White Nationalism: The Gravitational Center of the GOP

GOP supporters

A piece in Vox includes an interview with Avik Roy, a Republican, health care wonk and editor at Forbes, who has worked for three Republican presidential hopefuls.   The focus is on how the Republican Party has finally shown the world its true gravitational center: white nationalism. The piece traces the descent of the GOP into a openly white racist party from the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964, through Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" to the rise of Donald Trump.  The one failing, in my view, is that it fails to factor in the role of white Christian denominations, especially the Southern Baptist Convention, in driving the GOP toward the embrace of racism and its current hostility to anyone that isn't a conservative white Christian.   From my own years of experience as an activist in the GOP, the rise of the Christofascists is inseparable from the GOP's increased embrace of white supremacy.  Here are article highlights: 

“Goldwater’s nomination in 1964 was a historical disaster for the conservative movement,” Roy tells me, “because for the ensuing decades, it identified Democrats as the party of civil rights and Republicans as the party opposed to civil rights.”

Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He himself was not especially racist — he believed it was wrong, on free market grounds, for the federal government to force private businesses to desegregate. But this “principled” stance identified the GOP with the pro-segregation camp in everyone’s eyes, while the Democrats under Lyndon Johnson became the champions of anti-racism.

This had a double effect, Roy says. First, it forced black voters out of the GOP. Second, it invited in white racists who had previously been Democrats. Even though many Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act in Congress, the post-Goldwater party became the party of aggrieved whites.

“The fact is, today, the Republican coalition has inherited the people who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — the Southern Democrats who are now Republicans,” Roy says. “Conservatives and Republicans have not come to terms with that problem.”

The available evidence compiled by historians and political scientists suggests that 1964 really was a pivotal political moment, in exactly the way Roy describes.

Yet Republican intellectuals have long denied this, fabricating a revisionist history in which Republicans were and always have been the party of civil rights. In 2012, National Review ran a lengthy cover story arguing that the standard history recounted by Roy was “popular but indefensible.”

This revisionism, according to Roy, points to a much bigger conservative delusion: They cannot admit that their party’s voters are motivated far more by white identity politics than by conservative ideals.

[T]hey deny the party’s racist history, that its post-1964 success was a direct result of attracting whites disillusioned by the Democrats’ embrace of civil rights. And they deny that to this day, Republican voters are driven more by white resentment than by a principled commitment to the free market and individual liberty.

This, Roy believes, is where the conservative intellectual class went astray. By refusing to admit the truth about their own party, they were powerless to stop the forces that led to Donald Trump’s rise. They told themselves, over and over again, that Goldwater’s victory was a triumph.

But in reality, it created the conditions under which Trump could thrive. Trump’s politics of aggrieved white nationalism — labeling black people criminals, Latinos rapists, and Muslims terrorists — succeeded because the party’s voting base was made up of the people who once opposed civil rights.
 This soul-searching led Roy to an uncomfortable conclusion: The Republican Party, and the conservative movement that propped it up, is doomed.

Both are too wedded to the politics of white nationalism to change how they act, but that just isn’t a winning formula in a nation that’s increasingly black and brown. Either the Republican Party will eat itself or a new party will rise and overtake its voting share.

For the entire history of modern conservatism, its ideals have been wedded to and marred by white supremacism. That’s Roy’s own diagnosis, and I think it’s correct. As a result, we have literally no experience in America of a politically viable conservative movement unmoored from white supremacy.

The fact is that limited government conservatism is not especially appealing to nonwhite Americans, whereas liberalism and social democracy are. The only ones for whom conservatism is a natural fit are Roy’s “cranky old white people” — and they’re dying off.

Facing the truth - and objective reality - is the last thing that the Christofascists and white supremacists who now control the GOP base want to face or admit.  

Donald Trump and Christofascists - Kindred Narcissists

As regular readers know full well, I have a very low opinion of evangelical Christians, especially those I refer to as Christofascists.  They are defined by the selfishness, false piety and hatred of anyone and everyone who does not subscribe to their toxic version of Christianity or who tries to limit their ability to abuse and discriminate against others that they deem as "sinners" or as not being "real Americans."  These folks are a walking advertisement as to why one should leave Christianity.  Some are surprised that a significant portion of the Christofascists in the Republican Party base are flocking to Donald Trump's banner.  A piece in The Raw Story makes the case why Trump and the Christofascists are made for each other and tied to one another by a common trait: narcissism.  Here are highlights:

One of the questions vexing the mediocre punditry of American discourse is how Donald Trump—a former star of the tabloids with a track record of scandal and little history of religious affiliation—is polling so well with evangelical Christians. 

But Trump and America’s religious right are not as different as one would think. If any corner of American Christianity encourages narcissism, it’s conservative evangelical Christianity.

One of the oddest traits of many deeply religious people is their self-professed humility even as they claim to understand the plan of the creator of the universe as well as their own special role in its development. The late Christopher Hitchens perfectly summarized the brand of arrogance that wears the mask of modesty: “Don’t mind me—I’m only on an errand for God.”

