“The South’s Victim Complex”: How Right-Wing Paranoia Is Driving New Wave Of Radicals
Southern voters will go to the polls in November 150 years, almost to the day, after Gen. Sherman commenced his March to the Sea, breaking the back of the Confederacy and leaving a burnt scar across the South. The wound never fully healed. Humiliation and resentment would smolder for generations. A sense of persecution has always mingled with the rebellious independence and proud notions of the South’s latent power, the promise that it “will rise again!” Congressman Paul Broun Jr., whose Georgia district spans nearly half of Sherman’s calamitous path to Savannah, evoked the “Great War of Yankee Aggression” in a metaphor to decry the Affordable Care Act on the House floor in 2010. The war, in Broun’s formulation, was not a righteous rebellion so much as a foreign invasion whose force still acts upon the South and its ideological diaspora that increasingly forms the foundation of conservatism.
The persecution narrative deployed by Broun, so woven into Southern culture and politics, has gained national currency. Contemporary conservatism is a Southern politics. Ironically, the Southern persecution narrative, born of defeat, has spread nationwide to form the basis of Republican victories since Reagan and the conservative hegemony that moderated President Clinton, establishing through President George W. Bush nearly 40 years of rightward movement at the national level. It is the South’s principal political export, now a necessary ideological substrate in Republican rhetoric. Lee Atwater, the Karl Rove of the Reagan era, explained the nationalization of Southern politics accomplished with the 1980 campaign and election of President Reagan: “The mainstream issues in [the Reagan] campaign had been, quote, ‘Southern’ issues since way back in the Sixties,” Atwater said in 1981. Likely the foremost representative of that Southern mood was Alabama’s George Wallace, who in his 1963 gubernatorial inaugural address, the infamous “Segregation Forever” speech, invoked Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis and raged that “government has become our god.” Just months later, that omnipotent force would defeat Wallace when President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and forced desegregation at the University of Alabama. Wallace, though, would be rewarded for his stand, and the governor carried five Deep South states in his 1968 presidential run.
A century after the Civil War and Reconstruction, the 1960s was a sort of second federal invasion, with the White House strong-arming Wallace, Supreme Court decisions finally implementing Brown’s desegregation order, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts radically reshaping Southern politics and culture. “The South went from being behind the times to being the mainstream,” Atwater said. It is helpful to consider the inverse: The mainstream GOP adopted the ’60s-era mood of the South. Atwater does not suggest that the South caught up with a modernized conservatism — i.e., that it ceased to be “behind the times” — but that the larger movement regressed, albeit with rhetorical coding to evade charges of old-school racism.
Since Reagan, then, conservatism’s principal issues cannot be extricated from what animated them in the Southern milieu of their birth. The North, if now only a phantom, prefigured the foreign other always at work in the modern conservatism borrowed from the South. Every major issue is argued in terms of persecution and attack. The racial minority is not the oppressed subaltern but a threat, whether physical or fiscal. Liberatory advances for women and LGBT Americans are assaults upon the family. Religious pluralism and fortifications of the wall between church and state evoke biblical accounts of Christian persecution. Deviations from increasingly neoliberal capitalism are described as authoritarian socialism. Relaxation of military aggression, especially under Obama, is even seen as collusion with the enemy.
Broun, a skilled purveyor of a Southern politics of persecution, was an early alarmist, predicting a violently oppressive, explicitly Hitlerian regime just days after President Obama’s election in 2008. Broun’s repeated evocation of Hitler and Stalin would later find its way into the crass iconography of Tea Party protests. The stakes have always been existential to Broun. In an almost mystical ritual, Broun, a born-again Christian, snuck onto the inaugural stage in 2009 to anoint the door through which Obama would pass with holy oil, entreating God to come to the aid of His besieged and cleanse the new president of his tyrannical evil. Broun’s persecution narrative, dismissed by many at the time as hayseed hyperbole, now forms the basis of conservative arguments on nearly every issue. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, likely 2016 presidential candidate whose star is still rising, adopts the “we want our country back” language and eschatological stakes of the Tea Party. Cruz is joined by newcomer Sens. Ron Johnson, Mike Lee and Rand Paul to form a conservative insurgency in a chamber historically governed by staid and statesmanlike members.
