GOP Congressmen to America's 65,000 Unemployed: Stop eating food.

(This item by way of the back-in-business PhuckPolitics.)

On Thursday, the newly emboldened, self-congratulatory, and Wall Street-subsidized House Republicans "torpedoed a bill to extend benefits for the long-term unemployed" (The Washington Post). Just get an eyeful of this Old Boy's (Hair) Club (For Men):

It seems that the $12 billion price tag of intervening on behalf of those teetering on the brink of total bankruptcy and ruin is too steep for these steely-eyed Protectors of Industrial/Financial Interests The American Way. Look at the determination in their, uh, gut. The sense of honor and profundity in their Latte-sipping gait.

They just saved America $12 billion. Phew! I'd be drinking me some coffee, too. It's a tough job, pulling our nation back from the brink of financial apocalypse, but somebody's gotta do it.

Of course, the Bush Tax Cuts for the ultra-wealthy cost the nation $3 trillion (Alexander Stille), and that's only over the first eight years of the cuts' existence! Were those cuts to expire on schedule, as the Dems are apparently going to be too weak-kneed to insist—which, by the way, is insane, depressing and humiliating...if ever there were an issue on which the Dems should refuse to compromise....—"the projected cost of the Bush tax cuts to the federal budget over the next ten years is $3.9 trillion, an average of 1.4 percent of the country’s total economic activity (GDP) per year" (CAP). If the Republicans and their conservative Democrat accomplices succeed in actually extending the the tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy, the resulting drain on the US deficit would be an additional $4 million!

But, like I said, the Republicans should be proud of themselves that they've once again succeeded in cynically screwing over the struggling American families that are most vulnerable by sparing the US deficit that whopping $12 billion.

Welcome to the New Wedge Politics: A political calculus.

Well, it's here. (Or, rather, it's back.) White, Christianist * Terrorism (yes, terrorism, since the Right has decided to use this term when it's convenient to its purposes). Charged with plotting to kill police officers and civilians and to set in motion a new American Civil War, the aims of these armed Christianist militiamen were entirely politico-religionist and ideological: they have committed treason against the United States government and its people and engaged in seditious activities. In yearning to start the next Civil War, these militiamen stand alongside the tea-bagger rank and file.

 This is a moment in which the bogusness of the Fox News Right's sham claims to consistency, moral authority and—most deliciously ironic of all—patriotism is exposed for all to see. And I mean exposed in a way that forces the old-fashioned Republican base—the suburban, upper-middle class—to confront the chaos, ugliness and violence in which all supporters of the current Republican Party have been complicit.

The wealthier households of the American suburban bourgeoisie, who have long served as the real political base of the Republican Party—and whose defection to Obama in 2008 helped cost McCain the presidency—basically only care about two things:

1. physical security for themselves and their families at all costs, and
   
   
2. low taxes (i.e.: financial security for themselves and their families at all costs).

Whichever party can scare this still-very-powerful echelon of the American citizenry into perceiving** that either (1) or (2)—in that order—or both cannot be trusted in the hands of the other party, wins.

[***]

Consider, for example, Joe Briefcase. Joe is a medium-level Big Shot in the [whatever] business and is a case study in the mentality of this socioeconomic stratum of American society. He typically—before the Iraq War, anyway—falls for, I'd say, at least 75% of neoconservative scare-mongering lies (i.e.: 'An attack on the USA is imminent if we don't do a, b, and c to stop it...') and is also especially easily flattered by Republican laissez-faire & square charm tactics (i.e.: 'You've pulled yourself up by your bootstraps and deserve to hold onto every precious penny you've earned...')... and has voted Republican ever since he graduated from [whatever] school and entered what is known colloquially as "The Real World."

Joe Briefcase doesn't give two shits about the "restoration of American values" or the "maligned legacy of state's rights" that the brainless, fat, racist, uneducated, neo-secessionist, Fox News-watching hordes seem to care so much about. The fact is that Joe Briefcase doesn't want trouble, and trouble is exactly what he has begun to see that he will get if the Republican Party manages to regain control of the country.

Three additional factors shall flesh out my hypothesis of a new electoral alignment that I believe may be a component of the Democratic Party's (and especially Obama's) electoral strategy, which I shall call the New Wedge Politics:

• All of the "tea party" shenanigans during the health care debate managed to poison the well of public discourse to such an extent that most Americans stopped caring about the content of the health care bill a long time ago and simply grew increasingly irritated by the shrill health care bill debate. And it was the Republicans who, after all, vowed over and over and over and over and over again to obstruct the passage of the bill. Thus—irrespective of most people's inclinations as regards the content of the bill (and irrespective of the likelihood that the Obama Administration shrewdly planned to allow the Republican demagogy to meander until it reached the pinnacle of outrageousness)—Obama gets all of the credit for putting the whole miserable display out of its misery with a stroke of his pen. Meet Obama, the restorer of 'law and order' from the clutches of tea-bagger-fueled chaos and anarchy.
  
  
• The Civil War. Don't forget the Civil War. It's very much on the minds—or in the hearts—of many among the tea-bagger faithful, whether they realize it or not. From incumbent Governor Rick Perry's Texas Secession Rallies to the new revelations of Far-Right paramilitary activities to the ugly racism of so much of the redneck sloganeering, the ghost of the Civil War has returned to the national subconscious in a big way. And it just so happens that Joe Briefcase's great-great grandfather fought in the Civil War. And guess whose side Great Great Grandpa Briefcase fought for? That's right, it wasn't for the Confederacy. Joe Briefcase has always taken pride in the fact that he belongs to the Party of Abraham Lincoln. He has no sympathy for protesters of any kind. He wants the secessionist rednecks to get off his TV already. He most certainly does not recognize the current Dixiecrat Shambles as His Republican Party. This 'Party of No' is not the Republican Party as he has known it.
  
  
• The Iraq War. Don't forget the impact of that war either. The minutia of the USA's continued presence in Iraq under the Obama Administration, of course, fail to capture anyone's interest. But the people of the United States have not forgotten the Iraq War, nor its costliness in lives and dollars, nor the sleazy lies that the Bush Administration told in order to sell it. This still stands as a significant betrayal of trust between the Republican Party and its erstwhile supporters.