Despite the attempt religious believers often make to monopolize morality, it turns out that teaching children they are the center of the universe is not healthy. A large study recently published in Current Biology, found that the more religious the child, the less likely they are to behave altruistically with peers. In fact, religion in children correlates strongly with selfishness and mean-spiritedness.

[T]he Christian right in America has a long history of encouraging narcissistic, intolerant ideology.

Trump, meanwhile, is the rock bottom of Republican decline from a political party with a coherent policy agenda to a loosely connected network of nativists and extremists. The party’s loss of credibility is the predictable outcome of its transformation into a vehicle for the self-promotion and theocratic advocacy of white evangelical Christians. In order to appeal to evangelical voters, candidates like Carson and Cruz have to project narcissism and selfishness. They do it very well, but Donald Trump is the demagogic master of it.

Having perfected his personality through years of reality television performance, Trump is able to successfully sway evangelicals to his side, despite his lack of Christian credentials, because narcissists take comfort in each other. His meanspirited attacks on minorities, disabled reporters and women who disagree with him do not subtract his support: quite the opposite. It actually makes him more appealing to those who, like the children in the study, believe they are special and that those who are different are inferior.

Evangelical Christians believe they are a persecuted minority because anything less than total ownership is unsatisfactory. God blesses America, and God has selected them to carry out his will. “Making America great again” will require the execution of God’s plan through the exclusion of those who do not share the religious vision of America as a white Christian paradise.

Barry Goldwater telegraphed the entire decline of the Republican Party in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan first began welcoming evangelicals into the room. The senator warned that, “If and when these preachers get control of the Republican Party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem.  Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know. I’ve tried to deal with them.”

Arthur Miller once remarked that Christian conservatives don’t want a president. Instead, they “ache for an Ayatollah.” Right now, they have Trump.

GOP Anarchy in the House of Representatives

As a former Republican I remain dumbfounded at the party's descent into insanity - at least until I remember the so-called GOP establishment's welcoming of the Christofasicts and those hiding behind the Tea Party label into the party.  Short term expediency has left the party with a metastasizing cancer that needs to be somehow stopped or else the party is headed toward eventual oblivion.  The question thus becomes one of whether somehow the dwindling number of sane Republicans in the party will overthrow the extremists or not.   Given how far right "mainstream" Republicans have become, the prospects do not look encouraging.  Geo­ffrey Kabaservice, the the author of book “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party,” has an op-ed in the New York Times that looks at the troubling reality of today's GOP.  Here are excerpts:

REPUBLICANS aren’t big fans of Karl Marx, but perhaps they should ponder his observation that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. As preposterous presidential candidates dominate the polls and extremists topple congressional leaders, the Republican Party is headed for a replay of the catastrophic Goldwater revolt of the early 1960s. It may be an entertaining spectacle, but it’s dangerous.

The Republican Party has long been divided into comparatively moderate and conservative factions, but historically the conservatives were realists, too. Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, the great conservative leader of the mid-20^th century, understood that his side had to make incremental steps toward its goals. It had to devise detailed policy alternatives to Democratic proposals, work with party leadership and build coalitions both within the party and across party lines.

But the early 1960s witnessed an overthrow of Taftian realism.

As Goldwater famously wrote: “My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones.”. . . . Goldwater’s followers viewed any Republicans who wanted to govern as traitors to be stamped out. . . . He would win the 1964 election, they believed, because a hidden majority would flock to the polls when presented with a candidate who wasn’t what we would now call “politically correct.”

Years ago, I wrote a history of the Republican civil war between the moderates and radicals of the Goldwater era. I’m sufficiently alarmed, watching history repeat itself, that I now work as a research consultant for the Main Street Partnership, an organization of over 70 members of Congress who represent the moderate-conservative wing of the Republican Party. Their rivals are members of the Freedom Caucus, who would rather close the government than compromise.

The radicals have no realistic alternative solutions of their own. Even to contemplate the negotiations and compromises such policies entail would sully their ideological purity. Senator Goldwater, despite his brave talk of repeal, was an isolated, powerless legislator. The extremists who opposed John A. Boehner as speaker are likewise a small faction without the ability to accomplish any positive program.

[M]any members of the Freedom Caucus put a higher priority on scoring purity points than on carrying out the nation’s business. Its chairman, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, is, by this accounting, the second-least effective member of Congress. The only one who’s even less effective is another longtime critic of Mr. Boehner, Representative Steve King of Iowa . . . .

The Republican Party’s unhappy ideological adventure in the early ’60s ended in disaster.  . . . . The present resurgence of anti-governing conservatism is also likely to end badly for Republicans. The extremists have the ability to disrupt the Congress, but not to lead it. Their belief that shutdowns will secure real concessions is magical thinking, not legislative realism.

The rebranding of Republicanism as a force for anarchy has spilled into the presidential contest and threatens the general election chances of the eventual nominee. The Republican establishment, and the party’s governing majority, have the power to quell this insurgency, whether by abandoning the so-called Hastert rule, which requires a majority of the majority to approve of legislation before it can come up for a vote, or by mounting primary challenges of their own. 

