The Tea Party's Hot Mess

[RobDownSouth]

The truth is something you people all have trouble with. You really ought to be worried about your party's prospects this Fall.

"Anytime Vetteman is reduced to yammering about 'the truth', you've won" - Abraham Lincoln

 

[Adre]

There's nothing more shameful that an Obama supporter running away from his culpability.

Voted for Bush, voted for Obama. I don't need Fox News to cast my ballot for me.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Oh, so now you want some activist judges to help you? Figures.

Vetty's hated that pesky Constitution his entire life, and he's hated America since they failed to give him a parade for losing in Vietnam.

 

[KingOrfeo]

So Hopefully he'll be beaten by his Democrat opponent in the Fall . . .

For once we agree.

 

[bronzeage]

So does Thad Cochran. He had to reach out to the left to defeat his opponent. Hopefully he'll be beaten by his Democrat opponent in the Fall, so we can keep the line between liberty and oppression clearly defined.

Why the GOP is doomed, summed up in one sentence.

 

[unregistered]

 

[RobDownSouth]

Hopefully the perfidy of Republican Rinos will continue to be exposed and doomed as the phonies they are, most are establishment liberals running as conservatives in order to get elected.

Cochran voted to ban gay marriage and has admitted fucking chickens.
Your insistence on calling him a RINO has no factual basis.

 

[gotsnowgotslush]

Whining and dining-
"They cheated!"
"It is voter fraud!"
("We wants it, we needs it. Must have The Precious. They stole it from us. Sneaky little (Democrats?) hobbitses. Wicked, tricksy, false!")
- Gollum

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/tea-partyers-pretty-miserable-chris-mcdaniel-lost-mississippi

 

[bronzeage]

Hopefully the perfidy of Republican Rinos will continue to be exposed and doomed as the phonies they are, most are establishment liberals running as conservatives in order to get elected.

Which means the GOP remains committed to shrinking its membership.

There are no big fish in a small pond.

 

[bronzeage]

Cochran voted to ban gay marriage and has admitted fucking chickens.
Your insistence on calling him a RINO has no factual basis.

Actually, he was called out on the chicken thing. When he admitted it was a hen and not a rooster, it tipped the vote in his favor.

 

[julybaby04]

So does Thad Cochran. He had to reach out to the left to defeat his opponent. Hopefully he'll be beaten by his Democrat opponent in the Fall, so we can keep the line between liberty and oppression clearly defined.

I have heard that quite a bit. Many conservatives are going to vote democrat if the establishment Republicans refuse to listen to it's supporters.

 

[bronzeage]

I have heard that quite a bit. Many conservatives are going to vote democrat if the establishment Republicans refuse to listen to it's supporters.

What do you say when someone said that to you?

 

[RobDownSouth]

I have heard that quite a bit. Many conservatives are going to vote democrat if the establishment Republicans refuse to listen to it's supporters.

Not even YOU believe that.

At worst, the hardcore haters such as yourself will stay home.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Hopefully the perfidy of Republican Rinos will continue to be exposed and doomed as the phonies they are, most are establishment liberals running as conservatives in order to get elected.

But, if you drive out of the party all who are not what you judge true conservatives, the GOP will no longer win any elections outside a few solid-red counties and districts. There are not enough of your kind to win elsewhere and certainly not enough to win nationally. You know this.

 

[bronzeage]

Not even YOU believe that.

At worst, the hardcore haters such as yourself will stay home.

No. About two dozen of them will meet at the VFW hall, to hang a portrait of George Wallace on the wall and declare the nominating convention of the American Independent Party to be officially convened.

Excuses always have to be offered for disappointing losses. When Julie says, "Many conservatives are going to vote democrat if the establishment Republicans refuse to listen to it's supporters," she is pretending there are many more conservatives than actually exist.

The idea a conservative would vote for a liberal candidate in order to punish party leaders is just silly on the face of it, but after reading other stuff the Tea Party expects people to believe, it's not surprising.