To close, some caveats: my analysis here is intended to be hypothetical. Furthermore, it's a hypothesis about long-term political and/or electoral strategy—not a prediction of whether or not such a strategy would work. And when I say long-term, I mean that it's not about the vicissitudes of 'cable news' cycles, which Obama has made it his habit to ignore (or at least to appear to ignore)—a way of doing things that has worked well for him in the past and which furthers the impression of his being 'above the fray' of the bullshit.

Lastly, although I dislike the Republican Party something fierce, and although I'm not as critical of Obama as many others on the Left have been (not having expected him to act as a genuinely progressive president in the midst of our current political/economic conditions and ideological alignments), I'm not saying that it is necessarily a good thing that the Democratic Party might be preserving its spot at the Center by pushing the Republican Party ever-farther to the Right. I'd have much preferred it if the health care bill had been more aggressive and radical, etc., etc. And I'd certainly have preferred to see Obama actually take a firm legal position against torturers, liars and manipulators like Dick Cheney, et al.

Anyway, there you have it. If anyone's actually read this far down, I'd love for you to prove it to me by leaving a comment. Heh.

[N.B.: I updated this post (mostly grammar and formatting edits) on the morning of 3/31/10).]

* Note the distinction here, between Christians and Christianists, Christianity and Christianism, religion and Religionism. Each of these dyads comprises:

1. first, a phenomenon that is so heterogeneous and multifarious, and rooted so deeply in our history and society as to resist evaluation in one direction or another, in and of itself, and
   
   
2. second, an extreme politics that enshrouds itself in a rhetoric that has been appropriated from the first, and then manhandled and distorted to accord with tactical or strategic ends.

I am an atheist, but I consider the notion of the 'inherent evil of religion' to be both inherently childish and itself always a cloaked political gesture, every bit as much as Religionism. I suppose I could distinguish my brand of atheism from that of Sam Harris by calling him an 'atheismist,' but I won't. You get my point. (Up.)

---

** This is a not-insignificant component of the process to bear in mind. Perception, that is. Kind of a slippery concept, I know, but sometimes we forget that we're not talking about the unmediated, abstract truth of these things, but rather, the truth of people's perceptions, which—in addition to being very difficult to determine—is frequently unconscious (that is, people don't always perceive the content of their own perceptions). That's one of the reasons why polls are frequently pure garbage. (Up.)

---

*** Notice that the trick that the Republicans have pulled off over the decades—in concert with the enormous interest group it serves, namely the military-industrial complex—is to eliminate any and all cognitive dissonance between (1) and (2), despite the fact that the 'bloated government' and 'proliferating, unaccountable government bureaucracy' that the GOP claims to so oppose are nowhere more strongly in evidence than in unfunded military spending. Remember that the Bush Administration deliberately left the deficit-spending on the Iraq War off of the books! (Up.)

Big man, pig man / Ha ha, charade you are!

It's here, at long last. The Crib From This Photoshop Moment (although I didn't literally use Photoshop). I felt the need to present my critique of the US Chamber of Commerce in a manner that captures the rhetorical nuances and socio-critico-theoretical apparatus that are within my meager capabilities to bring to bear:

With grateful acknowledgments (...and apologies?) to George Orwell and Roger Waters.

The Populist Left / The Paranoid Right

In recent posts, I've discussed the idea of authoritarian populism, an idea popularized by the sociologist Stuart Hall to describe the rise of Margaret Thatcher in early 1980s England. I argued that the resentment-fueled rhetoric of the current Republican Party could be seen as an updated species of authoritarian populism.

But forget about all that.

I think that a recent op-ed by Thomas Frank nails it. What the GOP has been up to, he observes, is not really populism at all but paranoia. It's the John Birch Society gone mainstream....

Next month will mark the 45th anniversary of the publication by Harper's Magazine of Richard Hofstadter's famous essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," a work that seems to grow more relevant by the day.

I was not always a fan. [...] I thought, who really cared about the strange notions that occurred to members of marginal groups like the John Birch Society? Joe McCarthy's day was long over, and even in the age of high Reaganism, I thought, the type of person Hofstadter described was merely handing out flyers on street corners.

As the historian himself admitted, "in America it has been the preferred style only of minority movements." Why bother with it, then?

How times have changed! Hofstadter's beloved liberal consensus has been in the grave for decades now. Today it would appear that his mistake was underestimating the seductive power of the paranoid style.

The essential element of this mindset, Hofstadter explained, was its predilection for conspiracy theory—for understanding history as a theater in which sinister figures control the flow of events from behind the scenes, nudging us constantly and secretly in the direction of communism.

Back in Hofstadter's day this sort of thinking at least had something supremely rational going for it: The existence of the Soviet Union and its desire to bring the West to its knees.

But take that away and the theories become something far more remarkable. Consider, by contrast, the widespread belief that President Barack Obama's birth certificate was forged. What could have been his parents' motives for committing such a bizarre deed, or his home state's motive for colluding in it, or the courts' motives for overlooking it?

Or consider the widespread conservative conviction that we are being marched secretly into communism or fascism. Why would someone bother? It seems equally likely, given today's circumstances, that conspirators would trick us into becoming a colony of Belgium or the imperial seat of the Bonaparte family.

The paranoid pattern persists regardless. It is impervious to world events; a blurting of the American subconscious that has not changed since Hofstadter analyzed it 45 years ago. Consider the recent wave of fear that the hypnotic Mr. Obama was planning to indoctrinate schoolchildren. In "The Paranoid Style," Hofstadter wrote, "Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; . . . he has a new secret for influencing the mind; . . . he is gaining a stranglehold on the educational system."

Conspiracy-mindedness isn't just for fringe political groups anymore; it makes for riveting entertainment. And it is all around us today, a disorder with an entire industry to act as its enabler. [...]

Frank goes on to cite recent examples of this phenomenon, from Glenn Beck's fake news show to a truly bizarre essay penned by Michelle Malkin. These examples always include (1) alarmingly hysterical conspiracy theories and (2) a self-persecution complex, accompanied by massive amounts of self-pity.

What the hell's going on, anyway?

Although Frank's piece isn't about progressive political strategy, I believe that Frank's formulation (or, rather, his appropriation of Hofstadter) might provide a rhetorical framework with which to strengthen the project of Left-populism.