How the GOP Became the "White Man's Party"

I've noted before that I hail from a family that long supported the Republican Party and that I myself held a City Committee seat in Virginia Beach for eight years before resigning in disgust as the GOP became increasingly racist and controlled by religious extremists of the Christian Right who sought to merge their extremists beliefs with the civil laws.  These are the people I call the Christofascists.  And in the years since I resigned from the GOP, the party has become increasingly horrible with the racism becoming ever more overt.  A piece in Salon looks at how the GOP became so racist commencing in earnest under Barry Goldwater and later Richard Nixon and his "Southern Strategy."   A second, older piece also looks at the rise of the Christofascists within the GOP which, in my view has only intensified the white supremacist agenda of the GOP a separate post will look at this piece).  Here are excerpts from the first piece:

The Republican Party today, in its voters and in its elected officials, is almost all white. But it wasn’t always like that. Indeed, in the decades immediately before 1964, neither party was racially identified in the eyes of the American public. Even as the Democratic Party on the national level increasingly embraced civil rights, partly as a way to capture the growing political power of blacks who had migrated to Northern cities, Southern Democrats—like George Wallace— remained staunch defenders of Jim Crow.

The 1964 presidential election marked the beginning of the realignment we live with today. Where in 1962 both parties were perceived as equally, if tepidly, supportive of civil rights, two years later 60 percent of the public identified Democrats as more likely to pursue fair treatment, versus only 7 percent who so identified the Republican Party. What happened?

Groundwork for the shift was laid in the run-up to the 1964 election by rightwing elements in the Republican Party, which gained momentum from the loss of the then-moderate Nixon to John F. Kennedy in 1960. This faction of the party had never stopped warring against the New Deal.
By 1961, however, Goldwater and his partisans had become convinced that the key to electoral success lay in gaining ground in the South, and that in turn required appealing to racist sentiments in white voters, even at the cost of black support. As Goldwater drawled, “We’re not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc in 1964 and 1968, so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are.”

As the conservative journalist Robert Novak reported after attending a meeting of the Republican National Committee in Denver during the summer of 1963: “A good many, perhaps a majority of the party’s leadership, envision substantial political gold to be mined in the racial crisis by becoming in fact, though not in name, the White Man’s Party. 

The rise of a racially-identified GOP is not a tale of latent bigotry in that party. It is instead a story centered on the strategic decision to use racism to become “the White Man’s Party.”

Running for president in 1964, the Arizonan strode across the South, hawking small-government bromides and racially coded appeals. In terms of the latter, he sold his vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a bold stand in favor of “states’ rights” and “freedom of association.”  . . . . in the South this meant first and foremost the right of business owners to exclude blacks from hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, and retail establishments. Like [George] Wallace, Goldwater had learned how to talk about blacks without ever mentioning race.

Late in the [1968] campaign, Nixon opted to publicly tack right on race. He had already reached a backroom deal with South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond— an arch-segregationist who had led the revolt against the Democratic Party in 1948 when it endorsed a modest civil rights plank, and who switched to become a Republican in 1964 to throw his weight behind Goldwater. Nixon bought Thurmond’s support during the primary season by secretly promising that he would restrict federal enforcement of school desegregation in the South. Now he would make this same promise to the nation. On October 7, Nixon came out against “forced busing,” an increasingly potent euphemism for the system of transporting students across the boundaries of segregated neighborhoods in order to integrate schools.

Nixon also began to hammer away at the issue of law and order. In doing so, he drew upon a rhetorical frame rooted in Southern resistance to civil rights. From the inception of the civil rights movement in the 1950s, Southern politicians had disparaged racial activists as “lawbreakers,” as indeed technically they were. In the Jim Crow regions, African Americans had long pressed basic equality demands precisely by breaking laws mandating segregation: sit-ins and freedom rides purposefully violated Jim Crow statutes in order to challenge white supremacist social norms. Dismissing these protesters as criminals shifted the issue from a defense of white supremacy to a more neutral-seeming concern with “order,” while simultaneously stripping the activists of moral stature. 

Nixon had mastered Wallace’s dark art. Forced bussing, law and order, and security from unrest as the essential civil right of the majority—all of these were coded phrases that allowed Nixon to appeal to racial fears without overtly mentioning race at all. Yet race remained the indisputable, intentional subtext of the appeal. As Nixon exulted after watching one of his own commercials: “Yep, this hits it right on the nose . . . it’s all about law and order and the damn Negro-Puerto Rican groups out there.”

The Southern strategy, incipient for a decade, had matured into a clear route to electoral dominance. The old Democratic alliance of Northeastern liberals, the white working class, Northern blacks, and Southern Democrats, could be riven by racial appeals. Beginning in 1970, Richard Nixon embraced the politics of racial division wholeheartedly. 

