Alan: I define fascism as a political (or psychological) system that promises to make the world safer than "God intended it to be." Trump promotes fear to induce self-terrorized frames-of-mind that persuade people to trade freedom for safety.
Self-Terrorization, The National Pastime
"Are Republicans Insane?" Best Pax Posts
Donald Trump: The Paranoid Style In American Politics And The Ongoing Festival Of Hatred
http://paxonbothhouses.
Republican presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan, the living American who has served longest as a White House senior staff adviser, observed: “The Republican philosophy might be summarized thus: To hell with principle; what matters is power, and that we have it, and that they do not.” “Where the Right Went Wrong"
Republican candidates for the presidential nomination claim that Democrats kill babies and harvest their organs to sell them, insist the U.S. is at war with an “evil state of consciousness,” compare Muslims to rabid dogs, and call for closing mosques and registering Muslims. These are not fringe candidates. They are the front-runners.
American politics has descended from principle into tribalism.
The descent began in 1968. That year’s presidential election looked to be a principled fight, with Democrats Hubert Humphrey and Robert F. Kennedy articulating a vision of an inclusive America in which the government expanded efforts to guarantee equality. For their part, Republican managers understood that they had a problem. The two sides of the Republican Party were too far apart to be cinched together by any national vision.
On the one hand, moderate Eisenhower voters believed in using the federal government to promote equality of opportunity, although they were nervous the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty had gone too far. On the other hand, Movement Conservatives who had backed Barry Goldwater in 1964 rejected the principles of the New Deal. They wanted the government to stop meddling with the social welfare legislation that they insisted was a redistribution of tax dollars from hardworking white people to lazy African-Americans.
To win the 1968 election, Richard Nixon’s team adopted the Southern Strategy, sacrificing black rights to cement Movement Conservative white voters to the Republican Party.
The racial dimension of this decision is well known. Less well known is that it also marked a seismic shift in the mechanics of American politics. The chaos of 1968 cemented the Republicans’ new electoral strategy. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. Democratic presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey got sent into obscurity, and former Vice President Richard M. Nixon won the White House without a popular majority.
The year after the election, an architect of the Southern Strategy named Kevin Phillips wrote a groundbreaking book. In “The Emerging Republican Majority,” he argued that voters aligned according to their ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds. By playing to those different constituencies, he argued, the Republican Party could cobble together a coalition that would dominate American politics for at least a generation. Republican leaders began to slice and dice the American electorate rather than advancing a coherent vision of the nation’s future.
This electoral strategy played perfectly to the growing power of Movement Conservatives in the party. The majority of Americans strongly believed in government regulation of business and in social welfare legislation. In contrast, Movement Conservatives embraced a vision of an American government that backed Christianity and unfettered capitalism. Knowing that they could never attract supporters based on their principles, Movement Conservatives turned instead to an age-old technique: They whipped up fear of an enemy. To take the nation back from secular New Dealers, Movement Conservatives insisted they were the true Americans, standing alone against a dangerous cabal. The enemy was a group they dubbed “Liberals” with a capital L to suggest they were a party that mirrored the Communists. Liberals were attacking America by destroying religion and individualism. Movement Conservatives insisted that business regulation and social welfare legislation were not, as most Americans thought, a way to level the American playing field. Such laws were a redistribution of wealth, since government programs and bureaucrats and programs cost tax dollars.
Movement Conservatives’ first boogeymen were African-Americans. Since Reconstruction, reactionaries had insisted that government protection of black rights meant a redistribution of wealth. The federal muscle required to enforce the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision enabled Movement Conservatives to rehash this old argument. Linking black rights to taxation enlisted racism on the side of Movement Conservatism, a linkage illustrated when Barry Goldwater picked up the Deep South states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina in 1964.
In 1968, the Southern Strategy brought the Movement Conservative narrative into the heart of the Republican Party. Nixon’s strategists deliberately pushed the idea of good Americans under siege by constructing a simple narrative designed to play on people’s emotions. “Voters are basically lazy,” one of Nixon’s advisors wrote. “Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we… seek to engage his intellect… The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.” Nixon cemented a constituency by dividing the world into the “Silent Majority,” and “they.” The Silent Majority was made up of hardworking men and women. “They” were minorities, women, and anti-war agitators who wanted government handouts even as they attacked the nation.
No comments:
Post a Comment