The conundrum that I had been perceiving in all of the Angry Right-Teabagger stuff had not been limited to the damage that violent, racist innuendo and intellectual dishonesty threatens to inflict upon civil discourse. What had been worrying me most of all had been the fact that it appeared that the Deranged Right was -- albeit disingenuously -- threatening to dominate populist-inflected discourse in this country.

But why cede that ground to a bunch of hacks, liars and -- as Frank notes -- producers of mass entertainment?

Glenn Beck doesn't represent a twisted, authoritarian version of populism: He represents many vile, stupid and wrongheaded things. Not one of them has anything to do with populism.

Well, here's to hoping that Obama will turn out to be a Theodore Roosvelt, not a Henry Kissinger.

Does this look like a man who spent his time thinking: What are my political opponents going to say about the fact that I have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?? I mean, all I've done is negotiate one lousy peace between Russia and Japan, and other than that, I've busted some trusts and before that I rode around on horseback a lot.

President Barack Obama's not the first person -- and certainly not the first American -- to receive the Nobel Peace Prize without really having "done anything" to deserve it.

I'd take that any day over 1925's banker/soon-to-be-vice president-of-the-US Charles G. Dawes version, in which you win the coveted prize for doing something that seems in the short-term to hold the promise of peace but that a couple of years later clearly has had basically no success whatsoever in preserving peace.

 

And I'd even prefer 1925's Charles G. Dawes version to 1973's Henry Kissinger version, in which an arrogant liar and war criminal who has respect neither for the rule of law nor for human life takes home the medal for bringing to an end a war that he thereafter goes on to extend for years (for reasons of prestige, despite the resulting escalation in the loss of life on an unimaginable scale...).

Washington DC's professional chatterers like Slate's John Dickerson are the only people who are getting their undies in a bundle about Obama's Nobel Peace Prize. Whatever the Republicans try to throw, it ain't gonna stick. Nobody -- whether she likes Obama or not -- will change her position as much as an inch in one direction or the other because of winning the damn Nobel Peace Prize.

Anyone whose day is made because of Obama's win -- and apparently, internationally (especially in the Third World) there are lots of such people -- is going to celebrate it, and -- as usual -- nobody gives a shit what the GOP's Southern Meathead Brigade has to say about it.

You have to see it to believe it.

A couple of items concerning recent antics -- incendiary, despicable and (most of all) surreal antics -- that various portions of the Deranged Right have gotten up to recently. Everything from mean-spiritedness to mendacity to incitements to violence and paramilitary activity to -- last but not least -- calls for presidential assassination.

First, the blog PhuckPolitics shares with us a video clip taken from Fox News that depicts talking heads engaging in what appears at first glance to be their run-of-the-mill, neo-corporightist and/or crypto-racist rhetoric. Whereupon, the viewer realizes that that decrepit Aussie Rupert Murdoch's 24-hour gift to this here land has transcended itself as regards its capacity to produce reckless and shameful innuendo.

The matter-of-fact nonchalance in this instance becomes all the creepier as the viewer ascertains that the correspondent posing as a putative "healthcare expert"  -- naturally, a role delegated to a journalist on staff at the National Review -- is claiming that large-scale reforms to the present US healthcare system (which system is that, exactly?) will increase the threat to the Homeland of terrorist attacks.

And, of course, the anchorman interviewing this National Socialist Review stooge apparently sees no need to challenge -- however cursorily -- his colleague's 'hypothesis'. It's as though this bald-faced tidbit of demagogy were -- well, sir -- just plain old everyday common sense. The footage is about as offensive, twisted, wrong and evil as anything we've heretofore seen from these cynical manipulators of secessionist South fake-populism. I strongly encourage you to watch it.

Second, courtesy of an item posted by the blog DownWithTyranny, I learned a couple of new things. Apparently, the Deranged Right has become cyber-savvy. Who knew? Not many Republicans that I know are particularly skilled in the ways of the Internets, although that's probably because almost all of them are sexagenarians.

"Over the weekend," states the blogger (who I infer is an opponent of Tyranny and not Tyranny's homeboy),

a friend sent me a link for a Facebook polling [sic] asking whether President Obama should be killed. I called a friend of mine who works at the Secret Service. They were already on the case.

Whew. That's pretty damn shocking. Can you remember anybody sending around Internet surveys asking this question about the previous occupant of the Oval Office? I certainly can't. And neither I nor those who were/are inclined to circulate lame Internet surveys were exactly huge fans of that administration.

But if you think that's shocking/disgusting, DownWithTyranny follows it up with something even worse. Initially showcased by a Web site called Right Wing Watch, DWT presents an outcry

more disturbing than Joe Wilson's "You lie" screech at the Joint Session of Congress. This outbreak was from another extreme right wing Republican congressional backbencher looking for some attention, Trent Franks, whose Arizona district stretches from the suburbs west of Phoenix through Glendale and Sun City and up to the northwest corner of the state.  [...]

Franks is an angry and driven man who feels he was dealt a bad hand in life. He's filled with irrational paranoia, bigotry and hatred. And, of course, he's a birther. Normally the Republican leadership keeps him away from the cameras and microphones but this week he escaped from the reservation and found an opportunity to declare President Obama "an enemy of humanity."  [Emphasis mine - cft]

Take a look at the short video and transcript of Congressman Franks's remarks, which DWT points out was likely to have encouraged fanatics to advocate proceeding with the ouster of the current administration through the staging of a military coup:

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic... Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a “family intervention,” with some form of limited, shared responsibility?

There are some scary people out there. Shouldn't more people be lambasting the Republican Party for encouraging this kind of extremism? There are probably people out there who have never quite gotten over the Civil War. Sure, in important ways, they're marginalizing themselves into their destiny of political irrelevance. But even so, don't these people have guns?

Now you'll have to excuse me as I proceed to retreat into my multi-racial, multi-ethnic Democratic-voting Chicago neighborhood and hope that, if I ignore them, these problems will go away....

Surprise, surprise...

...The Republican Party really has become the party of the South.

The following graph breaks down by region the 'favorability rating' of the Grand Old Party:

I mean, it's not even close!