Defeated by the Southern strategy, McGovern neatly summed it up: “What is the Southern Strategy? It is this. It says to the South: Let the poor stay poor, let your economy trail the nation, forget about decent homes and medical care for all your people, choose officials who will oppose every effort to benefit the many at the expense of the few—and in return, we will try to overlook the rights of the black man, appoint a few southerners to high office, and lift your spirits by attacking the ‘eastern establishment’ whose bank accounts we are filling with your labor and your industry.”   McGovern erred in supposing that the Southern strategy pertained only to the South. Nixon had already learned from Wallace, and then later from the number crunchers, that coded racial appeals would work nationwide. Other than that, especially in its class and race dimensions, McGovern had dog whistle politics dead to rights.

 What's frightening is that the GOP's current racism was planned from the start and has only intensified as the Christofacists and their Tea Party cousins have grown in power.  It is politics based on hate and resentment and it is nothing less than dangerous. 

When Will the GOP Kick Out Ted Cruz and Similar Crazies?

I find it somewhat scary when conservative/GOP columnist Jennifer Rubin starts to sound like me.  But she is onto something when it comes to the need for the Republican Party at both the national level and certainly here in Virginia to kick the crazy elements – principally Christofascists and racist,  Until this happens, I believe that the GOP is in a long term death spiral.  The irrationality and refusal to accept objective reality of these folks makes it impossible to reason with them or to appeal to a majority of voters when GOP nomination contests have become a contest as to who can be the most certifiably insane in order to win the nomination.  Here are excerpts from Rubin’s column in the Washington Post:

ignorance embracing Tea Party lunatics – from the Party.

When the John Birchers had to be kicked out of the Republican Party, William F. Buckley Jr. effectively excommunicated them from the GOP. When the “smoking gun” Watergate tape came out, it was the late Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) who urged Richard Nixon to resign. And when Pat Buchannan’s views could no longer be called anything but anti-Semitic, it was Buckley who called him out.

If the GOP has one big problem now it is that there is no Goldwater, no Buckley to tell Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and his ilk that enough is enough. The Republicans interested in governance are now participants in the political scrum. The biggest of the conservative magazines, whose editors should know better, are too timid. They poke and prod here and there, but really stand up to the destructive right wing? No. They fear a full throttle debunking would put at risk their place in the conservative cosmos. They mistakenly believe that their role is to rebuke only liberals.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page or a conservative eminence like George Will or Charles Krauthammer can call the tune of charlatans, but the Cruz crowd dismisses even them as pawns in the Great GOP Sell-out.

There is no single governor, no party senior statesman to say, “It is intolerable to impugn the motives of those who fought long and hard against the liberal welfare state. Mr. Cruz, you are not helping; you are hurting. Please sit down and learn for a few years.”

The politics of the right becomes akin to university politics — bitter and small-minded with small spoils at stake. And the architecture that encompasses Cruz, talk radio, Heritage Action and the rest can sustain itself –in fact does better — when the party loses. It is not obvious how or even if the GOP gets back on track.

The saying goes that we get the government we deserve. The same is true of political parties. Republicans collectively have to decide what they want to be and what role they want to play in the next few decades. They can be participants in a majority party — eager and capable of governing, optimistic and inclusive – or they can be the party run by Heritage Action/Ted Cruz. But they can’t be both.

The Shame of Being on the Wrong Side of History.

There are those who proudly fought desegregation in the last century but today, outside of white supremacist circles, history does not view them very highly.  And I suspect that some of their descendants find them somewhat of an embarrassment.  With the way support for gay equality and gay marriage is changing, many of today's loudest homophobes may find themselves similarly viewed by history and their descendants.   It may be nice to not be forgotten by history, but if one is remembered for hate and bigotry, then perhaps it would be better to be forgotten and fade away in the mist of time.  A piece I bookmarked some time ago in the Washington Post looks at the likely legacy of today's homophobes and hate merchants.  Here are some highlights:

In 1964 Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act. He was labeled a racist and much worse for his position. Goldwater, a dedicated libertarian, voted on the constitutionality of the issue and not on the issue itself. I knew him well, and he was no racist. He had integrated the Arizona National Guard, had hired African Americans in his family company and was an early member of the NAACP.

Years later he would say publicly that he regretted his vote. As a close friend of my parents, he once told me that he ended up actually being ashamed of his vote.

Shame. That’s a strong word. But toward the end of his life (he died at 89) he had changed a lot. Goldwater was a strong pro-choice advocate — his wife was one of the original founders of Planned Parenthood in Arizona. He was also pro-gay rights long before it really became a public issue. His grandson was gay. Still, he was ashamed of that one thing in his life.

Today, there are many potential Goldwaters out there on the gay marriage issue, which has recently been argued in two cases before the Supreme Court: reviews of the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage. There are decent people with good values who are against gay marriage. One day, in the not-so-distant future, these people will be ashamed of their position. If any of the Supreme Court justices vote against it, they will eventually be ashamed as well. Not only that but their children, their grandchildren and their heirs will be ashamed of them.

