Michelle Goldberg elegantly slams the pundits.
In November, several outright Nazis and white supremacists will appear on Republican ballot lines. Arthur Jones, a founder of a neo-Nazi group called the America First Committee, managed to become the Republican nominee for Congress in the heavily Democratic Third District in Illinois. The Republican candidate in California’s 11th District, John Fitzgerald, is running on a platform of Holocaust denial. Russell Walker, a Republican statehouse candidate in North Carolina, has said that Jews descend from Satan and that God is a “white supremacist.”
Corey Stewart, Virginia’s Republican Senate nominee, is a neo-Confederate who pals around with racists, including one of the organizers of the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville last year. The longtime Iowa Republican representative Steve King has moved from standard-issue nativist crank to full-on white nationalist; he recently retweeted a neo-Nazi and then refused to delete the tweet, saying, “It’s the message, not the messenger.”
Clearly, the time has come for a serious national conversation. And so political insiders across the land are asking: Has the Democratic Party become too extreme?
We do not have a liberal party in this country. We have a conservative party, the Democrats, and a far-right looney-tunes fascist party, the Republicans. I am not going to pay any attention to the nattering nitwits who want to play Liebermanesque games and express shock that people don’t want the Democratic party to drift farther to the right, to cater to the assholes.
It’s time to swing back to reason.
Don’t forget the white supremacist gun fondling trash Brian Kemp for Georgia governor.
Scroll down to see his actual campaign ads. No, they’re not clips from “Who Is America?”
Jonathan Freedland over at The Guardian notes that nothing is likely to move conservative Americans against Trump, even a “jaw-dropping” announcement from the Mueller investigation. The booger-eating trailer trash that constitutes the Trump base gave up on facts, evidence and truth a long time ago, so nothing is going to dissuade them from his side. Meanwhile, progressive Americans can’t seem to get anything going, making me wonder what’s going to happen in November.
I respect Michelle Goldberg’s comments, but I fear it’s just more liberal flailing.
Yeah, they’re threatening to be twice as pragmatic and centrist next election cycle. X-TREME incremental change when it’s convenient!
“Arthur Jones, a founder of a neo-Nazi group called the America First Committee, managed to become the Republican nominee for Congress in the heavily Democratic Third District in Illinois”
To quote Jake Blues:
“I hate Illinois Nazis.”
The Democrats are slightly more complicated than that. They’re an alliance between conservatives and progressives. Strange, I know.
First, recall that the same forces that drive us to have two parties also drive those parties to have two wings.
Democrats until 1932: a conservative wing and a fascist wing.
Republicans until 1932: an urban elite wing and a working poor wing.
The Democrats had an iron grip on the south (fascists ftw. huzza. -_- ), Republicans owned northern cities, northern farmers mostly aligned with Republicans but gave Democratic conservativism a fair shot.
Democrats 1932 – 1947: a coalition of traditional conservative and fascist democrats along with urban poor normally reserved for Republicans.
Republicans 1932 – 1968: the urban elite and a dwindling supply of middle class progressives that turned more to the Dems.
The Great Depression ruined things for the Republicans. They’d been preaching trickle-down and lower taxes for decades (second verse, same as the first) and it collapsed, spectacularly. FDR (the first modern Dem) built a coalition of everyone hurt by the GD, leaving the Republicans with the only group that could ride out a depression: the urban elite. It worked spectacularly well and pulled the country out of depression and set up social safety nets (racistly).
Truman, the second modern democrat, tried to build on FDR’s legacy in 1947. Thinking that, in a bright new modern era and in the aftermath of the horrors of Nazi Germany, perhaps the US would be ready to be a little less horrible to brown people, he tried to pass Civil Rights Legislation.
The US was not ready. Strom Thurmond (racist rapist piece of shit from my own state, SC) defected. He filibustered the legislation, killing it, and led the southern fascists out of the Dems, forming the Dixiecrats, the only stable, notable 3rd party not to replace one of the major two nor to just fade away… an odd case.
Dems 1947-1968: a poor-conservatives-who-aren’t-quite-that-racist wing and a progressive wing combining brown workers and a growing group stolen from the Republican middle class.
Reps 1947-1968: libertarian assholes (Goldwater Republicans) getting lonelier and more desperate as progressive folks (Rockefeller Republicans) abandon them.
In the middle of the century, the Dixiecrats had a stranglehold on the south. Thanks to fascist violence and “election” machinery, Dems and Reps couldn’t break in. The fascists couldn’t win outside the south, but nobody else could win in the south, and they were big enough no one could ignore them.
Goldwater upset things horribly. In 1964, he was against Civil Rights legislation, claiming a small government was better. This, plus being a hateful shit, meant he lost in a landslide. Except in the Solid South. Not only did he win the south, he was the first Republican to win there in a century. It was … weird. But it spelled the way forward.
In 1968, Nixon ran on the Southern Strategy:
1) Be racist
2) Just don’t sound racist.
The first rule won him the south. The fascists really only cared about you being racist. They were single issue voters. They learned a broader hatred in the second half of the 20th century.
The second rule won him states outside the south. The US was incredibly racist in 1968, but even then they looked at the South in shock and awe. “We hate negros, sure, but we don’t set dogs on them on national television! We kill them quietly and secretly in alleyways like decent folk!” Being openly fascist/racist had confined the Dixiecrats. Learning to speak in code let the fascists loose on the rest of the country.
In short, Nixon opened the doors of the Republican party, invited the fascists inside and offered them the keys. All they had to do was ditch the hoods. The fascists agreed. Now, instead of calling them the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, we call them White Evangelicals. So banal, yeah?
It’s hard to remember today how wildly popular Nixon was. He won handily in 1968. In 1972 he won in a goddamn landslide. He almost won all fifty states. It was almost a complete sweep of the electoral map. He won everything but Massachusetts, 1 vote in Maryland, and 1 faithless elector in VA who went libertarian (an old fascist never-Republican die-hard). In fact, Watergate happened because a landslide wasn’t good enough for Nixon; he wanted that sweep. In the space of a year he went from the most popular president in US history to resigning in disgrace for having committed multiple felonies.
Dems 1968-present: an unwieldy alliance of the old conservatives and the new progressives, with conservatives running the machinery.
Reps 1968-present: an efficient alliance of aristocratic/capitalist fascists and racist fascists.