These data, culled from recent polling, were translated into graph form in a piece that appeared in The Washington Monthly earlier this month. I discovered it through a link posted on Andrew Sullivan's blog.

HYPOCRITES!! (Part II): Health care, Medicare Part D and generational politics.

At the conclusion of Part I of this discussion, I mentioned the hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty of Republicans who oppose a public health insurance option, yet have nothing negative to say about Medicare and Social Security, which, when combined with Medicaid, represent by far the most expensive government entitlement programs currently in existence.

The Republicans, like the Democrats, would never be caught opposing these unfunded programs because they are massively popular with the most active and influential sectors of the electorate: the elderly. As the Baby Boomers continue to age -- and increasingly bottleneck the system -- this popularity of these programs is unlikely to decline.

So, somehow, these government-administered entitlements do not get mentioned in the same breath as Congressional/Obamian health insurance reform when hard-Right ideologues and thugs hit the pavement or spread lies over the Internet about death panels and whatnot.

Thing is: Many of those who decry health reform as "socialistic" are themselves willing and continuing recipients of Medicare and Social Security Benefits. Thus, I should like suggest that these people are a bunch of crusty old self-centered whiners and liars, and that we ought to declare a generational war!

Doesn't it shame them that they would deny to succeeding generations the same entitlements from which they themselves have benefited, from the Social Security Act to the GI Bill to Medicare to Medicaid, up to and including the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit for those 65 years of age and older that was passed, without funding and in between the two largest tax cuts for the wealthy ever to be passed into law?

Nothing -- including military spending! -- even comes close to the costliness of these programs. Apparently, Americans 65 and older are simply more deserving of this bounty than those of my generation. My generation, by contrast, has been weathering an inhospitable economic and educational environment. Ours is an age in which the notion of class mobility has long been a cruel joke. Our experience is one of the accumulation of debts, of forgoing health insurance, of meager opportunities.

I'm not arguing that the Great Depression was a walk in the park. I am, however, arguing that, in the wake of the Social Security Act, the radical expansion of opportunities for higher education represented in the GI Bill and in the proliferation of colleges and universities in order to accommodate the Baby Boom, the United States enjoyed a sustained period of economic, social and cultural progress.

Anyway, in my limited experience with such things, the clearest, most objective and most focused discussion of the recent political-historical context of Republican flip-flopping on government-coordinated public health insurance plans is contained in a recent episode of the PBS series Frontline, titled: Ten Trillion and Counting. (You may wish to click here for a link to streaming video of the entire episode, which is well worth your time.)

The piece actually tackles the subject of the United States' skyrocketing national debt. but its discussion of George W. Bush's passage of Medicare Part D -- sandwiched between the passage of the two largest tax cuts for the wealthy in United States history -- could not be more relevant to our present discussion. Here is that section of the episode:



Here's part of the transcript:

FORREST SAWYER: It finally passed by five votes.
[on camera] Why would a small government conservative initiate a program that is so massive?
JACKIE CALMES, The New York Times: Politics.
FORREST SAWYER: What do you mean?
JACKIE CALMES: There's no group that votes at the rate and in the numbers as those over 55, and 65 and over certainly. And Democrats, as well as Republicans, want to please seniors, and that's why our entire budget is tilted towards programs for seniors.
FORREST SAWYER: [voice-over] The reason that the Bush administration could pass Medicare part D was that the Republican Congress in 2002 had let a rule called "pay as you go" lapse. It was a rule established by the first President Bush and a Democratic Congress to enforce fiscal discipline.
GREGG IP: His father endured some very serious political pain to do the right thing to get the deficit down. And one of the steps was that a rule called "pay-go," or pay as you go. And this rule basically meant that if you wanted to introduce a new tax cut or a new spending program, you had to find a way to pay for it with an offsetting tax increase or spending cut. Well, in 2002, that rule expired.
ALICE RIVLIN, Dir., Office of Management & Budget, 1994-96: In the Clinton years, we had the "pay-go" rule, pay as you go, and that meant we couldn't pass a lot of good-sounding ideas, including Medicare prescription drugs. It's not that nobody thought of that in the '90s. A lot of people thought of it. But we couldn't pay for it. To pay for it, we would have had to have done a tax increase or cut out some other spending in major proportions, and nobody wanted to do that, so we didn't do it.
FORREST SAWYER: But the Bush administration did do it. With "pay-go" no longer restraining spending, they had pushed through Medicare part D, a program that's projected over time to cost as much as $8 trillion.
DAVID WESSEL: They did not come up with a way to raise taxes or cut spending somewhere else to pay for it, so they just passed this thing. It goes into law. It's a promise to elderly people that we'll pay- subsidize their drugs, and we borrow every year to pay for it. And in the end, it's more expensive than the war in Iraq because the war in Iraq ends at some point. Certainly, it will end now that Obama's president. But the prescription drug benefit will go on forever.
FORREST SAWYER: It will go on forever because it's a promise made by the federal government to its citizens. Seniors are entitled to this benefit, just the as they are entitled to Social Security and Medicare itself. These entitlements are all enormously popular, but they're also enormously expensive. Medicare part D alone will cost $60 billion this year.
JACKIE CALMES: The expense of that over time, unfunded liabilities for the government, at a time when more people are reaching retirement age and qualifying for Medicare, added more to the long-term obligations of the government than all of Social Security.
FORREST SAWYER: Medicare part D was the largest spending bill the president signed, but there were dozens of others. During his first five years as president, with a Republican-controlled House and Senate, George Bush never vetoed a spending bill. Fiscal conservatives in his own party accused him of being the biggest spender since World War II.

I think this is worth bringing up next time one finds himself in a bar, confronted by someone who insists that Obama is a socialist or that the Democrats are the big spenders... It was, after all, Bill Clinton who balanced the budget.

A heroic moment in conversation with the Deranged Right on health care.

Anecdote time.

Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, a longtime friend of Crib From This, recently found himself at one of his local watering holes, engaged in a political conversation with his

good friend who also happens to be rightist ideologue, who claimed that there was a provision in the Congressional/Obama Health Care reform proposal that allows for abortions of people up to fifteen years old. Whew!

Whew, indeed! But that's the kind of dissembling that is so incomprehensible that even the person who believes he believes it can't actually, at the end of the day, believe it.