There is a problem, though, for the GOP in the 2014 and subsequent elections: Once the Fort Sumter-like salvo of superlatives and hyperbole is launched, it is likely impossible to quiet the fear and anger of the party’s base. Broun’s successor to represent the shamed land of Sherman’s path brings his own scorched earth rhetoric, sounding more 1860 than 2014. The presumptive successor, Rev. Jody Hice, whose primary win makes November’s general little more than a formality in the heavily conservative district, speaks uniformly in the language of persecution and insurrection. Like, actual insurrection. Hice regularly demands that Americans be permitted the full means of war — e.g., rockets, missiles, etc. — in order to prepare for an eventual armed conflict with the “secular,” “socialist” state. Hice, an evangelical pastor, is an unapologetic theocrat whose persecution complex pervades the entirety of his apocalyptic politics. Hice makes Broun look cuddly by comparison.
The GOP suffers through an internecine fight that shows little sign of slowing. The party’s internal conflict reached its latest peak in primary battles in two prominent Confederate locales: House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s historic loss in the old capital of the Confederacy and Sen. Thad Cochran’s controversial victory in Jefferson Davis’ Mississippi, a state whose flag still bears the Confederate battle emblem. Cantor’s primary defeat would have been inconceivable just a few years ago, but the very fervor stoked by Cantor for what many saw as an eventual run at the speakership metastasized further into an implacable anti-establishment impulse from which even Cantor was not exempt. Cochran, targeted as an establishment senator, had to resort to DEFCON 1 tactics and openly beseech Mississippi’s black Democrats to lift him over Tea Party candidate Chris McDaniel, a move that became something of a right-wing Alamo. In a late primary strategy, Jody Hice went public with the assertion that his opponent, a pro-business, establishment candidate, was courting the enemy in what the Hice campaign called a “Mississippi Strategy.”
A sort of Mason-Dixon line has begun to trace its way along the GOP’s internal fissures, threatening the coalition solidified by Reagan and sustained through the Bush presidency. After more than a generation of cultivating a narrative founded on persecution and insurrection, the GOP runs the risk of falling victim to a Maslow’s hammer-type predicament. If all you have is victimhood, all disagreement starts to look like oppression, even within your own party. The more Southern, rural, Tea Party wing of the GOP is beginning to resemble the People’s Front of Judea from Monty Python’s “Life of Brian,” whose antipathy toward their Roman oppressors was exceeded only by their hatred for the Judean People’s Front.
Big business and national security Republicans of the party establishment, having benefited from the zeal brought by the martial politics of Southerners, can no longer control the emboldened rogues. The debt ceiling and shutdown episodes, pursued with crusade-like passion by conservative zealots, now frighten big business. Speaker John Boehner revealed the growing rift in a frank press conference after the 2013 shutdown, saying that Tea Party-affiliated groups have “lost all credibility.” Similarly, the intensifying isolationism of politicians like Sen. Rand Paul threatens Republican hawks’ long-standing hold on foreign policy matters.
When he reaches Congress, Rev. Hice will likely be laughed at, just as Broun was. But the politics Broun brought to Washington in 2007 is no longer a joke. The anger in the South is real. Voters along Sherman’s route have their own torches now. Hice’s theocratic, paranoiac and insurrectionist politics should not be scoffed at, if the trajectory charted by Southern politicians like Broun will be bent further with a new wave of radicals and a purging of moderates. The South is finally rising.
