As a transplanted Yankee Democrat who has lived in the gerrymandered ruby red state of Texas for a very long time, I know a lot about the Republican jerks, drunk monkeys and the petulant teenagers that are running the state. I know this because our tweeting Governor obviously spends much of his days listening to right wing trash talk and conspiracy theories. Sometimes the Governor parrots the radio hosts’ distorted acrimony. Or he plays into the hands of far right conspiracy theories. Remember the ginned up Jade Helm controversy? And predatory men wearing dresses who lurk in public women’s restrooms for the sole purpose of rape?
I also know a lot about this deeply religious state with its abundance of Christian mega churches that exude wealth in urban areas. Most Republican lawmakers wear their Christian values on their sleeves. They profess to love Jesus. At the same time, the fine Christian Texas Republican Party cruelly punishes women's reproductive rights, voting rights, minorities and the poor. By its refusal to accept federally expanded Medicaid, the Jesus Party has assigned some of the poorest among us to an early death.
The Texas Jesus Party is also proud to have imposed the harshest Jim Crow Voter ID Law in the country. What did this law do? It is a Republican dream come true. This unconstitutional act disenfranchised over 600,000 registered voters in 2014. Most were Democrats. Many are among our state’s poorest residents. They couldn’t afford to pay for the paperwork required to obtain a state photo ID card.
You see, according to the Texas Jesus Party, Jesus Christ was a free market capitalist who loathed and thereby punished the sick, the poor and “fallen” women. Today these people should have no rights at all.
How’s that for the Party of Jesus, liberty, freedom and the determined defenders of the Constitution?
My question is how or why did the hate devil take over the National Republican Party? We know how it took over Texas. Low voter turnout, straight R Party voting, no matter who is on the ballot, money, self-serving greed, crony capitalism, the usual dog whistles, social hot button issues and hypocrisy always delivers the worst. Election after election. Gerrymandering enables the elections of the lowest of the lows.
But what happened to the Republican Party in the rest of the country? How did it swing from Nixon to Reagan to Trump?
Thanks to Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy, Ronald Reagan’s demonization of “welfare queens,” G.H.W. Bush’s cynical Wille Horton ads, W.’s craven Swift Boat attacks against then Democratic candidate John Kerry in 2004, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove and their scorched earth politics, the GOP suddenly finds itself with two very powerful monsters on its hands. Decades of dog whistles, bigotry, fear mongering, lies and venom, with more than a little help from Fox News and right wing hate talk radio, spawned two demons straight from a Republican concocted hell.
How unsurprising that two very ugly beasts are the Party’s Presidential front runners. Trump booted prominent Republicans such as Jeb Bush, Rick Perry, 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.
The dog whistles are not alone in accounting for the rise of a fascist and a Christo-fascist leaning Republican candidates, Trump and Cruz.
You see, the Republican Party has shamelessly fanned the fires of social issues such as abortion, gay marriage for decades and more recently, it has vilified the transgender community. For the sole purpose of creating outrage among the Party’s fundamentalist Christian base. Rage and indignity will drive the believers to the polls.
Among its so-called “lunch bucket” members (the Reagan Democrats) the Republican agents of rancor constantly rail against Obama, blaming him, that black Kenyan Muslim “other” and “socialism” for everything that is unfair and wrong in the lives of the GOP’s working class base. The message is cloaked by thinly veiled racism of course. And the lunch bucket crowd, most of whom are serially misled by Fox “News” and hate talk radio, are unaware that their Party’s leaders, once elected, have no intention of working on their behalf's.
For their fearless leaders have obstructed every effort President Obama has made in an effort to create more jobs right here at home. These voters do not understand that their Party’s leaders bait them to the poll with hot button issues and dog whistles. But as soon as an election is over and after they win, these very leaders will switch to serving the needs of their donor classes. They ignore the needs of those who elected them into office. When I asked a Republican friend (a native of NH) why the GOP base is so angry she replied that her Party promises to do a lot but after election after election it does nothing. It makes promises it will not or cannot keep. People are furious, she said. As they well should be. As are Democrats who witness 365/24/7 Republican obstruction on everything and anything proposed by the duly elected President.
The Great Recession of 2008 began this spiral down in the GOP when the economy collapsed in late 2008 in the final days of the George W. Bush administration. Years of unpaid for tax cuts and unpaid for wars, trillions in borrowing and an out-of-control speculation on Wall Street and "anything goes" mortgage financing finally collapsed the economy.
Millions of the same blue collar workers who today are "mad as hell and won't take it anymore" are supporting the same republican party that offshored their jobs in the Bush administration and even provided tax deductions for doing so! They are the same ones who fight against raising a feeble minimum wage that would help those struggling on the bottom of our economy who feel left out in today's economy.
A brilliant writer for the The Guardian exhaustively explains how Trump took over the GOP.
The article is an excellent recap of U.S. political history since 1948. I urge everyone to read it in its entirety. (For some reason I am having problems with disappearing links. Here is the full link to the article cited above. “American Crossroads: Reagan, Trump and the devil down south.”)
www.theguardian.com/...
How the Republican party’s dog-whistle appeal to racism, refined by Richard Nixon and perfected by Ronald Reagan, led inexorably to Donald Trump
“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. Cut taxes for the rich, gut unions in order to please the corporate overlords. Eradicate social safety insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicaid. 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. I will write another blog post about this at a later time.
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 it 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.