 

[RobDownSouth]

No. About two dozen of them will meet at the VFW hall, to hang a portrait of George Wallace on the wall and declare the nominating convention of the American Independent Party to be officially convened.

Excuses always have to be offered for disappointing losses. When Julie says, "Many conservatives are going to vote democrat if the establishment Republicans refuse to listen to it's supporters," she is pretending there are many more conservatives than actually exist.

The idea a conservative would vote for a liberal candidate in order to punish party leaders is just silly on the face of it, but after reading other stuff the Tea Party expects people to believe, it's not surprising.

There's a definite ceiling with regard to Tea Party acceptance. It's somewhere in the 20-25% range, higher in the Bible belt.

They cannot get their candidates elected until they find a way to mask their message.

 

[AllyRose]

"Anytime Vetteman is reduced to yammering about 'the truth', you've won" - Abraham Lincoln

Abraham, or as vettey likes to call him, Imam Ibrahim Lincoln.

 

[Sean Renaud]

It was difficult to get past the part that anyone thinks any party in power will result in a stable society.

Despite the fact that thousands of years of human history tell us that it will?

 

[KingOrfeo]

It was difficult to get past the part that anyone thinks any party in power will result in a stable society.

We have a stable society. That's part of the problem -- nothing whatsoever (and least of all the Tea Party) really threatens the power and wealth and position of the 1%.

 

[bronzeage]

There's a definite ceiling with regard to Tea Party acceptance. It's somewhere in the 20-25% range, higher in the Bible belt.

They cannot get their candidates elected until they find a way to mask their message.

There is one hard and fast rule in politics. If your group is not the majority in your party, you can't be the majority in anything else. The Tea Party's only realistic goal is to be the majority in their party. Nothing else matters to them.

If this keeps up, the GOP will only nominate a Vice Presidential candidate because they'll become so used to being second place, they can't tell the difference.

 

[eyer]

From Salon:

Wednesday, Jun 25, 2014 07:45 AM EDT

Tea Party’s hot mess: Inside a noisy, disenchanted movement

After Chris McDaniel's unlikely defeat in Mississippi last night, an angry movement is about to get even angrier

Elias Isquith

In Mississippi on Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran defeated state Sen. Chris McDaniel in a runoff election to determine who would be the state Republican Party’s nominee for Senate in the extremely conservative state. Despite the fact that the two men were more or less indistinguishable on issue positions, the race was remarkably contentious and largely defined by dueling allegations of impropriety and fraud. Indeed, while non-conservatives may consider the differences between the so-called establishment and Tea Party wings of the GOP to be slight, the primary battle that reached its culmination last night is clear evidence that Republicans themselves strongly disagree.

On that front, if nowhere else, Mississippi GOPers have themselves an unlikely companion: University of Washington associate professor Christopher Parker, who is the author of 2013′s “Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America” and is a firm believer that the divisions within the GOP are significant and likely to endure. Hoping to gain a keener insight into the Tea Party mind, Salon recently called Parker to discuss his research, his recent Brookings Institution paper on the Tea Party and why he doesn’t think the kind of bickering and dysfunction we saw in Mississippi as of late is likely to go away any time soon. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.

You make a distinction between Tea Party conservatives and establishment conservatives, even though they often support essentially the same policies. How come?

There are a couple of really key differences, one of which has to do with change. An establishment conservative doesn’t necessarily embrace change of any kind; in fact, there’s a reason they cling to conservatism, because they prefer stability. So they don’t necessarily embrace change, but what they do do is they know that [change is] necessary in order to maintain a stable society over the long haul … What they want is, if a change is going take place, they prefer to have organic, controlled change versus revolutionary change. In other words, evolutionary versus revolutionary change. You can see that in the works of Edmund Burke, who railed against the French Revolution because it was such a drastic change and [because] he would have preferred more evolutionary change, not something so drastic that it completely overturned the foundations of society. The difference between these establishment conservatives is that they see change as a necessary “evil,” if you will, in order to maintain a stable society over the long run.