By: Matthew Pulver, Salon, September 30, 2014
“This Is Exactly How Karl Rove Works”: Doing The Same Things He’s Done Before
If you consumed any political news at all Tuesday, you likely know that Karl Rove, former political guru for George W. Bush, reportedly suggested during a conference last week that Hillary Clinton suffered a “traumatic brain injury” recently.
Rove quickly denied the charge, and told The Washington Post later in the day that “of course she doesn’t have brain damage.”
But the idea that the former first lady and possible future presidential candidate is brain damaged is already all over the media. Elsewhere in the Post, one can find over a thousand words from the ever-credulous Chris Cillizza on the subject of Clinton’s health, pivoting off Rove’s remarks. (Cillizza isn’t entirely sure if Rove’s bizarre charge is wrong: he actually begins a sentence “Putting aside the ‘brain damage’ debate, which seems like a bit of a red herring….”)
You could believe Rove’s denial—but you would have to ignore virtually his entire political career. For decades Rove has been circulating nasty, personal rumors about political opponents and placing them in the public conversation, all while obscuring his fingerprints, making the rumors become the opponent’s problem, not his. It’s page one of his playbook.
Take for example the tale of Mark Kennedy, a Democratic candidate for Alabama Supreme Court in 1994, as recounted in James Moore and Wayne Slater’s book on Rove, The Architect. Rove was working for Harold See, Republican and law school professor backed by the Business Council of Alabama.
Kennedy was “not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin’, tobacco-chewin’, pickup-drivin’ kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man,” Moore and Slater noted. A central feature of Kennedy’s campaign ads was the private nonprofit he founded for abused and neglected children.
That seems like an entirely benign, harmless résumé point to offer—but as Moore and Slater note, Kennedy “had never been in an election against Karl Rove.” This is what began to happen:
“[W]ord began to spread along the loose network of University of Alabama Law School faculty and students that Kennedy was a pedophile. The whisper campaign moved with a kind of ruthless efficiency from the hallways of the law school to folks back home, to big cities and small Alabama communities, everywhere students lived. [Kennedy’s campaign manager] said he heard about the whisper campaign directly from friends inside the law school, and as he studied polling data, he saw that it was working. But what to do about it?”
Kennedy couldn’t exactly call a press conference and announce he wasn’t a pedophile, as the authors note. He managed to win the election, but narrowly, and did not seek re-election.*
Rove is a master at forcing his adversaries to address vicious personal rumors that were never true in the first place. I could go on and on, but a brief highlight reel:
During the 2000 presidential contest, when Rove was working for Bush, the campaign “featured a widely disseminated rumor that John McCain, tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, had betrayed his country under interrogation and been rendered mentally unfit for office.”
When Bush was running against Ann Richards for governor of Texas in 1994, a persistent rumor circulated that Richards was a lesbian, helped in no small part by a push poll asking voters if they would be “more or less likely to vote for Governor Richards if [they] knew her staff is dominated by lesbians.” In fact, a regional Bush campaign chairman was quoted criticizing Richards for “appointing avowed homosexual activists” to state jobs.
Sometimes Rove doesn’t even restrict this tactic to political campaigns—he uses it for himself. Josh Green in The Atlantic in 2004: “In 1986 [John] Weaver and Rove both worked on Bill Clements’s successful campaign for governor, after which Weaver was named executive director of the state Republican Party. Both were emerging as leading consultants, but Weaver’s star seemed to be rising faster. The details vary slightly according to which insider tells the story, but the main point is always the same: after Weaver went into business for himself and lured away one of Rove’s top employees, Rove spread a rumor that Weaver had made a pass at a young man at a state Republican function. Weaver won’t reply to the smear, but those close to him told me of their outrage at the nearly two-decades-old lie. Weaver was first made unwelcome in some Texas Republican circles, and eventually, following McCain’s 2000 campaign, he left the Republican Party altogether.”