To see how quickly the public has come around on this issue is to recognize how soon it will be totally accepted in our country.

However, the people who will have the toughest time with their anti-gay positions are the religious. .  .  .  .  In their hearts, they cannot square their teachings that God made man in his own image, that we are all children of God, with the fact that they discriminate against people simply because of those they love.

I have had a few religious leaders confide in me that they were not personally against gay marriage but could not take that position publicly for fear of losing their congregations. Think of the conflict and, yes, shame they must be feeling now and how it will only worsen with time. One day, they will have to come around or they really will lose their congregations.

Suddenly a majority of senators support same-sex marriage. Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) stunned his colleagues when he came out in support several weeks ago, explaining that he had a son who was gay.  .   .   .   .  Of the members who are in opposition, most are facing reelection and are afraid. In fact, it is fear and religion that keep most people from “coming out” in support. What is increasing the momentum is that so many are now in favor that the scales are tipping and that those against will appear to be “left behind,” as we say in the jargon of the apocalypse.

They should turn to their Bibles, to Ephesians 5, for guidance:  “For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light — for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true. Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord. 

Christ did not utter a single word against same sex love if the Gospels are to be believed.  But he did heal the Roman centurion's male lover. And he constantly condemned the hypocrisy of the Pharisees who congratulated themselves on their own piety even as the missed the message of love of one's neighbor.   The anti-gay factions are the Pharisees reincarnate and history will not view them kindly.

Suicidal Republicans

A post earlier this week noted that Karl Rove and other big money GOP donors are establishing a plan to defeat Tea Party and Christofascist backed candidates who, while the darlings of the delusional and deranged Christofascist/Tea Party crowd, are radioactive in general elections.  Not surprisingly, the Kool-Aid drinkers are NOT happy with Mr. Rove and his cohorts.  The spittle is flying and the indignation is ramping up off the charts.  All of which may be good news for rational, sentient voters who want practical, pragmatic, get the job done individuals elected to the House of Representatives and U. S. Senate.  A GOP civil war could well allow Democrats to sweep elections as the Christofascists and Tea Party lunatics drag the GOP downward.  A column in the New York Times looks at the reaction of the knuckle draggers to the Rove plan.  The coming intra-party fght should make for great spectator sport.  Here are column highlights:

Last week, the opening salvos were launched in a very public and very nasty civil war between establishment Republicans and Tea Party supporters when it was reported that Karl Rove was backing a new group, the Conservative Victory Project, to counter the Tea Party’s selection of loopy congressional candidates who lose in general elections. 

The Tea Party was having none of it. It sees Rove’s group as a brazen attack on the Tea Party movement, which it is. Rove sees winning as a practical matter. The Tea Party counts victory in layers of philosophical purity. 

Politico reported this week that an unnamed “senior Republican operative” said that one of the party’s biggest problems was “ ‘suicide conservatives, who would rather lose elections than win seats with moderates.’ ”  Democrats could be the ultimate beneficiaries of this tiff. Of the 33 Senate seats up for election in 2014, 20 are held by Democrats. Seven of those 20 are in states that President Obama lost in the last presidential election. Republicans would have to pick up only a handful of seats to take control of the chamber. 

But some in the Tea Party are threatening that if their candidate is defeated in the primaries by a candidate backed by Rove’s group, they might still run the Tea Party candidate in the general election. That would virtually guarantee a Democratic victory. 

Sal Russo, a Tea Party strategist, told Politico: “We discourage our people from supporting third-party candidates by saying ‘that’s a big mistake. We shouldn’t do that.’ ” He added: “But if the position [Rove’s allies] take is rule or ruin — well, two can play that game. And if we get pushed, we’re not going to be able to keep the lid on that.”

The skirmish speaks to a broader problem: a party that has lost its way and can’t rally around a unified, coherent vision of what it wants to be when it grows up.  The traditional Republican message doesn’t work. Rhetorically, the G.O.P. is the party of calamity. The sky is always falling. Everything is broken. Freedoms are eroding. Tomorrow is dimmer than today.   In Republicans’ world, we must tighten our belts until we crush our spines. We must take a road to prosperity that runs through the desert of austerity. We must cut to grow. Republicans are the last guardians against bad governance.  

But how can they sell this message to a public that has rejected it in the last two presidential elections?  Some say keep the terms but soften the tone. A raft of Republicans, many of them possible contenders in 2016, have been trying this approach. 

The Tea Party crowd did not seem pleased with that plan [on immigration reform]. Glenn Beck, the self-described “rodeo clown” of the right, said:  “You’ve got John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and now Marco Rubio joining them because Marco Rubio just has to win elections. I’m done. I’m done. Learn the Constitution. Somebody has to keep a remnant of the Constitution alive.” 

For Beck’s wing of the party, moderation is surrender, and surrender is death. It seems to want to go further out on a limb that’s getting ever more narrow. For that crowd, being a Tea Party supporter is more a religion than a political philosophy. They believe so deeply and fervently in it that they see no need for either message massage or actual compromise..  .  .  .  For this brand of Republican, there is victory in self-righteous defeat. 