I mean... Cause, how would that work, exactly? Kind of difficult to picture... That's what happens, Republicans, when you simply memorize talking points without actually thinking through what (or, for that matter, whether) they mean!!

But wait: It gets better! I give you, the Crib From This community, courtesy of Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, the Deranged Dixiecrat Right in its full glory:

Also, we were at a bar and a random drunk dude came to our table and my friend and he struck up a conversation and he happened to also be a rightist ideologue who predicted (with my friend) that Obama was leading the United States into the worst depression in history AND that we would have another Civil War within the next two years. Whew!

Yes, you read correctly. This man thinks that there's going to be another CIVIL WAR within the NEXT TWO YEARS! To which our correspondent, Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, responded, in the heroic moment to which our title refers:

When the guy brought up the Civil War thing, I said: "Yeah, if it happens, it will because of people like YOU."

YYYYEEEEESSSSS!!! And Gypsy Sun knocks one clean out of the park!!!

I think that I am not the only one for whom the Rightist rhetoric is increasingly alarming/disconcerting: Where does this venom and hatred come from? Why are so many people making themselves impossible to talk to? What's behind all this? Just incoherent hatred of taxes?

(Incoherent because Medicare, Medicaid & Social Security combined are currently by far the biggest national expense, and we are borrowing trillions of dollars from China to pay for it, instead of just taxing the Viagra-addled dicks off of those crusty old bastards!!! ["Greatest Generation," MY ASS!!!!?])

Just racism? Just propaganda about "socialism" and whatever? What the hell is behind this out-of-control turn that Rightist rhetoric has taken?

A few Right-wing apologists say: "These health care protests are no worse than the Left-wing protests during the lead up to the Iraq War!"

But that's a bit of a stretch, don't you think?

Why is it a stretch? Because nobody took those war protesters seriously. Tell me I'm crazy, but that seems fairly obvious to me.... Was there any moment during the run-up to Iraq upon which you recall thinking: "Maybe we're not really going to go to war??!!!"

No. The Iraq War was a done deal, long before it was even mentioned to the American People, and we all knew that at the time. The Right-wing anti-health care astroturf campaign, by contrast, threatens to derail the entire debate.

But, I repeat: What the hell is behind the disturbing militarization of Rightist rhetoric?

Gypsy Sun and Rainbows weighs in:

Yeah, kind of brings us back to our Sarah Palin debate. Since this health care stuff began, I think I am beginning to understand your concern [about the Right's increasingly ominous and irresponsible rhetoric]. Death Panels? It's been debunked, but people still believe it. Same with Obama's birth certificate thing.

Right. What I personally find alarming is the sheer number of people who seem to be obsessed fanatically with these kinds of bizarre things.

Now, admittedly, I've never exactly met these people, but from what you and some others have said, it seems like a lot of the people saying this type of thing are people of whom you'd expect different -- more sober and less hysterical -- behavior.

Fortunately, unlike the health care nut jobs, I gather that the "birthers," as people seem to be calling them, are not exactly ever going to have the numbers to make anybody have to care about their bullshit, which I think makes it unquestionably a GOOD thing for the Democrats and for Obama: Even though all of the rhetoric and posturing is extremely unsettling, it definitely helps keep the Republican't Party* submerged in its present untrustworthy/uneducated/fanatic/non-mainstream cesspool.

By the way, although by no means do I wish to legitimize these so-called 'birthers', I would like to point out that there is so much evidence out there at present of Obama's having been born in Hawaii that it is almost unbelievable that anyone -- even mentally unbalanced people -- could actually continue to harbor doubts about this.

Specifically, in addition to all of the other evidence, there are numerous clippings from different Hawaii newspapers announcing Obama's birth!

Click here to see one of them. Ha ha ha!! Are there people who actually see stuff like this and STILL BELIEVE that he wasn't born in Hawaii??



___________________
* I just thought this up as I typed it. I'm sure I can't be the first. It's just too obvious.

HYPOCRITES!! (Part I): Health care, ideology and rhetoric.

The elegantly monikered and frequently brilliant blog Phuck Politics brings to our attention a highly entertaining and singularly infuriating exercise in Far-Right talking points.

You know what talking points are, right? They're these bullet-pointed 'arguments' circulated among Far-Right activists, politicians, Fox News-"personalities" and, of course, the Brownshirts that have been doing their inbred, mouth-breathingly thuggish best to carry out the bidding of demagogues and insurance industry brass alike. Their goal?: to interrupt 'town hall meetings' that are being held by congressmen in their home districts in order to discuss health reform.

This is a phenomenon to which we may refer as "astroturfing," or perhaps with still greater accuracy as "astroweeding."

Anyway, Phuck Politics shares with us the talking points that are being advanced by something called the Liberty Counsel (sounds friendly enough: Who doesn't like liberty??!!), which is apparently the Joseph Goebbels-like misinformation-propagating arm of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University:

Sec. 59B, Pg. 170, Line 1 – Any NONRESIDENT alien is exempt from individual taxes. (Americans will pay for their health care.)

Sec. 1177, Pg. 354 – Government will RESTRICT enrollment of special needs people! “Extension of Authority of Special Needs Plans to Restrict Enrollment.”

Sec. 1233, Pg. 425, Lines 4-12 – Government mandates Advance (Death) Care Planning consultation. Think Senior Citizens and end of life. END-OF-LIFE COUNSELING. SOME IN THE ADMINISTRATION HAVE ALREADY DISCUSSED RATIONING HEALTH CARE FOR THE ELDERLY.

Sec. 2511, Pg. 992 – Government will establish school-based “health” clinics. Your children will be indoctrinated and your grandchildren may be aborted!

The late, windy Jerry "Tushy-Faced" Falwell. May he rest in piss.

The reader will observe that Phuck Politics has some astute and howlingly funny things to say about this, including an imaginative description of the type of dialogue that must have gone down among the Liberty Council staffers when they were cooking this stuff up.

I wish to weigh in specifically on the fourth item listed above, which for my money is the most ermm...side-splittingly hilarious. The idea of referring to health clinics as "health" clinics... Wow!

Let's have another look!:

Sec. 2511, Pg. 992 – Government will establish school-based “health” clinics. Your children will be indoctrinated and your grandchildren may be aborted!

