos are running on empty fumes in their helpless search for answers. How did the Donald get this far? Some journalists pointed fingers at themselves. We created this monster!
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the cable TV news industry sold its soul to Trump TV. Tune into Fox, CNN or MSNBC. Voila! Trump is on every screen. Saying much about nothing of substance. But hey. Ratings and ad buys are blowing off of the charts in the world of the corporate mainstream media. Money rolls in to pay for and promote the ad buying narratives.
Well, folks it is now April and guess who is the GOP’s front-running devil?
Who knew?
Trump readily booted prominent Republicans such as Jeb Bush, Rick Perry (prominent in terms of crooked buffoonery), Chris Christi, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and Scott Walker out of the race. Only Ted Cruz, a right wing extremist and religious fundamentalist still stands. Ted Cruz is also among the most deplored Republicans nationwide. This is especially true in New York City where Cruz trashed NYC values.
New York, tough and resilient, hit back. Hard.
Snake oil dealing Cruz cancelled a speaking engagement at a school in the Bronx because the students wanted nothing to do with a bigot. They revolted. “His views are against ours” they said.
Indeed they are. Cruz’s views are against those held by the majority of us. You see, Cruz won the election in Texas in 2012 because only a tiny handful of voters showed up to vote in a late May primary. Most of the Cruz voters belong to the GOP’s tea party wacko wing. The other Republican voters took a nap or went on vacation.
Smart students matter. It is no small wonder why Texas ranks at the bottom of the national pile in education. The former slave states know how to maintain certain forms of slavery, alienation and ignorance in order to keep the powerful in power.
So, how did the Republican Party end up with candidates who can easily be described as a fringe fascist and a not so borderline Christo-fascist?
Last week in one of my blog posts I had discovered an article written by a reporter for The Guardian. He exhaustively dissected how Trump became the GOP’s front runner. The author reminded us of the Republican Party’s long history of dog whistling racism.
American Crossroads: Reagan, Trump and the devil down south.
How the Republican party’s dog-whistle appeal to racism, refined by Richard Nixon and perfected by Ronald Reagan, led inexorably to Donald Trump.
Please follow me below the fold to re-discover U.S. political history since 1948. My blog post last week did not get much attention, at least here. I believe the information is crucially important enough to share it again.
We need a deep understanding of the Republican devil before we can fight and render it irrelevant.
The article is a sobering and fascinating description of how the Republican Party evolved to the cynical and corrupted disgrace it is today.
One of our community’s members, RETIII, posted the following comment.
Your post sets forth what I think is the worst, undiscussed thing in modern politics: the Republican party has become the neo-Confederate party.
When I talk to Republican friends in my North-East, I always cut to the chase: I am not voting for the “Mississippi Model,” are you? I am not voting for the party of Alabama, are you? NE and coastal Republicans are flat-footed by their denial about this basic fact. They start sputtering about Rudy Giuliani or George Pataki — two candidates who couldn't even get a courtesy vote in the modern, Southern dominated Republican party.
As far as the Republican party is concerned, we have moved beyond the (obscure) “Southern Strategy” to the (unacknowledged) “Mission Accomplished.” Look at an electoral map . . . it looks pretty damn close to the Confederacy vs. the Union. Follow recent events — government shutdowns, debt defaults, permanent filibusters and Supreme Court blockades — are the new (yet old) nullification and secession battles.
One day — in order to become its best — this country will have to openly acknowledge, and decisively, beat the destructive ideology of the South
Let us remember how we got to this very ugly place in our history. Knowledge is power.
“How did it get to Trump?”
To put it in Trump terms: you could say it started with a deal. Or more precisely, a big deal with various side deals attached, all of it amounting to one grand, dark bargain whose payment may be coming due at last. If one was inclined to reach for metaphor, you could say it was a deal with the devil. Or you could say it started with this, a plank adopted by the Democratic national convention of 1948:
In 1948 the Democratic Party vowed to put an end to racial, religious and economic discrimination. Of course back in those days the Dixiecrats, white racist men from the South, were included in the Democratic Party. None would be too pleased with an anti-discrimination platform of any sort.
That was enough to bring the devil howling out of his hole, that foot-on-the-neck-of-the-black-man devil of the Jim Crow, hookworm, lynch-prone south – “the solid south” that reliably delivered its votes to the Democratic party every four years.