Yes, it is a religion with these folks since a high proportion of the Tea Party are also Christofascists and white supremacists.  The want to keep America white and conservative Christian or go down trying.   Let's hope that they get their death wish.  The future of the nation depends upon killing this type of extremism and bigotry.

A Republican Glasnost?

Many political pundits would have one believe that the Republican Party has gotten the message from the 2012 election results.  Here in Virginia, it is somewhat hard to believe as Ken Cuccinelli becomes the all but crowned GOP nominee for governor in the 2013 Virginia elections.  Cuccinelli embodies the worse aspects of the GOP's white supremacist, anti-woman, anti-gay and theocratic agenda as exhibited during the past year by candidates like Newt Gingrich, Todd Akin, Richard Mourdoch, Rick Santorum and others.  More frightening is the fact that Cuccinelli is worshiped by the base of the Virginia GOP.   David Brooks makes the contrary case in a column in the New York Times and looks at what he sees as trends toward a new GOP.  I think he is giving Republicans too much credit and fails to see just how insane and toxic the GOP's Christofascist/Tea Party base has become.  I see little to make me believe that the GOP leadership such as it is can stop the party's continued lurch to extremism - at least not until the Christofascist extremist are driven from the GOP.  Here are column highlights:

But the speech really began to sing toward the end. Rubio made an oblique rebuttal to some of the Republican gaffes during the campaign: “Some say that our problem is that the American people have changed. That too many people want things from government. But I am convinced that the overwhelming majority of our people just want what my parents had: a chance.”

“It all starts with our people,” Rubio continued. “In the kitchens of our hotels. In the landscaping crews that work in our neighborhoods. In the late-night janitorial shifts that clean our offices. There you will find the dreams America was built on. There you will find the promise of tomorrow. Their journey is our nation’s destiny. And if they can give their children what our parents gave us, the 21st-century America will be the single greatest nation that man has ever known.”

The Republican Party has a long way to go before it revives itself as a majority party. But that speech signifies a moment in that revival. And I would say the last month has marked a moment.

Over the past month, the Republican Party has changed far more than I expected. First, the people at the ideological extremes of the party have begun to self-ghettoize. The Tea Party movement attracted many people who are drawn to black and white certainties and lock-step unity. People like that have a tendency to migrate from mainstream politics, which is inevitably messy and impure, to ever more marginal oases of purity. 

Jim DeMint, for example, is leaving the Senate to go lead the Heritage Foundation. He is leaving the center of the action, where immigration, tax and other reforms will be crafted, for a political advocacy organization known more for ideological purity and fund-raising prowess than for creativity, curiosity or intellectual innovation. 

Second, politics is being reborn. For a time, Republican candidates like Richard Mourdock of Indiana proudly declared that they didn’t believe in compromise. Political activists spent more time purging deviationists than in trying to attract new converts. 

But that mania has passed. There are increasing signs that House Republicans are willing to unite behind Speaker John Boehner so he can cut a deal to avert the “fiscal cliff.” There has been an epidemic of open-mindedness as Republicans try to win minority votes and create a version of their party that can be competitive in states like Connecticut and California. 

The Republicans may still blow it. If President Obama is flexible and they don’t meet him partway, Republicans would contribute to a recession that would discredit them for a decade. But they are moving in the right direction and moving fast. These are first steps, and encouraging ones.  

Again, I believe that Brooks is mistaken and that no real change will occur readily in the GOP.  Indeed, if he wants to see the real GOP, perhaps he should attend the Virginia GOP's convention that will crown Cuccinelli as the party's 2013 nominee for governor.  Barry Goldwater had it right.  The GOP allowed the Christofascists to get control of much of the party and it will be difficult, if not impossible to rid the party of that infestation.

The Republican Party's Fatal Attraction To Rural [and Reality Denying] America

I many times express my confusion as to why the Republican party continues to focus on diminishing demographic groups in the larger voting public. Here in Virginia, the GOP base is increasingly the rural socially, culturally and educationally backwards areas of the state. The only excepts are cities like Virginia Beach with high numbers of military personnel and/or wealthy voters who care nothing about the nation so long as they get to hoard their wealth and pay low taxes. But Virginia is not unique in the GOP grand scheme of things. Forbes has an article that looks at the GOP's focus on the rural shrinking populations as opposed to the growing urban populations which increasingly reject the GOP message of intolerance and division. Here are some highlights:

Rick Santorum’s big wins in Alabama and Mississippi places the Republican Party in ever greater danger of becoming hostage to what has become its predominate geographic base: rural and small town America.

If America was an exclusively urban or metropolitan country, Mitt Romney would be already ensconced as the GOP nominee and perhaps on his way towards a real shot at the White House. In virtually every major urban region — which means predominately suburbs — Romney has generally won easily.

