As some people like their eggs 'sunny side up' with the attendant risk of slimy mucus-like egg white to contend with, so too some people like their politics ‘right side up’ with undercooked, half baked slime to contend with. They are called Republicans. The lower the standards the better they like it. As pigs enjoy wallowing in the muck so do Republicans revel at the opportunity to get ‘down and dirty.’ Truth, respect, civility, intellectual honesty, peer reviewed science - all of are little concern. It is all about effective propaganda.
As we all know the GOP (Grand Old Party), as the Republicans like to call themselves, was once the party of Lincoln. But I doubt if Abraham Lincoln were he alive today would touch the Republicans with a ten-foot pole. The party has mutated into something ugly and evil. It has become chock full of proudly ignorant and the easily manipulated ditto heads - essentially demagogue fodder. Add to this a solid component of wild-eyed Libertarian “pure capitalism” absolutists, a very generous helping of Second Amendment obsessed ‘happiness-is-warm-gun’ nuts and finally a noisy hoard of self-righteous fundamentalist Christians whose primary concern over all other issues is the absolute right of all fetuses intended or unintended to be born upon the earth (once you’re born, however, you’re on your own, Kiddo! ) Yet most of these folks, good intentioned as they may be, are from the very social classes in which Republican economic policies hurt the most.
Behind the curtain of this Republican ‘down home populism’ is a sort of Wizard of Oz, a tight network of smart, amoral corporatists with an extensive and effective lobbying apparatus, ideologically linked is a shadowy network of tax-loathing, secretive independent billionaires. This ‘lose confederation of millionaires and billionaires’ (to borrow from a Paul Simon song) quietly serves as a brain trust, as puppet masters and paymasters for the Grand Old Party. They work, often hand in hand with many like-minded Democrats, to keep in place (and upgrade when possible) a fervently pro-corporate, globalized (read outsourcing of jobs), staunchly anti-union, under-regulated, social sector-minimalized, full strength-warfare state (as opposed to welfare state) rolling ever forward.
In recent times and especially since the Southerners departed (thanks to LBJ’s signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965), the two parties have successfully staked out different territories with respect to pro-capitalism economic ideology specifically regarding the role of the government. While the Democrats appeal to their base, which includes underprivileged minorities, by supporting programs that might help them, the Republicans traditionally oppose any such programs and consider such support anathematic to the character of said recipients. Also Republicans steadfastly oppose any restriction on business (even if it’s to make their beloved capitalism work better – i.e. antitrust legislation.) They also have in recent years become rabidly anti-environmental to the core.
Republicans like to call themselves “conservatives”, although it’s never clear exactly what they want to conserve. But the word resonates well with the poorly educated lower and middle class whites who feel like they are ‘doing OK, thank you’ and don’t need any help from Big Brother - that is until it all falls apart. Republicans always equate any government program other that military, prisons or police as being a slippery slope toward “socialism.” Socialism to them involves some admixture of European social democratic welfare state style socialism and the old hammer and sickle, police state, Soviet Union socialism/communism. The two are illogically but conveniently merged for emotive effect. In fact many a Republican’s political careers has been launched by accusing an opponent of a being “a Red” or a “Pinko”.
A weakened Democratic Party coming out of the Viet Nam war era (which they were rightly blamed for) relied mainly on the misdeeds and downfall Republican Richard Nixon (who we now realize was actually a moderate in terms of economic policy, anyway) rather than formulating a bold new program. The result was good-hearted conservative Southern Democrat Jimmy Carter’s inept and unlucky presidency. In the 1970s the Democrats floundered under a Cold War foreign policy fiasco (as former puppet state Iran became revolutionary Iran broke and away from the US orbit in an ugly hostage crisis) and a faltering economy as joblessness increased while inflation and interest rates ran rampant, and oil supplies choked up. This paved the way for the right wing of a formerly “center right” party to redefine the entire political landscape as the Republicans found their own FDR in reverse – Ronald Reagan. Reagan was the consummate politician – actor by trade and a sly charming demagogue by nature. He singled handedly wrenched the entire US political spectrum as far to the right as it has ever been - and things have never the same since. And Reagan unveiled something new under the sun ’supply side economics’, to whit: simply lower taxes (on mainly the wealthy) and the extra income will be re-invested and create sufficient economic growth to recoup the lost revenues. It was a cruel hoax. Reagan left office with a monumental national debt (remember balancing the budget was an article of faith in pre-Reagan Republican circles.) Of course Reagan’s real enemy was the dreaded welfare state, which would now could be deemed politically impossible (for subsequent Democratic administrations) to maintain because of the horrendous overhead just to pay the interest on the now gargantuan national debt.