Many of these techniques actually come from Lee Atwater, who tutored Rove. “A supposed slip of the tongue that in fact gets some truly nasty tidbit on the record—that tactic is straight from the Atwater manual,” The New York Times noted in 2008. And the strategy has been reworked and refined by Rove in the ensuing years. (Note the echoes between his ageist attack on McCain’s mental health, and Tuesday’s broadside on Clinton’s brain.)
It’s only a matter of time until some reporter asks Clinton if she’s really suffered brain damage, and her response will revive the story once again, leaving legions of voters wondering if there really is something to all this brain damage talk. Rove knew exactly what he was doing by invoking that specter and then walking away innocently, twiddling his thumbs. It’s the same thing he’s always done.
By: George Zornick, The Nation, May 13, 2014
“The Intent Is Pure Partisan Power Politics”: The GOP’s Racial Dog Whistling And The Social Safety Net
You’ve no doubt heard the famous quote about race in politics spoken by the late Lee Atwater, the most skilled Republican strategist of his generation. Liberals have cited it for years, seeing in it an explanation, right from the horse’s mouth, of how contemporary Republicans use “issues” like welfare to activate racial animus among white voters, particularly in the South. Race may be an eternal force in American politics, but its meaning and operation change as the years pass. It’s time we took another look at Atwater’s analysis and see how it is relevant to today, because it doesn’t mean what it once did. Atwater may have been extraordinarily prescient, though not in the way most people think.
If a certain word unsettles you, you might want to read something else with your coffee, but it’s important we have Atwater’s quote, spoken in 1981 during an interview with a political scientist, in front of us:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.'”
As Rick Perlstein explained, the common interpretation of the quote—that Atwater was describing how the GOP shrewdly encourages and benefits from racism among voters while maintaining deniability for doing so—isn’t quite correct. Heard in context, it seems clear that the point Atwater was trying to make was that the GOP was evolving beyond racism, even if some of its favored policies were still better for some races than others. Eventually, the deniability wouldn’t just be plausible, it would be genuine.
At the time, this was more than a little ridiculous. Just a year before, Ronald Reagan had opened his campaign for president in Philadelphia, Mississippi, site of the murder of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, then spent a good deal of his campaign talking about welfare queens. Four years before, Reagan had told Southern audiences about how frustrating it was to stand in line at the grocery store behind a “strapping young buck” buying T-bone steaks with food stamps. And seven years after the interview, Atwater would join with Roger Ailes to mastermind the “Willie Horton” strategy for George H.W. Bush, in which the mug shot of a menacing black convict became as ubiquitous in the campaign as flags at a Fourth of July parade.
But in 2014, Atwater’s vision of a GOP evolving on race has finally come to pass, though not precisely in the way he intended. Back then, attacks on safety net programs like welfare and food stamps were used by Republicans as a means to activate barely contained racist feelings, with the knowledge that the more hostility white voters felt toward minorities, the better it would be for Republican candidates. Today, we see the reverse: Stirring up a bit of subconscious racism, or attacking the rights of minorities in much more practical ways, is a means to attack the safety net and undermine government.
Take, for example, the issue of voting. When the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, it was meant to dismantle the system under which white Southerners had kept blacks from exercising their right to vote, a system created to maintain white supremacy. And when the Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the law last year, Republican states rushed to rewrite their laws to do things like require ID in order to vote. Republican states all over the country have cut back on early voting, making sure to eliminate it on the Sunday before election day, when many black churches conduct “souls to the polls” voting drives after service. In Arizona and Kansas, Republicans even passed laws requiring that you not just document who you are but provide proof you’re a citizen in order to vote, laws that were just upheld by a federal judge.