This takes the idea of seeing the world through the prism of ideology to its paranoiac limits.

I mean...really. Were the (il)logic of this statement to edge a fraction-of-an-inch further in the direction of mechanical-pre-judgment of empirical reality, it would represent a brand new pathology, wherein bigotry, myopia, resentment and rank stupidity begin to chew away not only at its believer's capacity to relate to the world around him -- which clearly is already on the skids -- but at one another.

The myopia begins to resent the bigotry, the bigotry looks askance at the myopia, and all the while, the stupidity reproduces itself like a cancer, slowly reducing the entire thing into a kind of droopy incoherence.

There is something so reprehensible about this rhetoric, something so completely offensive and prejudiced and pathetic and self-serving and self-undermining and willfully dumb, that it becomes almost beautiful. The sheer absurdity of questioning the very notion that health clinics are concerned with health!

The nerve displayed in this deployment of the word "indoctrinated," which reads not so much as a shocking revelation, but as a casual aside. Like: Oh yeah, of course these supposed "health" clinics are actually no more than "indoctrination" clinics!!! Indoctrinated into what? Into viewing the practice of medicine as based upon empirical science?

And then, to top it all off with what could only be called an astonishing feat of transgression-for-transgression's-sake: "your grandchildren may be aborted"!

Round of applause, please!!!

Think about this for a moment.....while keeping in mind, of course, that it is not the sort of provocation that is designed to make people think. The fear that's being expressed here is that the reader's son's and daughter's daughter's yet-to-be-conceived-unborn child may be aborted.

This begs the question: What kind of children are the reader's sons and daughters raising? Don't they learn about abstinence at their Bible Camp??? Are America's preteen Evangelicals having wild parties with the close-dancing and the listening to that race-music?

One rather suspects that this particular exercise in Right-wing hysteria is directed against the idea of public schooling in general more than against the idea of having health clinics in those schools. Let us take a look at a few quotations on the subject of public education, from Rev. Falwell, Herr Hitler and President Jefferson:

I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be! -- Rev. Jerry Falwell

The idea of separation of Church and State was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country. -- Rev. Jerry Falwell

Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith.... We need believing people. -- Adolf Hitler

Education is here placed among the articles of public care, not that it would be proposed to take its ordinary branches out of the hands of private enterprise, which manages so much better all the concerns to which it is equal; but a public institution can alone supply those sciences which, though rarely called for, are yet necessary to complete the circle, all the parts of which contribute to the improvement of the country, and some of them to its preservation. -- Thomas Jefferson

A bill for the more general diffusion of learning... proposed to divide every county into wards of five or six miles square;... to establish in each ward a free school for reading, writing and common arithmetic; to provide for the annual selection of the best subjects from these schools, who might receive at the public expense a higher degree of education at a district school; and from these district schools to select a certain number of the most promising subjects, to be completed at an University where all the useful sciences should be taught. Worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and completely prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts. -- Thomas Jefferson

Hmmm... Looks like we have some disagreement here. Between Founding Father Thomas Jefferson in favor of public education and the dynamic duo of Rev. Falwell and Herr Hitler against.

But back to the talking points: Such is their unsurpassed incoherence that the only comparison I can come up with is to a black hole: the vortex at which space and time and light and matter and mass all collapse upon and within themselves. (Or something like that.....)

Come to think of it, doesn't this artist's rendition of a black hole a whole lot like the images adorning the covers of books published by weirdo Right-wing nut-job literalist Southern Evangelical religious people? You know, like one of those ultra-cheesy depictions of the Apocalypse or the Book of Revelation or whatever?

Anyway, in the second part of this discussion, to be titled "HYPOCRITES!! (Part II): Health care, Medicare Part D and generational politics," I shall explain why this ludicrous Republican rhetoric opposing health care reform is truly and deeply hypocritical: Have you considered the fact that the people objecting most strongly to health care reform are precisely those who benefit the most from Medicare?

And Medicare is the single most costly government program in existence, far exceeding anything else, including military spending?

That's right, people over the age of 65, many of whom live in the South, are the recipients of the most expensive public program in existence. The same people who are so fervently opposed to Obama's 'socialistic' proposal for a public health insurance program that would compete with the private insurers....

The expense of this government program increased by several orders of magnitude when George W. Bush signed Medicare Part D, which is the prescription drug benefit, without bothering to figure out how he was going to pay for it, and sandwiched between the two biggest tax cuts for the wealthy in American history??

Obama is right not to intervene in Iran protests.Why the GOP's demand for 'stronger' response is self-centered & opportunistic.

It is increasingly clear that Obama has been correct all along in refusing to weigh in 'more forcefully' on the Iranian protests in the wake of the rigged reëlection of Ahmadinejad. I find convincing the point of view that Obama has, in effect and by design, already weighed in, in the most consequential way possible, on the issues at play in the present Iranian situation. That is, with his Cairo speech, he emboldened in an unprecedented way the resolve of forces of resistance in Iran.

Obama's speech was successful specifically because he eschewed the self-centered, Cold War-style rhetoric favored by the administration of George W. Bush. The GOP's predilection for musty and mechanistic cant evinces a Cold War-era conception of what it means to be pro-democratic in one's interactions with the international world in that it perceives the line between a free Occident and a repressed Orient to divide exclusively competing military and economic alliances. In other words, it pays no attention to what freedom and democracy actually mean.

By contrast, Obama, in his Cairo speech, spoke to Iranians -- and to inhabitants of the Middle East broadly -- with respect for their capacity for self-governance. It should be no surprise that, upon a population as highly educated as that of substantial portions of Iran, Obama's direct, serious-minded and non-patronizing address should have exercised a galvanizing effect.



An individual going by the name math4barack formulates the connection between Obama's Cairo speech and the events in Iran (from the Daily Kos):

The Iranian Revolution. First and foremost, it must be emphasized that this is an internal revolution. It comes from the people, the people that live there. They deserve all the credit. They are the ones who are putting their lives on the line and they are the ones who are providing the images and video. Nevertheless, without President Obama (ie under President Bush or President McCain), this revolution would not have been successful. For, both President Bush and a President McCain would have made the protesters look like Western, American pupptets [sic] by speaking intemperately.

