Alan: If the Democratic Party were home to a presidential candidate as unhinged as Senator Ted Cruz, Republicans would be permanently apoplectic with rage.
Throbbing neck veins.
Bleeding at the eyes.
Frothing at the mouth.
Ideologically, emotionally and rhetorically incontinent.
Bleeding at the eyes.
Frothing at the mouth.
Ideologically, emotionally and rhetorically incontinent.
Democrats, on the other hand, are reasonable enough to realize that Cruz is a Godsend, an unwitting ally -- a Hillary-enhancing propagandist whom no money could buy -- committed to the collapse of Republican respectability.
Ted Cruz Proves To Conservatives That They Are Twisted, Conniving People
Ted Cruz: Red Meat For The Blood Lusty. Let The Carnage Begin
Ted Cruz Proves To People That They Are Twisted, Conniving People
"How Ted Cruz Plans To Disrupt The GOP Presidential Primary," Fortune Magazine
Ted Cruz: "Give Me A Horse, A Gun And An Open Plain, And We Can Conquer The World"
Ted Cruz Proves To Conservatives That They Are Twisted, Conniving People
Ted Cruz: Red Meat For The Blood Lusty. Let The Carnage Begin
Ted Cruz Proves To People That They Are Twisted, Conniving People
"How Ted Cruz Plans To Disrupt The GOP Presidential Primary," Fortune Magazine
Ted Cruz: "Give Me A Horse, A Gun And An Open Plain, And We Can Conquer The World"
Compendium Of Best Pax Posts: Plutocracy, Economic Inequality & Collapse Of Conservatism
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/03/compendium-of-best-pax-posts-on.html
"American Conservatives And Oppositional-Defiant Disorder"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/arrested-development-american.html
Compendium Of Best Pax Posts: Plutocracy, Economic Inequality & Collapse Of Conservatism
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/03/compendium-of-best-pax-posts-on.html
"American Conservatives And Oppositional-Defiant Disorder"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/arrested-development-american.html
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/03/compendium-of-best-pax-posts-on.html
"American Conservatives And Oppositional-Defiant Disorder"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/arrested-development-american.html
Ted Cruz’s demented strategy: He doesn’t need to win the White House to push America rightward
Blocking legislation, defunding the government and thwarting compromise is the real mission — and he's winning
Ted Cruz’s candidacy highlights a fundamental rift in the Republican Party, a rift that observers often misunderstand as simply a tug-of-war between different gradations of conservatism. It is a gulf far more profound than this. Most Republicans recognize that the government must regulate some aspects of American capitalism, providing Social Security, veterans benefits, workplace safety, and basic infrastructure at the very least. But Cruz belongs to a reactionary wing of the party that rejects the idea that the government has any role at all to play in the American economy. Since the 1950s, the leaders of Cruz’s wing have been fighting to take the American government back to the days before FDR’s New Deal.
After unregulated capitalism sparked the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing 10-year Depression, Democrats and most Republicans came to accept the idea that the federal government must protect workers, provide jobs and establish a social safety net to keep people from starving. But big business leaders in the Republican Party loathed these programs. New Deal labor laws required businessmen to obey basic rules about safety, wages and hours, cutting into profits. New laws gave workers the right to unionize, and the right to join in a political faction strong enough to counter organizations of businessmen. At the same time, the New Deal raised taxes to pay for the new social safety net. Republican businessmen howled that these laws prevented them from making and keeping as much money as possible. They were “soak the rich” programs that would “crack the timbers of the Constitution.” The New Deal was socialism, pure and simple, they insisted.
But most Americans saw an active government as the proper response to the conditions of modern industrialism, and reactionary businessmen cried in the wilderness.
In 1951, fresh out of Yale, the son of a wealthy oil man launched a radical movement to break the popular New Deal consensus and take the party back to the pro-business government policies of Herbert Hoover. Speaking for the nation’s wealthy businessmen, William F. Buckley Jr. insisted that government must never interfere with either Christianity or “freedom,” a word he turned inside out. In Buckley’s worldview, American freedom no longer meant personal liberty; it meant the right of the wealthy to accumulate as much money as possible. He excoriated regulation and taxes as “collectivism” that redistributed wealth, and warned that welfare legislation destroyed individualism. Bemoaning the extraordinary popularity of America’s new government activism, he maintained that it was leading the nation to full-blown communism. He called for right-minded Americans to reverse the tide and restore the economic freedom he insisted was America’s fundamental principle. But Buckley and his ilk made little headway at first, for a mere 11 years after the Depression, very few Americans still believed in wholly unfettered capitalism.
Buckley’s reactionary ideas began to gain traction in 1954, when court-ordered school desegregation gave Movement Conservatives the opportunity to break the New Deal consensus by appealing to white racists. Many white Americans who liked the idea of an active government that regulated business and kept old people from starving hated the idea of an active government that protected their black neighbors. Buckley harped on this racial wedge in his new magazine, National Review. Movement Conservatism—Buckley’s creation– picked up momentum after 1957, when President Eisenhower sent troops to integrate Little Rock Central High School. This was the first intrusion of federal troops into the South since Reconstruction, and Movement Conservatives deliberately revisited the racist arguments of the late nineteenth century. They explained that integration was simply a redistribution of wealth because tax dollars, paid by hardworking white men, funded the troops that were defending grasping African-Americans. In 1960, Movement Conservatives in Buckley’s mold backed Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona for the presidency. They articulated their principles in “The Conscience of a Conservative,” published under Goldwater’s name but written by Buckley’s brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell. Those principles are Cruz’s playbook.
Heather Cox Richardson teaches nineteenth-century American history at Boston College.
No comments:
Post a Comment