Are the people who are going to be disenfranchised by a requirement for proof of citizenship going to be disproportionately minority? Of course they are. But that’s not the reason Republicans are so eager to impose these requirements. The reason is that the disenfranchised voters will disproportionately be Democrats. If there were a way to just as easily keep large numbers of Democrats from the polls without harming minorities particularly, they’d be perfectly happy to adopt that method instead. That’s why, for instance, in Texas the voter ID law passed by a Republican legislature and signed by Governor Rick Perry says that a gun license is a valid form of identification, but a student ID issued by a Texas university isn’t. When a legislature engineers a “racial gerrymander” to pack as many black voters into as few districts as possible, the goal isn’t white supremacy, it’s Republican supremacy. The result may be bound up in race, but the intent is pure partisan power politics.
And when Paul Ryan starts talking about how “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work,” the racial implications may be perfectly clear (it’s the “inner city,” i.e. the place where black people live, that has a “culture” of laziness, as opposed to the places where there are a lot of poor white people). But Ryan’s real goal isn’t to get you mad at black people, it’s to get you mad at the safety net. I have no trouble believing Ryan, in a way, when he says that race was not the heart of his intent. The man who once said that “the reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand” is surely motivated primarily by a Randian contempt for the “takers” who might need help with food or health insurance, whatever color their skin.
Today’s GOP is a place where open expressions of racism are far less tolerated, no one talks about “strapping young bucks” anymore, and the next Willie Horton is presented with more subtlety—and deniability—than ever. How much of that is because the mainstream blowback from blatantly racial appeals is just too high (just look at all the flack Ryan got), and how much because of a sincere change in perspective? It’s almost impossible to say. But if America’s blacks and Hispanics woke up tomorrow and starting voting 60 percent Republican, the party’s leaders would welcome them with open arms, then call an emergency session of every Republican-run state legislature to get rid of all those voter ID laws.
Of course, that won’t happen any time soon, so Republicans will continue to pass laws limiting minorities’ ability to vote, and offer roundabout appeals aimed, some more directly than others, at the darker places where people’s less generous feelings about race lie. Were he alive today, Lee Atwater would probably say, “See? I told you so.”
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, March 24, 2014
“Speaking In The Abstract”: How The Right Talks About Race, Even When They’re Not Talking About Race
In 1982, Republican operative Lee Atwater gave an interview to Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University, in which he explained how the so-called “Southern Strategy” of focusing on race had become much more subtle by the 1980s.
Atwater, who apologized to Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis for the “naked cruelty” of his tactics before his early death in 1991, put it like this:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
Some conservatives questioned whether the controversial words credited to Atwater were ever truly spoken by the man who helped George H.W. Bush win the presidency using tactics like the so-called “Willie Horton” ad. After the racially charged 2012 campaign — in which the Romney campaign used racial dogwhistles including insinuating that the president was trying to “take the work out of welfare” — James Carter IV, the son of the former president and the researcher who unearthed the “47 Percent” tape, convinced Lamis’ widow to release the audio above.
Atwater was in his own way echoing what President Lyndon B. Johnson once told his press secretary, Bill Moyers.
”I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,” the president said. “If you can convince the lowest white man that he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll even empty his pockets for you.”
In this summer of the George Zimmerman trial, Detroit going bankrupt and Republicans demanding huge cuts to food stamps, it’s clear that these old narratives are still embedded in our politics. And in the post-birther era, race is no longer, as Atwater said in 1982, “on the back burner.”
While the right wants to focus on black culture and “black-on-black” crime, they refuse to acknowledge that “white-on-white” crime is statistically nearly as common and happens much more often, as white people, who are the vast majority of the population, commit the vast majority of violent crimes in this country.
Negative aspersions on so-called “food stamps,” like Ronald Reagan’s old “welfare queens,” often carry a racial connotation. But government assistance in this country is actually used by ethnic groups pretty much in proportion to their share of the population:
African-Americans, who make up 22 percent of the poor, receive 14 percent of government benefits, close to their 12 percent population share.
White non-Hispanics, who make up 42 percent of the poor, receive 69 percent of government benefits – again, much closer to their 64 percent population share.
But these statistics fade into the background as Trayvon Martin instantly becomes a thug when he puts up his hood in the rain.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, July 28, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 