Back on June 15, a blogger called Kalash offered an analysis that appears to support this favorable reading of Obama's approach (by way of an item in Media Nation):

The election results remind us that the will of the people is not the deciding force in Iranian politics. All candidates were screened by the Supreme Council. The leading challenger was Mir Hossein Mousavi. He is now seen as a "reformist" but that is a relatively meaningless term. Afterall [sic], he was once considered a radical.

[...]

Mousavi withdrew from political life in 1989. His resurgence has been interesting to watch as supporetrs [sic] have flocked to him in defiance of the current government. But there was no reason to expect much to change in Iran if he had emerged victorious. He is no Barack Obama. He is one of the boys, otherwise he wouldn't have been allowed to run.

Whether or not Mousavi had the election stolen from him, it seems clear the ruling class has made a calculating move. Anti-American sentiment is one of the strongest cards those wretched clerics hold. By merely softening the tone Tehran hears from Washington, Obama has weakened their hand considerably. But re-instating Ahmadinejad ensures that US-Iranian relations will continue down a rocky road. What happens next is crucial. If Obama takes a firm position as a result of what's happening, the mullahs may emerge victorious.

That would be a real shame. The system of governance in Iran is terrible. There is no democracy to speak of. The people are ruled by despotic men of 'faith' who do nothing to advance their country's interests. Aside from keeping Iran in the headlines, Ahmadinejad has done nothing to improve his country's standing in the international community. It should come as no surprise that so many Iranians are opposed to him.

[...]

Hopefully what is happening right now is a homegrown phenomenon. Iran needs another revolution if it is to rid itself of the backwards theology pulling the strings. Mousavi is hardly the right person to lead such a movement, but what's important is that the people rise up. The process won't be easy. We may be witnessing the beginning of something huge… It won't happen overnight, but the "Islamic Republic"' is bound to fall one day or another.

The people of Iran deserve better than Ahmadinejad and the clerics who give him his orders. The current regime is a complete disaster, but the media tends [sic] to focus more on the less important issues. In other words, this is not about Israel. Iran's position on Zionism and the question of Palestine is a just one. The problem is the lack of civil freedoms and democracy, not nuclear weapons.

John McCain, whose latest stunt aimed at getting people to pay attention to him consisted last week of joining the GOP chorus clamoring for Obama to use "stronger rhetoric" against Iran has since expressed appreciation for Obama's more recent comments that stressed the United States' opposition to any infringement upon rights of protest and of fair political representation, as well as restating the exceedingly good point that to turn the United States into a foil for Iran would undermine and disrespect the very cause for which the protesters are fighting.

A close look at McCain's aforementioned comments -- made on the CBS program Face The Nation -- gives weight to the view that the Republican call for "stronger rhetoric" is both politically opportunistic and evidence of a worldview that is obsessed not with actual events in the world -- not with, for instance, the success of the Iranian protesters' plea for substantive democratic rights:

"America's position in the world is one of moral leadership," the senator said. "It's not about what takes place in the streets of Iran. It is about what takes place in America's conscience."

Not about what takes place in the streets of Iran, but about America. Go figure. Thanks for clarifying, Angry Johnny. That speaks volumes.

Did populism collapse the house that WFB built?Some thoughts as to the wheres, hows, whens & wherefores.

I. The "Palin farce" & Republican populism.

An article that should be required reading for the George Wills of the world appears in today's Wall Street Journal (which I spotted by way of Media Nation). Penned by a certain Mark Lilla, it's one of the bitter pills that I'd advise self-respecting Republicans to swallow:

The Palin farce is already the stuff of legend. For a generation at least it is sure to keep presidential historians and late-night comedians in gainful employment, which is no small thing. But it would be a pity if laughter drowned out serious reflection about this bizarre episode. As Jane Mayer reported recently in the New Yorker ("The Insiders," Oct. 27, 2008), John McCain's choice was not a fluke, or a senior moment, or an act of desperation. It was the result of a long campaign by influential conservative intellectuals to find a young, populist leader to whom they might hitch their wagons in the future.

And not just any intellectuals. It was the editors of National Review and the Weekly Standard, magazines that present themselves as heirs to the sophisticated conservatism of William F. Buckley and the bookish seriousness of the New York neoconservatives. ...

... So what happened? How, 30 years later, could younger conservative intellectuals promote a candidate like Sarah Palin, whose ignorance, provinciality and populist demagoguery represent everything older conservative thinkers once stood against? It's a sad tale that began in the '80s, when leading conservatives frustrated with the left-leaning press and university establishment began to speak of an "adversary culture of intellectuals." It was a phrase borrowed from the great literary critic Lionel Trilling, who used it to describe the disquiet at the heart of liberal societies. Now the idea was taken up and distorted by angry conservatives who saw adversaries everywhere and decided to cast their lot with "ordinary Americans" whom they hardly knew. In 1976 Irving Kristol publicly worried that "populist paranoia" was "subverting the very institutions and authorities that the democratic republic laboriously creates for the purpose of orderly self-government." But by the mid-'80s, he was telling readers of this newspaper that the "common sense" of ordinary Americans on matters like crime and education had been betrayed by "our disoriented elites," which is why "so many people -- and I include myself among them -- who would ordinarily worry about a populist upsurge find themselves so sympathetic to this new populism."

The die was cast. Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders' intellectual virtues -- indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

... Back in the '70s, conservative intellectuals loved to talk about "radical chic," the well-known tendency of educated, often wealthy liberals to project their political fantasies onto brutal revolutionaries and street thugs, and romanticize their "struggles." But "populist chic" is just the inversion of "radical chic," and is no less absurd, comical or ominous. Traditional conservatives were always suspicious of populism, and they were right to be. They saw elites as a fact of political life, even of democratic life. What matters in democracy is that those elites acquire their positions through talent and experience, and that they be educated to serve the public good. ...

The article has something to say, namely that any portion of the educated Right should know better than to keep mum when a force like Sarah Palin is unleashed upon us, in the name of conservatism. And secondly, any conservative that should have known better but didn't, and who therefore didn't condemn Palin should now be ashamed of himself. (He -- predictably -- isn't). They should also be embarrassed. If they're not, then it's their loss, not the Left's. The less equipped these Palin-apologists are to spot the myriad internal contradictions in which the GOP identity is mired, the more likely it is that the USA can continue electing actual adults to national office.