Now, a reactionary conservative, they don’t want change at all. In fact, they want to look backwards in time to a time during which their social group — their power and cultural hegemony was unquestioned. Beyond that, they will do anything they can to protest social change of any kind, up to and including breaking the law … That’s what the Klan did; that’s what the Tea Party has done on a couple of occasions with their violence. It’s not as much violence as you saw with the Klan in the 1920s, but you do see some of the ways in which they break law and order. If you’re a real conservative, you’re supposed to be all about law and order. But these reactionary conservatives — they’re not completely about law and order if it means capitulation and the loss of their social prestige.

Let me just tell you one second point: Another axis of difference between the two is that an establishment conservative will see policy differences or policy preference differences between them and progressives as merely political differences. But these reactionary conservatives see policy differences, or differences of policy preferences, as a contest between good and evil. They have this Manichaean way of looking at politics, this apocalyptic way of looking at politics. Therefore, compromise cannot be [allowed]. Compromise will not be tolerated whatsoever, because they see it as concession to evil, whereas an establishment conservative knows that compromise is necessary.

Could you expand a bit on the point you just made about Tea Party lawlessness, because one of the common claims the right makes in defense of the Tea Party is to contrast its supposed law-abiding nature with the — again, supposedly — more anarchic behavior of the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

Think about what happened in Arizona, with the attack of some of the Arizona representatives’ offices that voted in favor of the Affordable Care Act. Some of their offices were vandalized by Tea Partyers — that’s one example. A more recent example, quite honestly, is what recently happened in Nevada, those people that went on that shooting spree that killed those cops … those people were linked to the Tea Party. I’m not saying they were members of the Tea Party, but they were Tea Party sympathizers. As a matter of fact, [their victims] were draped in the Gadsden flag. So, I’m just saying … [Tea Party supporters are] not above breaking law and order. They’re not above challenging law and order.

What are some other popular conceptions about the Tea Party that you think are mistaken?

The bottom line is that a lot of people assume that the Tea Party people are just crazy … but that’s not the case. I mean, that’s really not the case, and I want to dismiss that misconception as soon as I can … Another misconception [is] that the Tea Party is really just a bunch of racist people and that their movement is about racism — and it’s really not … It’s bigger than racism. People who tend to support the Tea Party, they tend to be sexist, they tend to be homophobic, they tend to be xenophobic; so it’s not just about race. It’s about difference. It’s about anything that violates their phenotypical norm of what it’s supposed to mean to be an American: white, mainly male, middle-class, middle-aged or older, heterosexual, and native born. Anything that falls beyond that description is considered not to be a true American and therefore … these groups are encroaching on what they see as the “real” America, the America that they’ve come to know and love through their lifetime.

Would you include Christian among those things a Tea Partyer is likely to think an American is supposed to be?

Christian, writ large, yeah. I would definitely say that.

To that point, though, what would you say to Tea Party folks who would point to the popularity of women like Sarah Palin — or people of color like Ben Carson — as proof that charges of bigotry are unfounded?

They would say people like Ben Carson and Herman Cain [are] these sort of “silver-minded Negroes.” They’re the exceptions. Now if we want to talk about looking at black folks as a whole, no — they’re racist. There are some exceptional people that agree with their views whom they like and whom they want to hold out there to blunt any claims that they’re racist; they’re going to pick a couple token people. But that doesn’t absolve them of racism.

OK. So what was your other point about Tea Party misconceptions?

My other point was that [Tea Partyers are] not crazy. People want to say that they’re crazy, and they’re really not. They want to maintain their social position, their social prestige; and as Frederick Douglass once said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will.” So it’s rational to want to hold onto your position; it’s completely rational. It’s about the means through which [Tea Partyers] do that — that’s what the problem is.