Outside the Mormon belt from Arizona to Wyoming, however, sophisticated Mitt has been a consistent loser in the countryside. This divergence between rural and suburban/metro America, poses a fundamental challenge to the modern Republican Party. Rural America constitutes barely 16 percent of the country, down from 72 percent a century ago, but still constitutes the party’s most reliable geographic base. It resembles the small-town America of the 19^th century, particularly in the South and West, that propelled Democratic Party of Nebraska’s William Jennings Bryan to three presidential nominations.

Yet like Bryan, who also lost all three times, what makes Santorum so appealing in the hinterlands may prove disastrous in the metropolitan regions which now dominate the country. Much of this is not so much particular positions beyond abortion, gay rights, women’s issues, now de rigueur in the GOP, but a kind of generalized sanctimoniousness that does not play well with the national electorate.

We can see this in the extraordinary difference in the religiosity between more rural states, particularly in the South, and the rest of country. Roughly half of all Protestants in Mississippi, Alabama and Oklahoma, according to the Pew Center on Religion and Public Life, are evangelicals . . . . In contrast, evangelicals make up a quarter or less of Protestants nationally and less still in key upcoming primary states such as Pennsylvania, New York, California and Connecticut, where the percentages average closer to 10 percent.

All the nation’s strongest tech clusters — Silicon Valley, Route 128, Austin, north Dallas, Redmond/Bellevue in Washington, Raleigh-Durham — are primarily suburban in form. High tech tends to nurture a consciousness among conservatives more libertarian than socially conservative and populist.

The political pace in rural America today still is being set by an aging, overwhelmingly white and modestly educated demographic.

Until the Republican nomination fight is settled, the party’s pandering to the sensibilities of such conservatives in rural areas could prove fatal to its long-term prospects. A Santorum nomination almost guarantees a replay of the Bryan phenomena; no matter how many times he runs, he will prove unlikely to win, even against a vulnerable opponent. Even in losing, his preachy, divisive tone — on contraception, prayer, the separation of church and state — has opened a gap among suburban voters that Obama will no doubt exploit.

The battle will then shift to the suburbs, including those urban areas, common in the vast cities of the South and West, that are predominately suburban in form.

Personally, I hope the GOP continues its misguided focus on the rural, backwards and in relative terms, ignorant areas of the country and that the result is an electoral defeat. A defeat that will hopefully also expose the long term suicide that pandering to the Christianists represents. The Christianists need to be exiled to the political wilderness.

Is the GOP Facing a Looming Election Disaster?

With another 8+ months until election day much can still happen to alter the political atmosphere. However, at present some anticipate that the GOP may be facing an election disaster in November. And part and parcel with that prediction, the second step of the game is figuring out who will be to blame for the catastrophe - at least if one is an ignorance embracing, science denying Republican. While some place the blame on the Tea Party crowd and the Christian Right (which is neither Christian nor right), others including myself place much blame on the so-called GOP establishment which made a pact with the Devil some years back and is now about to hopefully face a reckoning. Short term expediency and laziness have transformed the GOP into something truly ugly. A piece in The New Republic looks at those responsible for the GOP's descent into ignorance, bigotry and religious extremism. Here are some highlights:

A specter is haunting the Republican establishment — the specter of Barry Goldwater. With recent polling data suggesting that Rick Santorum has surged ahead of Mitt Romney among Republican voters nationwide, the people whose livelihoods depend on Republican electoral victories are terrified by the growing possibility of a massive wipeout in November, much like the one that Republicans experienced in 1964, when Goldwater was their nominee.

But even if the magnitude of the Republicans’ defeat this year resembles that previous debacle, the path there will be significantly different. Whereas Goldwater’s campaign was the product of an insurgency against the reigning Republican establishment, this year’s disaster is the product of political atrophy that the current GOP establishment has itself actively presided over.

ONCE UPON A TIME, East Coast moderates comprised the critical mass of the Republican party leadership. . . . . But with the movement of industrial and financial power away from the Northeast, the East Coast kingmakers’ standing within the party deteriorated by the early 1960s—evidenced most notably by conservative activists’ ability to seize the nomination, to the moderates’ horror, for Goldwater in 1964.

[A]s the moderates gradually, though inexorably, disappeared in the succeeding decades, the GOP became an ever more ideologically unified party. The popular belief that today’s Republican establishment is moderate is false. The current relationship between the Republican establishment and the party’s base is not so much a clash of moderates against conservatives as it is a difference in perspective between realistic professionals and passionate amateurs.

[A]s political professionals, the party’s elites have always known that radical conservatives are only a minority of American voters, and that a Republican nominee has to win over large numbers of moderates and independents to gain the presidency. To finesse this tension, the new Republican establishment adopted William F. Buckley Jr.’s famous command to select the most rightward yet viable candidate. But that has not proven a sustainable solution.

The GOP establishment gladly encouraged the idealistic amateurs of the Tea Party movement when they provided the decisive margins for Republicans in the low-turnout elections of 2010. The GOP’s current elites were swayed by the new movement’s palpable enthusiasm for conservatism. But with the Tea Party’s ideological rectitude now revealing itself as nothing so much as fundamentalist grandiosity, it's dawning on the conservative establishment that its careful experiment may have created a monster.