But the Republican heir to the throne, George H.W. Bush (AKA Bush the Elder,) could not keep industrial-strength, contradiction embedded Reaganism going on forever and suffered a humiliating one-term presidency being defeated in 1992 election by one William (Bill) Clinton of Arkansas.
Again the Democrats had offered up a Southern Democrat (one of the few that their were left by the 1990s.) Clinton found traction once he began behaving like a true moderate Republican (also an endangered species by then.) The Republicans hated Clinton not because of his program, it was straight out of their traditional party-line pre-Reagan rulebook, but because he did it so well. In the end with the Religious Right and moralistic Republican hypocrisy at full high tide, Clinton was nearly impeached for lying about something as personal as his extramarital sex life!
But somehow Clinton’s successful “Republican Presidency” (welfare reform and a balanced annual budget) was not enough to keep the Democrats in power. Enter one George W. Bush, who eventually materialized as a self-styled ersatz Ronald Reagan sans Reagan’s charisma, luck or intellectual curiosity. As we know the Bush presidency was handed its defining moment and opportunity in a basket when the blowback from US geopolitical maneuvers in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Israel/Palestine resulted a crazed jihadist attack of the World Trade Center. Eight years later suffice to say whatever good will and nostalgia for Reagan still lingered with the masses of apolitical types, Georgie Boy blew it all away big time with two wars, a dogged adherence to Reagan’s discredited ‘supply side’ nonsense (tax cutting coupled with major spending in which Reagan’s astronomical annual deficits were actually dwarfed,) a blithely mismanaged major natural disaster and finally on the eve of departure, the mother of all recessions.
But the GOP survived Richard Nixon being driven from office for indictable criminality and it has survived a presidency of breathtaking incompetence (and also possible indictable) Yet what a cranky, creaking piece of work the Grand Old Party has morphed into! With an idealistic, cautious to a fault, centrist, intellectual Democrat in as President who is stuck with a Pandora’s box of inherited problems, the Republicans have mutated into a well-oiled machine of a denial, dishonesty and rabid demagoguery. Their sole purpose has become a unified mission to undermine, discredit and mock the sitting president’s every action and every attribute. And add to their hate mongering the Democratic president just so happens to be of mixed-race lineage (he’s black!) This provides a target rich environment for their full arsenal of veiled racist innuendos and flanking maneuver racism.
Republicans are now counting on the Bushian-generated quagmire of misery to prove to be inescapable, and the electorate will turn away from Obama and the Democrats and turn back in disappointment to their only other choice – them! To make matters worse a new media landscape has emerged as daily newspapers fall like bowling pins replaced by shallow, banal, context-free cable news ‘infotainment’ (one outlet even becoming simply megaphone for the Republican Party and its even crazier right wing.) Couple that with a nationwide network of intellectually dishonest, demagogic radio and TV jabberwockies and a loose confederation of fanatic right wing Internet bloggers dedicated to assiduously resisting any idea left of Genghis Khan and you have the present media landscape.
The fight over the final version of this unfolding omnibus bill to confront the raging, resource hemorrhaging mess our health care system is in will be telling. But it is mere prelude to the even more critical world-historical struggle before us – global climate change. Because whether or not the US can reign in its runaway health care costs, as important as it is, it is only incidental compared to our leadership in reigning in global warming in which the US is a major contributor and important hegemonic role model. The same dark forces of denial, dishonest argumentation, ignorance and pigheadedness will be at play - but more of them and even more in earnest.