One could say, “Maybe they need to be more educated!” But that’s another fallacy as it pertains to the Tea Party: People think they’re dumb. They’re not dumb. Twenty-six percent of all strong Tea Party identifiers have at least a bachelor’s degree. People think they’re poor, or that they’re working-class. No, they’re not. Twenty percent of all Tea Party households have at least a $100,000 of income. So they’re not dumb, and they’re not working-class or poor — and this has been the case with Birchers, this was the case with the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, this was the case with the Know-Nothing Party in the 1850s. Same demographic group, every time.

Another problem is just the double-talk that they use. They claim they’re about small government; they’re really not. They claim that they don’t like Barack Obama cause he’s a progressive; have they really looked at his legislative record? He governs as a centrist, regardless of what they believe his beliefs to be. On that, if you look at what happened on George Bush’s watch — I mean, let’s be for real: the deficit on George Bush’s … expanded 104 percent … If you look at Clinton’s tenure, it only expanded about 14 percent. If you look at the national debt, how much that expanded on George Bush’s watch; if you look at the extent to which discretionary spending in George Bush’s first term expanded — I think it expanded by like 48-49 percent. I mean, come on! We didn’t see any Tea Partyers out there at the time. We saw nothing when George Bush was doing all this stuff. George W. Bush got TARP passed. We saw nothing. Now we get Obama in, and now the world is going to shit …

If I could play devil’s advocate here, what about the argument that many Tea Party types — like Glenn Beck, for example — like to make that says George W. Bush was bad, and they didn’t like him either, but that Barack Obama’s taken everything about Bush that was bad and made it even worse?

Was there a Tea Party when Bush was in office? No. [Laughs] All right? I’m not saying that it’s not possible; all I’m saying is that, to the extent to which there was some sort of tangible push-back or counter-mobilization [on the right] against Bush, we didn’t see it when he was in office. So there might have been some people at the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute, and there were — especially at the Cato Institute — who had serious issues with Bush’s policy. I’m not saying that there weren’t. But we didn’t see any mass movement. We didn’t see any mobilization of this kind. Not even close to the mobilization of the Tea Party. Think about the number of people that are Tea Party members, just at the national level: We’re talking maybe 700,000 people. But if we’re talking about Tea Party sympathizers, people who strongly identify with the Tea Party, we’re talking about 45-46 million people … We didn’t see anything like this when Bush was in office, period.

That ties in with another one of your arguments, which is that the Tea Party is, fundamentally, not an astroturf phenomenon but rather a legitimate grass-roots movement.

It’s not the astroturf movement that a lot of people think it is. I said that in that Brookings piece and I’ve backed that up with some evidence. Now, we saw what happened in Virginia, right? You had this guy, Brat, who got almost zero support from national Tea Party organizations — and look what happened. So I think there’s really valid data showing that the Tea Party movement is not the astroturf movement that people think it is.

You’ve argued before that we shouldn’t expect to see the Tea Party movement dissipate so long as Barack Obama — or even Hillary Clinton — is president, because it’s fundamentally a reactionary movement driven by people who are afraid of losing privileges. That makes sense, but at the same time, if their complaints are so much about power and station rather than more abstract ideological disagreements, that doesn’t leave those of us who aren’t conservative may options when it comes to negotiating with these people. So while I get that establishment Republicans will make their peace with the Tea Party because their differences are relatively minor, what are the rest of us supposed to do?

What happens with these reactionary, right-wing movements, historically, is that they tend to coalesce whenever [the people involved] believe social change is happening too fast … So if there’s no threat to the “American way of life,” these people will go underground, as people say. But that doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily go away. For a while, they will go underground and we won’t have to deal with them. But as soon as they perceive another existential threat, then they will reappear again. It happens all the time, historically.

Something I’m wondering is, since reactionary conservatism is so tied-up with identity — specifically, a white, mostly male and Christian identity — does this mean that we can expect to see movements like the Tea Party disappear in the future, when the U.S. is projected to no longer be majority-white? (I know the whole question of what is whiteness is loaded and the definition has changed throughout American history, but let’s table that element, if we could.)