Which brings us to Rick Santorum, around whom the Tea Party activists are now increasingly coalescing. In claiming that Santorum can beat Obama, they are consciously or unconsciously parroting the theory of a “hidden conservative majority” advanced by Goldwater’s supporters in 1964.

GOP elites know, however, that when one party nominates a candidate that most Americans find extreme, whether Republican Goldwater in 1964 or Democrat George McGovern in 1972, the predictable result is resounding victory for the other party. Indeed, what tends to be forgotten is that Goldwater’s presence atop the ballot proved lethal for Republicans all the way down the ticket. GOP representation in Congress was reduced to its lowest level since the 1930s.

An election with Santorum as a standard-bearer might produce a similar debacle, reenergizing the left and restoring the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Obama might not only win reelection, he might feel liberated, or obligated, to move left. Republicans who claim that Obama in his first term was the most socialist president they can imagine clearly don’t have much imagination.

Elites are aware that more is at stake this year than ideology. . . . . the Republican establishment is in the position of the lookout on the Titanic who sees the ship speeding toward the iceberg ahead. They are dreading a disastrous collision like the one the party experienced in 1964. But the bitter irony of the present moment is that it’s the establishment, not an insurgency, that was responsible for charting this course to begin with.

I hope the author of the column is correct and that the GOP establishment is unable to steer clear of the looming iceberg. Maybe, just maybe, a huge electoral defeat is what is needed to wake the establishment up to the fact that the Christianists and Tea Party need to be re-exiled back to the political wilderness where they belong.

Current GOP Insanity Versus What Once Were GOP Values

Lon, a reader from GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann's 6th District of Minnesota sent me an e-mail earlier today bemoaning the embarrassment of Ms. Bachmann's ignorance and homophobic venom. One does have to wonder how individuals who are so untethered from reality manage to get themselves elected to high office when and insane asylum would be a more appropriate place for them to be holding court. Lon was especially miffed at Ms. Bachmann's comments in opposition to the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Bill. Here's a sampling of Ms. Bachmann's verbal diarrhea via C-Span:

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"[A]pparently people who are practicing pedophiles would be considered protected under this legislation, but not, I understand, veterans, not, I understand, pregnant women, not, I understand, 85-year-old grandmothers would be protected under this law," she said. "But who would be protected? A pedophile, someone who considers themselves gay, someone who considers themselves transgender, someone who considers themselves a cross-dresser? That is who is protected."

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Once upon a time the GOP stood for individual rights and recognized that extreme religious views should not govern the civil laws and that legislators should rebuff attempts to intimidate their voting decisions on legislation. Moreover, the "conservative" thing to do was to call out those who sought to subvert freedom of religion and to condemn their efforts. This was the Republican Party that I grew up in and it is a memory of a Republican Party that has ceased to exist currently. Andrew Sullivan has a marvelous quote from Barry Goldwater that mkaes this case all to eloquently and directly:

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"There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent.

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If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in 'A,' 'B,' 'C,' and 'D.' Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of 'conservatism,'" – Barry Goldwater, Congressional Record, September 16, 1981.

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One can only assume that Goldwater - and I suspect even Reagan are rolling over in their graves over the vile, religious party the GOP has become. The Christianists have utterly subverted the principles that once defined the Republican Party.

Former Bush Aide and Goldwater Granddaughter Voting for Obama

As I have said several times, each new day seems to bring the surprise of more Republicans jumping from the sinking McCain/Palin garbage barge to climb onto the Obama campaign. Today CNN is reporting that Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary to the Chimperator, announced that he is voting for Barack Obama. Meanwhile the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that Barry Goldwater’s granddaughter voted early in Fulton County on Tuesday — for Barack Obama. First highlights from CNN:

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Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary who sharply criticized President Bush in his memoir last spring, told CNN Thursday he's voting for Barack Obama. "From the very beginning I have said I am going to support the candidate that has the best chance for changing the way Washington works and getting things done and I will be voting for Barack Obama and clapping," McClellan told new CNN Host D.L. Hughley.

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McClellan isn't the first member of Bush's inner circle to express support for Obama. In 2007, former Bush strategist Matt Dowd also said he had become disillusioned with the president and said Obama was the only candidate that appealed to him.

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As for Barry Goldwater's granddaughter, here are highlights from the Atlanta Constitution:

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Barry Goldwater’s granddaughter voted early in Fulton County on Tuesday — for Barack Obama. . . . Alison Goldwater Ross, 45, waited about an hour and a half to cast her vote at the Fulton County government center in Atlanta, for the Democratic presidential candidate. “I’m avoiding the crowds on Election Day,” Goldwater Ross told my AJC colleague, Mary Lou Pickel.

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The Goldwaters and the McCains have a history of antagonism. “Coming from a political family, I had insight into a lot of things,” Goldwater Ross said. Of McCain, she said, “I don’t have respect for him.”