II. However.

Not so sure I'm ready to buy into the premise that it wasn't until the 1980's that the Republican Party started playing the 'populist' (in both the euphemistic and straightforward senses) card. Or that it somehow wasn't until that shiny-chrome decade that the movement realized that, if it were to survive, it needed to appeal to racists and bigots. True, that commie-hating, loony-toony apologist for extremism Barry Goldwater failed to create an effective political alliance combining Northern industrialists with Southern segregationists. But it wasn't for lack of trying! His mistake? Perhaps he was a bit too forthright in his trigger-happy xenophobic militarist extremism?

III. How 'bout let's just say "the silent majority," wink wink?

Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon, et al., perfected the much-ballyhooed 'Southern Strategy' in 1968. This maneuver capitalized on the widespread Southern opposition to Lyndon Johnson's having masterminded the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The Southern Strategy is an object lesson in Machiavellianism that the GOP milked for all (and I mean all) that the once-venerable, nominal "Party of Lincoln" could. And while I'm not aware that Nixon was specifically hateful toward black people, Tricky Dick earned his very nickname as a consequence of his use of bald-faced lies, smear-campaigns and McCarthyism in order to get elected to the House of Representatives. And, let's face it, everybody knows that Nixon was anti-semitic (a prejudice that then as now appears to walk hand-in-hand with pandering to the militarist far-Right fringe of the Zionist Movement, perpetuating dishonestly and dangerously a reprehensible ideology that equates 'good' Judaism with radical-Right-wing Zionism [See also: Hagee, John, John McCain's onetime anti-Catholic, anti-semitic pastor. See also: Kristol, William]).

Obviously, where Nixon benefited from the strategy electorally (with the exception of getting his ass handed to him by Jack Kennedy), it was with eight years of Ronald Reagan that the Goldwater Republicans could finally take their hatchet (the one that another Arizona politician, John McCain apparently inherited from them) to the public infrastructure, dismantling it limb from limb. Americans who so much as noticed -- it was, after all, the Spielberg 1980's -- greeted this carnage with either approval or indifference.

As impressively cynical a feat as Reaganomics turned out to be, perhaps even more striking was the unlikely election of George Herbert Walker Bush to the White House. People sometimes refer to Bush Senior's administration as the "Third Reagan Term." Uh...fair enough. But anyone who really wants to understand how the elder Bush managed to get elected had better come to grips with the singular, twisted genius of Lee Atwater. About whom: be sure to catch this documentary, which aired recently on PBS and will no doubt show up as a rerun in the near-future. Maybe Atwater was no Joseph Goebbels or Leni Riefenstahl. He was a Karl Rove, only times infinity.

Whereas Karl Rove's talent in the area of fascistic disinformation-peddling is damn impressive -- even if it may now look rather quaint, now that it's failed miserably in 2006 and especially 2008 --, Atwater was a natural where Rove is a tables-and-figures man. Atwater was a blues-guitar-playing (literally) opportunist who made a deal with the Devil -- and paid for it dearly. Rove is an Adolf Eichmann-figure. Savvier and more clever than Eichmann, of course. But possessing precisely the deficient capacities for reflection and critical thinking for which history has fated that Eichmann shall forever stand as a one-man morality play.

IV. Lee Atwater & the election of 1988.

Anyway (what's a blog if it doesn't veer off onto wild tangents?): Atwater cobbled together a presidential campaign -- that is, that of Bush Senior, in case we've forgotten -- whose unlikely success was fueled by the mere exhaust fumes of decades of slow-burning resentments and fears. Pure Southern Strategy, straight out of the Nixon playbook. Except in a way that plumbed new depths of dishonesty, race-baiting, demagoguery, shamelessness, and -- most importantly -- the whole discourse it imposed upon the presidential race was pure theater.

Unlike Nixon, who was promising, in effect, "law and order" to Southern and suburban whites who were scared of the rebellion of black nationalists and civil rights demonstrators, unlike Reagan, who lowered taxes, Bush Senior wasn't offering anything serious in return for handing him your vote. The Atwater strategy of playing upon accumulated conscious- and subconscious racism, xenophobia, neo-McCarthyism, anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism was nothing but manipulation that had previously been the province of beer commercials. It was all just to (1) slime the other guy and (2) scorch, as it were, the earth underneath the election such that many people became so turned off by the tactics and rhetoric that they (a.) failed to look closely enough to see that it was all being generated by one side (the GOP), and (b.) therefore didn't bother to vote. And they didn't. That's it. It was shameful and mendacious and mean-spirited even by the standards of the McCain campaign.

V. Back to Buckley: forgive him not for his McCarthyist high jinks.

Ever seen the video footage, shot during the political conventions of 1968 in which William F. Buckley offers to smack Gore Vidal in the face, calling him a 'fucking queer' (or something like that)? Which...to give Buckley his due, was not an inaccurate statement. It wasn't, nevertheless, all that relevant to the discussion at hand, which was the Vietnam War. (I'm not even sure that it rises to the status of ad hominem. Sorry, if that's harsh, Bill; may you rest in peace.)

Sure, our few remaining thoughtful conservatives here in the Year of Our Lord Two-Thousand and Eight have every reason to light a candle in gratitude to Buckley when attending high mass. Not so much for leaving them with The National Review, whose quality has plummeted at an astonishing rate since the exceedingly stupid Rich Lowry took the helm. (Rich Lowry is an idiot. In case I wasn't being clear about that.) No, these remaining thoughtful conservatives should venerate their forefather for his well-calculated move of severing the overt ties of the conservative movement to anti-semitism and the John Birch Society. But let's not forget that this same Bill Buckley was a huge supporter of Joseph McCarthy, that he embraced Jim Crow.

VI. Conclusion

In other words, I'll allow that the 1980's saw the anti-intellectual and anti-'elite' streak beginning to gobble up the Republican Party, such that this strain has now come to define the GOP in its totality. But don't let it off the hook that easily. Buckley and the early neocons, etc., may have been intellectuals, but they were also strategists, and cashing in on resentments -- particularly the Southern varieties -- was always a matter of chief concern.