Repugnicans’ Diversity

And people say there’s no diversity on the right! There might be more black people in NASCAR than in the Repugnicans’ quickly shrinking “big” tent, (notice FOX News’s complete disavowel of race’s role in Michael Steele’s “prominence”), but the GOP might have enough cross-cutting diversity in its employment of language to make up for its monochromaticity.

Setting the stage for the first major post-Obama institutional cave-in, problems are mounting at William F Buckley’s beloved National Review. After losing two generations of Buckleys to (different versions of) reality, this bastion of intelligent conservatism, the magazine’s most popular writer, David Frum, is leaving to start his own site. Potentially more damaging, however, is the institution’s declining brand. Thoughtlessly virulent comment boards, (largely) unflinching support for Sarah Palin (we’ll get to this in a second), and the omnipresent threat of the new mediascape have conspired to tarnish the reputation of the magazine as a reasonable conservative voice.

Despite some notable detractors, the National Review’s support for Palin is inexplicable unless read as a truly selfless effort to keep the team together. Buckley, who was known for a biting wit and an extensive vocabulary certainly wouldn’t have supported this beautiful Palinism:

“My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.”

It’s hard to believe that Sarah Barracuda might get a $7 million book deal.

After eight years of ridicule being hurled at Bush for his Engrish, one might think that the right would want someone who speaks WELL (instead of good).

So where does this leave conservative discourse?

Since I’m sure that Joe The Plumber will do a great job “Securing Our Freedom” as Joe-The-Blogger, there might not be much use for thoughtful conservatives over there on the right. Since I doubt they’ll be able to win much support from the Repugnican rank-and-file, might their allegiances be up for grabs. I hear there are some academics who are looking for help running the country.

What to do about Still-President Bush

Though the serious infighting, undermining, and 2012 posturing started a couple weeks ago, things have really picked up in the week since the big day. The fault lines between the plutocrats and the Christian Nationalists are growing clearer by the day; both rookie Repugnicans and veterans of conservatism’s 90’s successes are lining up supporters and GOP dinner dates while trying to figure out how to position themselves vis-à-vis the triple failure of Bush, McCain, and Palin.

Still-President Bush back in his prime

Newt Gingrich, possibly sensing a chance to forestall Mitt Romney’s ascension as the leader of the plutocrats, made news today by arguing for a wholesale renunciation of the Bush Administration. Had the Maverick been able to successfully disown the failures of Still-President Bush (instead of trying to out-Bush his primary opponents) the election may have turned out differently. Gingrich here is counting on the success of a retrograde rebranding by counting on the power of conservatives’ memories of the good times of the Contract with America era, before congressional Repugnicans were best known for their lobbying scandals, corruption charges, and lascivious AIM convos.

It might work, but The Newt is betting on the return of a dated political paradigm that relies on a discourse of crime reduction, welfare reform, immigration restrictions, and tax cuts. This strategy’s success depends on voters not only forgetting about the impending (rec/depr)ession, young voters going home, and a post-Obama American mileu disavowing the Repugnicans’ (barely concealed) racist discourse. Indeed, Newt’s return to power would ignore the pseudoprogressive inclusiveness advocated by Bobby Jindal and Charlie Crist (even 1999’s Governor Bush reached out to Latinos) and think nothing of this year’s embarassingly monochromatic convention.

One might think - judging by Repugnican candidates’ eagerness to appear with Still-President Bush in the last few months - that everyone in the GOP would want to turn the page on the last eight years. But the Wall Street Journal inexplicably ran an Op-Ed last Wednesday arguing that we’ve all been unfair to Bush because we couldn’t see what his vision revealed.

It seems that no matter what Mr. Bush does, he is blamed for everything. He remains despised by the left while continuously disappointing the right.

Yet it should seem obvious that many of our country’s current problems either existed long before Mr. Bush ever came to office, or are beyond his control. Perhaps if Americans stopped being so divisive, and congressional leaders came together to work with the president on some of these problems, he would actually have had a fighting chance of solving them.

To be sure, Mr. Bush is not completely alone. His low approval ratings put him in the good company of former Democratic President Harry S. Truman, whose own approval rating sank to 22% shortly before he left office. Despite Mr. Truman’s low numbers, a 2005 Wall Street Journal poll found that he was ranked the seventh most popular president in history.Just as Americans have gained perspective on how challenging Truman’s presidency was in the wake of World War II, our country will recognize the hardship President Bush faced these past eight years — and how extraordinary it was that he accomplished what he did in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.

One would think that the plutocratic WSJ would try to dump the blame for the administration’s failures at the feet of the Christian Nationalists. Maybe they don’t realize (or don’t want to) that they could be forced to pick sides in this conflict soon enough. Or maybe they have chosen sides.