I think it’s possible, but I don’t think it’s going to happen in the near future. Maybe in 50 years … But when you see these voter-suppression efforts, and the ways in which [voter ID proponents] continue to move the goal posts in order to ensure that they get the [voters] who are, for lack of a better term, more pro-status quo … and if they continue to move the goal posts, then they will continue to extend this sense of cultural entitlement and the hegemony they feel they are supposed to have.

But they’re losing and [that dominant position] is slipping away, little by little … They’re prolonging their cultural hegemony through these shenanigans that they’ve been conducting for the last four or five years, and it’s going to continue to be that way until the demographics in this country change sufficiently so that Republicans [have] more of an incentive to start listening to the policy preferences of people that don’t look like them …

That makes me wonder something that, in all honesty, makes a me a bit uncomfortable but: If you’re correct and it’s the case that these people won’t ever back down so long as they feel their social placement threatened, would it be possible to argue that Democrats would be better off nominating candidates who are not superficially threatening — i.e., who are white guys — while still pushing the same policy goals as they would under Obama or Clinton?

It doesn’t make sense logically because — you see what the Tea Party is doing to the Republican Party right now? It’s tearing it apart. So if I were a strategist, I’d continue to pick candidates that make the Tea Party group want to remain politically viable because it’s ripping the Republican Party in half.

But what about the idea that though the Tea Party has unquestionably hurt the GOP in some ways — they’d probably control the Senate by now if not for the Tea Party, for example — it’s also helped them gain a real iron hold over the House of Representatives and many state governments? Might their effect on the Republican Party not be quite so uniformly negative, then?

I think that’s a legitimate argument … Short of having some election reform … then that’s going to continue to be the case … That’s a tough question, Elias. I think you’re right, I think it could continue to muck up the world before we can get legislation passed; and if that’s the case, then we have to get a strong president in there that’s not afraid to pass an executive order, if it comes to that.

As Obama is doing now, with his strategy of doing as much via executive order as possible.

Right. We’re probably going to have to resort to something like that.

Last question: Were you surprised to see Rep. Kevin McCarthy beat out Rep. Raúl Labrador in the vote for a new House majority leader, now that Rep. Eric Cantor is stepping down? Labrador was generally seen to be the Tea Party’s preferred candidate, but McCarthy won. Do you think this is surprising and does it mean the establishment within the GOP is more powerful than conventional wisdom implies?

To the extent that the Republicans still run the House and Boehner’s speaker of the House, I’m not surprised at all that the establishment is starting to exercise a little more of their power. Boehner has the control; he’s the speaker of the House. He has a lot of discretion and a lot of power. So while these folks are sitting in the House right now, and they know that the Republicans are more than likely to win the House again in 2014, they don’t want to run against Boehner. I don’t think they want to do that. So I’m not surprised in the least that an establishment person won. Now, we’re going to see what happens in the continuing primary season as they continue to roll along, because I think the Tea Party is going to be around and I think they are far from finished. So we’ll see. I think the real litmus test is going to be what happens in the next Congress. That’s going to be the real litmus test.

Not to speak for LadyVer, but I think the most important points in the article are:

1) Despite the fact that outside observers see little space between the establishment-conservative-evolutionary and TP-reactionary-revolutionary wings of the GOP, the divide is very real to them and is not about to go away.

2) It is a mischaracterization or rather an incomplete characterization to call the TP "racist," they are fearful of all elements in American society that are not middle-age-or-older middle-class-or-higher white males. Angry White Men, IOW.

3) Despite astroturf elements it really is a grassroots movement of AWM as described above.

4) The TPers are mostly not poor and ignorant rubes, they are solid middle-class and upper-class people. That is why the TP exists -- they are defending their position, their power and privileges and property, from perceived threats by government, the poor, the working class, and the ethnic/racial/cultural/generational Other. More on that here:

Sunday, Oct 6, 2013 07:05 AM EDT

Tea Party radicalism is misunderstood: Meet the “Newest Right”

Our sense of the force currently paralyzing the government is full of misconceptions -- including what to call it

Michael Lind

To judge from the commentary inspired by the shutdown, most progressives and centrists, and even many non-Tea Party conservatives, do not understand the radical force that has captured the Republican Party and paralyzed the federal government. Having grown up in what is rapidly becoming a Tea Party heartland–Texas–I think I do understand it. Allow me to clear away a few misconceptions about what really should be called, not the Tea Party Right, but the Newest Right.

