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.