Today’s fearful GOP has shown during the presidency of the actual first Black President that it can be only interested in obstructing legislation (losing count now of ACA repeal votes) and ultimately a kleptocratic capitalism. It is the real manifestation of the Mike Judge capitalism of Office Space and Idiocracy, among other media products. tRump has said it best “we need to stop doing X until we can figure out what’s going on”.
He is not the only GOP politician to use that phrase and will not be the last to use the so-called reset button metaphor as though counterfactual history could be instantaneously reenacted like pre-LBJ Jim Crow or the states’ rights of Bloody Kansas, pressing red-buttons rather than red trigger messages.
Since Eisenhower that has been the GOP fear: X (The Other) is so frightening in the form of Commies, East Asians, Southeast Asians, West Asians, Latinos, our “own” Black folks. Even the laciviousness of the first(sic) black President and the actual first Black President whose children are (gasp) 25% European and even more(sic) Black than POTUS and who I expect but not in my lifetime will be poised for similar high political office.
In 1998, Toni Morrison wrote a comment for The New Yorker arguing that “white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.” Last week the New York Times, implicitly cited Morrison’s piece, and claimed the author was giving Clinton “a compliment.” This interpretation of Morrison’s claim is as common as it is erroneous.
Nixonian Southern Strategy preyed on Reconstruction fears of Black politicians to this day or at least until January 2009 and they have been exploited by politicians and their media in the most cynical of ways with entire political campaigns based on it: proxy Black GOP candidates in the South, proxy Black Conservatism even onto SCOTUS.
So much Obstruction, so little time, as 1992 and 1994 were the salad days for obstruction and are revived even again as some version of a GOP Contract with/for/on America, as though contract law could make deals better than a New Deal. Democrats are guily of similar preservationist sentiments, as though the state capitalism of pre-WW II America was good for everyone, being based on very tenuous and circumstantial economic equality of gender and race brought on by MIC production and yet still highly segregated.
In terms of the recent tRump ad I have faith in Iowans’ ability to see though their fears but it does seem like the rest of country, with its various ideological and visceral hatreds cannot get past reactionary thinking especially in the modern GOP. Iowa is truly a place to grow, but unfortunately the GOP wants to elect potted plants and not the ones that expand consciousness.
Yet their audience is the same stock as those whose beliefs use a Black POTUS as a pretext for a Third violent domestic insurrection and whose sense of racial resistance influences police agencies to shoot Black suspects with seeming impunity. They are like ISIL, albeit TrailerDaesh ready to defenestrate gays and oppress entire female populations. All they need is the Idiocracy offered by their best candidates.