The first misconception that is widespread in the commentariat is that the Newest Right can be thought of as being simply a group of “extremists” who happen to be further on the same political spectrum on which leftists, liberals, centrists and moderate conservatives find their places. But reducing politics to points on a single line is more confusing than enlightening. Most political movements result from the intersection of several axes—ideology, class, occupation, religion, ethnicity and region—of which abstract ideology is seldom the most important.

The second misconception is that the Newest Right or Tea Party Right is populist. The data, however, show that Tea Party activists and leaders on average are more affluent than the average American. The white working class often votes for the Newest Right, but then the white working class has voted for Republicans ever since Nixon. For all its Jacksonian populist rhetoric, the Newest Right is no more a rebellion of the white working class than was the original faux-populist Jacksonian movement, led by rich slaveowners like Andrew Jackson and agents of New York banks like Martin Van Buren.

The third misconception is that the Newest Right is irrational. The American center-left, whose white social base is among highly-educated, credentialed individuals like professors and professionals, repeatedly has committed political suicide by assuming that anyone who disagrees with its views is an ignorant “Neanderthal.” Progressive snobs to the contrary, the leaders of the Newest Right, including Harvard-educated Ted Cruz, like the leaders of any successful political movement, tend to be highly educated and well-off. The self-described members of the Tea Party tend to be more affluent and educated than the general public.

The Newest Right, then, cannot be explained in terms of abstract ideological extremism, working-class populism or ignorance and stupidity. What, then, is the Newest Right?

The Newest Right is the simply the old Jeffersonian-Jacksonian right, adopting new strategies in response to changed circumstances. While it has followers nationwide, its territorial bases are the South and the West, particularly the South, whose population dwarfs that of the Mountain and Prairie West. According to one study by scholars at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas:



The Tea Party right is not only disproportionately Southern but also disproportionately upscale. Its social base consists of what, in other countries, are called the “local notables”—provincial elites whose power and privileges are threatened from above by a stronger central government they do not control and from below by the local poor and the local working class.

Even though, like the Jacksonians and Confederates of the nineteenth century, they have allies in places like Wisconsin and Massachusetts, the dominant members of the Newest Right are white Southern local notables—the Big Mules, as the Southern populist Big Jim Folsom once described the lords of the local car dealership, country club and chamber of commerce. These are not the super-rich of Silicon Valley or Wall Street (although they have Wall Street allies). The Koch dynasty rooted in Texas notwithstanding, those who make up the backbone of the Newest Right are more likely to be millionaires than billionaires, more likely to run low-wage construction or auto supply businesses than multinational corporations. They are second-tier people on a national level but first-tier people in their states and counties and cities.

For nearly a century, from the end of Reconstruction, when white Southern terrorism drove federal troops out of the conquered South, until the Civil Rights Revolution, the South’s local notables maintained their control over a region of the U.S. larger than Western Europe by means of segregation, disenfranchisement, and bloc voting and the filibuster at the federal level. Segregation created a powerless black workforce and helped the South’s notables pit poor whites against poor blacks. The local notables also used literacy tests and other tricks to disenfranchise lower-income whites as well as blacks in the South, creating a distinctly upscale electorate. Finally, by voting as a unit in Congress and presidential elections, the “Solid South” sought to thwart any federal reforms that could undermine the power of Southern notables at the state, county and city level. When the Solid South failed, Southern senators made a specialty of the filibuster, the last defense of the embattled former Confederacy.