An angry devil stalked the South for decades. The devil still lurks today as we know from the GOP’s war against voting and women’s reproductive rights. But let’s move along to yesterday’s history.
That decade was the slow burn, but it was coming. Occasional aberrations aside, the south stayed solid for the Democrats after Truman, though the devil felt the cracks under his feet, roamed uneasy over the land. Brown v Board of Education was a tremblor. Montgomery, Little Rock, more tremblors. At the Democrats’ 1960 convention, African American delegates walked out in protest over John F Kennedy’s concessions to the southern segs, this at a time when the Republican party, the party of Lincoln and emancipation – and thus a 90lb weakling in most of the south – was welcoming civil rights advocates to its convention. Devil stamped his feet, sniffed the air.
As we know when LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act into law the Dixiecrats fled from the Democratic Party and flew straight into the arms of the GOP. LBJ knew he had handed the South over to the Republican Party.
He knew better than anyone the political risk. “I think we just gave the south to the Republicans,” he told his staff after ramming the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress. His aide Bill Moyers recalled the moment in more drastic terms: Johnson feared he had delivered the south to Republicans “for your lifetime and mine”, a prediction whose proof, while not yet conclusive – we are happy that Mr Moyers is still with us – has trended ever since toward prophecy. The first hard evidence came in the presidential election that fall, when Johnson’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater saw only Arizona (Goldwater’s home state) and the old Dixiecrat states, plus Georgia, go Republican. Goldwater had been one of only a handful of Republican senators to vote against the Civil Rights Act, and his nominating convention turned into a raucous revolt against the party’s eastern establishment. Nelson Rockefeller, millionaire governor of New York and the avatar of what’s now known as a country club Republican, was roundly booed, hooted and dissed. Goldwater delegates berated and shook their fists at the press, and African American delegates were “shoved, pushed, spat on and cursed with a liberal sprinkling of racial epithets”. Something new and nasty was afoot; Republicans were acting like a bunch of Dixiecrats. One black delegate had his suit jacket set on fire. The southern caucus at the convention named its hotel headquarters “Fort Sumter” after the starting point of the civil war. Jackie Robinson spent several “unbelievable hours” on the convention floor, and summed up his experience thus: “I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”
Nothing much has changed today within the GOP since it’s been taken over by Dixiecrats. It’s still a mostly racist, homophobic, xenophobic, misogynist Party. Today we have the tea party fascists and the American Taliban who are locked in a struggle with so called Republican moderates. A Party that is built upon hatred and divisiveness will continue in this ugly fashion until its poison is exorcised.
So how did Trump become so popular among Republican voters? Let’s think back to Lee Atwater, a Reagan operative. Lee Atwater is the creator of what we know as dog whistles. He discovered ways in which to shroud racism and acrimony in carefully crafted codes.
The problem was mainly one of marketing: how to make racism suitable for prime time. It was Atwater’s mentor and fellow South Carolinian Harry Dent Sr, a former adviser to Strom Thurmond, who helped Nixon perfect the southern strategy, tutoring the future president in the kinder, gentler vocabulary of the new racial politics, a politics that would deliver the White House to Republicans in five of the next six presidential elections.
It wasn’t an accident. It took planning and work. As made plain in the 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority by Nixon advisor Kevin Phillips, the southern strategy was a considered, premeditated, highly disciplined appeal to southern whites, and more generally to the deep-seated racism of America. In a 1970 interview published in the New York Times, Phillips put it this way:
The GOP essentially knew it couldn’t get more than 10-20% of African American voters so it had to appeal to Southern white racists. Because African Americans were more likely to vote Democratic the GOP quietly demonized the Party’s voters in order to woo white racist voters to its side. It worked.
Well, if that’s where the votes are, then by God, we better get down in that hog wallow and root ’em out! And so the Grand Old Party, the party of New York financiers, thrifty New Englanders, and wholesome midwesterners whose ancestors fought and defeated the Confederate States of America, made a deal with the south. It had taken the better part of 40 years, but Republicans had finally found their answer to the New Deal.
The GOP made its deadly deal with the racist devil in the South. It embraced the monstrousness that accompanies malice and divisiveness. It sold its soul to the KKK, the murder of Civil Rights activists, lynchings, church bombings and burning crosses.