“The Commonsense Center”

John Avalon from PajamasMedia:

The Republican Party can re‑emerge as a force by reconnecting with independents, centrists, and libertarians in the future.  Great parties have to be willing to grow, and in the GOP’s case, become more diverse.  But if socially conservative activists and cynical play-to-the-base politicians continue to impose rigid social conservative ideological litmus tests, the Republicans will be in the wilderness for a very long time.  For the Republican Party to revive itself and reconnect with independents, the Republican Party needs to look more like John McCain in his prime, and less like Tom DeLay.

A rhetorical placeholder for Reaganism, “the center” as we know it faces extinction because the category can’t comprehend what some call the demographic shifts of race and age, but which might be more usefully thought of as an ideological shift. The election of 2008 was in part a break in the way Americans think about ourselves in relation to the scary world beyond our shores.

America’s humbled position doesn’t get much discussed anymore, though it was on everybody’s lips in September 2001. The election of someone by the name of Hussein only seven years later is not so much a referendum on which white Southerner will flatter the most Americans. It’s an unexpected geopolitical saviness on the part of the American electorate. The Right’s Islamophobic attacks guaranteed that Obama would come off as even handed in the face of an extremist opposition. Sound like a quality you’d like in your leader? Me, too.

Limbaugh’s New Groove

Limbaugh, center, with hat.

Apparently, the President-Elect is to blame for the Bush economy’s depression, the teetering automotive industry, and the failure of the real estate bubble. It’s scary how they don’t even need an election to begin campaigning for Bush 2012, whoever he or she may turn out to be.

I suppose it’s heartening that what Limbaugh chooses to get worked up about proves he’s outlived his usefulness:

They’re going to take your 401(k), put it in the Social Security trust fund, whatever the hell that is. Trust fund, my behind.

Complaining about the social safety net in an economy like this one? These guys seem determined to make themselves completely obsolete by 2010.

How Did We Get Here?

John McCain's concession speech, where Palin was not allowed to speak.

The death throws of the McCain-Palin ticket appeared, at first, to be no more than the spasms of a dying Grand Old Party. More than just a confused political fossil, the Republican coalition is on the brink of shattering into its constituent parts. George W. Bush—as in the supurb trailer for the whelming film W.—might be asking himself, “How did we get here?”

Dubya’s rise took place in a political landscape fundamentally shaped by Confederacy’s winning the peace after Civil War. In this poisonous swamp, the fight for racial equality in 1960s tipped the electorate into Republican hands. Northern white sympathy for Southern civil rights struggles helped bring about the most important accomplishments of the era. With those achieved, however, black radicals set their sights on leveling education and housing segregation in the North. So the movement was quickly ended.

"The Soiling of Old Glory" by Mark Forman, 1976

Republicans learned to capitalize on the insecurities of many white Americans who felt that change was coming too fast. Even today, the Civil Rights movement exists in our cultural memory as the grinding oppression of heavy handed government programs that don’t befit the cherubic intentions of Dr. King. The avowed socialism of that movement thus assassinated, the conservatives appealed to the vague memories of a peaceful 1950s to reshape the electoral around racialized issues such as crime, drugs, and family values. Even today, in the Wall Street Journal, Mark Lilla (shame on this Detroiter) can dismiss leftward politics for being too anxious-making in the same breath with which he praises Richard Nixon’s retrograde politics:
 

[Conservative thought] offered shelter from the storm — from the mobs on the street, the radical posing of my professors and fellow students, the cluelessness of limousine liberals, the whole mad circus of post-’60s politics. Conservative politics mattered less to me than the sober comportment of conservative intellectuals at that time.

Using this rhetorical sleight of hand, Nixon and the Republicans draped themselves in the togas of order and stability, even while their agenda, as Naomi Klein points out, uses violence to impose unstable neoliberal economies on unwilling peoples around the world. The fruits of this “Conservative” labor have been made obvious in the continuing US economic crisis.

Reagan incited his Revolution by officiating the unholy marriage of big business to big church. Well-heeled plutocrats supplied money and influence in return for the grassroots ground game of the backward-looking christianists. As Werle says, “None of them were gonna knock on doors.”

The dream ticket of both the plutocrats and the christianists came in 2000. A patrician corporate and gubernatorial executive who was also been born again crafted a ruthless political machine that barnstormed the South Carolina primary, slandering the erstwhile Maverick and igniting his wingnuts base, a base he would share with the Governor of Alaska.

Since W.’s dreadul, insomniac election, many cynical thinkers have wondered how the wool was pulled over the eyes of so many who voted against their own self-interests on behalf of the top 1%. The tryst between the plutocrats and the christianists had no small part in that deception. The truth is, the magic and necromancy of evangelical christianism hoodwinked working class whites into voting for their plutocratic masters. It all makes sense if one’s pastor is telling you that a vote for a Democratic is a vote for the devil. But the fissures that Palin’s candidacy represented and furthered have exposed some of the hypocrisies of the Republican party. The growing rift between the christianists and the plutocrats is what this site intends to blog.