And that’s where Reagan went to speak the words “I believe in states’ rights”, in his first appearance as the Republican nominee. These days we know it as dog-whistle politics, that coded language Lee Atwater was talking about. Reagan did not, by the way, mention Chaney, Schwerner or Goodman, whose bodies had been found a few miles away. That screaming silence, that was a dog whistle too, and to think that Reagan didn’t know what he was doing is to consign him to the ranks of the epically stupid. He’d campaigned for Goldwater. He was a two-term governor of California, and a veteran of national politics. The Neshoba County speech stands as one of the true masterpieces of the Southern Strategy, a dog whistle that blew out the eardrums of every racist reactionary within 3,000 miles.
Today’s GOP is still a Party for its donor class. It puts its dog whistles to rest after the elections are over. The Republicans will routinely cut taxes for the rich, gut unions in order to please the corporate overlords. It will eradicate social safety insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicaid. Count on the GOP to slash welfare benefits for the poor. All in an effort to pay for the tax cuts for the wealthy. Under no circumstances should the minimum wage be increased. It might upset a business owner who writes checks to his go to puppet’s political campaigns. Repeal Obamacare so the insurance companies can revert back into the for-profit death panel industry.
The Republican Party abandoned the middle and working classes, the Reagan Democrats, decades ago. Not only does it disregard this group, the Party’s policies have shattered it.
The Republican Party will knee jerk back to its racist codes and dog whistles election after election. It fans the flames of alienation and hostility. It foments fear about others. It dumps gasoline on wedge issues.
No wonder people are pissed off. The south’s been suckered, along with all the other blue-collar and middle-class “Reagan Democrats” who put their faith in the GOP. The deal at the heart of the Southern Strategy is falling apart, and perhaps the modern Republican party with it. At this point it seems only a preternaturally gifted dealmaker could save the situation. Boehner couldn’t do it; he’s someplace warm playing golf. McConnell can’t do it; it’s all he can manage to keep the Senate from sinking into a cesspool of dysfunction. So just when it looks like the deal is beyond saving – lo, unto us a Trump is given.
It’s no fluke that one of the loudest and most persistent of the Obama birthers took the deep south states on Super Tuesday. While the other Republican contenders keep their xenophobia within the bounds of acceptably cruel political discourse, Trump blows it out: his racist rants play like full-fledged operas compared to the dog-whistle stuff, shredding the finely honed code that’s worked so long and so well for the GOP establishment. But that’s why the base loves him; he feels their rage. Even better, he’s beyond the establishment’s control. Nobody is the boss of Trump, not the Kochs, not Sheldon Adelson, and certainly not Reince Priebus, chief functionary of the Republican National Committee.
Since the mid 20th Century the GOP has been building its Frankensteins. It has reaped what it has sown. It’s devils are well-deserved. While the article focuses solely on Trump’s candidacy Ted Cruz is every bit as dangerous as Trump. He is divisive and will stop at nothing to advance his rigid right wing ideology and religious fundamentalism.
Maria Bartiromo, a Fox Business moderator, said she is from New York but she had no idea what “New York values” were. So Cruz said to much appreciation from the audience, “You are from New York so you might not, but I promise you here in the state of South Carolina, they do.”
That was Ted Cruz playing on the Civil War resentment that continues to linger in the south and has a ripe home in South Carolina, where effigies of President Obama are lawn ornaments.
Cruz condescended to explain, “Everyone understands that the values in New York City are socially liberal or pro-abortion or pro-gay marriage, focus around money and the media.”
I am glad the good people of the Bronx (the place of my birth) ran the bigot out on the FU rail. There is a F train in New York City. I haven’t lived there for a long time so I don’t know if a U train exists outside of the New York Daily News. That said, a FU Train for Ted Cruz is entirely appropriate.
Any Party or group that relies on pure hatred in order to win elections is not sustainable forever. Let’s vote en masse to make the hate disappear altogether. We need to rid our country of this toxic waste that has poisoned our political system and threatens the democratic process. I don’t care whether or not one is for Hillary or Bernie. Vote D. Our futures depend upon it.
It is well past the time in which to send the devil back to his rightful place in hell.