When the post-Civil War system broke down during the Civil Rights Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, the South’s local notable class and its Northern and Western allies unexpectedly won a temporary three-decade reprieve, thanks to the “Reagan Democrats.” From the 1970s to the 2000s, white working-class voters alienated from the Democratic Party by civil rights and cultural liberalism made possible Republican presidential dominance from Reagan to George W. Bush and Republican dominance of Congress from 1994 to 2008. Because their politicians dominated the federal government much of the time, the conservative notables were less threatened by federal power, and some of them, like the second Bush, could even imagine a “governing conservatism” which, I have argued, sought to “Southernize” the entire U.S.

But then, by the 2000s, demography destroyed the temporary Nixon-to-Bush conservative majority (although conceivably it could enjoy an illusory Indian summer if Republicans pick up the Senate and retain the House in 2016). Absent ever-growing shares of the white vote, in the long run the Republican Party cannot win without attracting more black and Latino support.

That may well happen, in the long run. But right now most conservative white local notables in the South and elsewhere in the country don’t want black and Latino support. They would rather disenfranchise blacks and Latinos than compete for their votes. And they would rather dismantle the federal government than surrender their local power and privilege.

The political strategy of the Newest Right, then, is simply a new strategy for the very old, chiefly-Southern Jefferson-Jackson right. It is a perfectly rational strategy, given its goal: maximizing the political power and wealth of white local notables who find themselves living in states, and eventually a nation, with present or potential nonwhite majorities.

Although racial segregation can no longer be employed, the tool kit of the older Southern white right is pretty much the same as that of the Newest Right:

The Solid South. By means of partisan and racial gerrymandering—packing white liberal voters into conservative majority districts and ghettoizing black and Latino voters–Republicans in Texas and other Southern and Western states control the U.S. Congress, even though in the last election more Americans voted for Democrats than Republicans. The same undemocratic technique makes the South far more Republican in its political representation than it really is in terms of voters.

The Filibuster. By using a semi-filibuster to help shut down the government rather than implement Obamacare, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is acting rationally on behalf of his constituency—the surburban and exurban white local notables of Texas and other states, whom the demagogic Senator seems to confuse with “the American people.” Newt Gingrich, another Southern conservative demagogue, pioneered the modern use of government shutdowns and debt-ceiling negotiations as supplements to the classic filibuster used by embattled white provincial elites who prefer to paralyze a federal government they cannot control.

Disenfranchisement. In state after state controlled by Republican governors and legislators, a fictitious epidemic of voter fraud is being used as an excuse for onerous voter registration requirements which have the effect, and the manifest purpose, of disenfranchising disproportionately poor blacks and Latinos. The upscale leaders of the Newest Right also tend to have be more supportive of mass immigration than their downscale populist supporters—on the condition, however, that “guest workers” and amnestied illegal immigrants not be allowed to vote or become citizens any time soon. In the twenty-first century, as in the twentieth and nineteenth, the Southern ideal is a society in which local white elites lord it over a largely-nonwhite population of poor workers who can’t vote.

Localization and privatization of federal programs. It is perfectly rational for the white local notables of the South and their allies in other regions to oppose universal, federal social programs, if they expect to lose control of the federal government to a new, largely-nonwhite national electoral majority.

Turning over federal programs to the states allows Southern states controlled by local conservative elites to make those programs less generous—thereby attracting investment to their states by national and global corporations seeking low wages.

Privatizing other federal programs allows affluent whites in the South and elsewhere to turn the welfare state into a private country club for those who can afford to pay the fees, with underfunded public clinics and emergency rooms for the lower orders. In the words of Mitt Romney: “We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care.”

When the election of Lincoln seemed to foreshadow a future national political majority based outside of the South, the local notables of the South tried to create a smaller system they could dominate by seceding from the U.S. That effort failed, after having killed more Americans than have been killed in all our foreign wars combined. However, during Reconstruction the Southern elite snatched victory from the jaws of defeat and succeeded in turning the South into a nation-within-a-nation within U.S. borders until the 1950s and 1960s.

Today the white notables of the South increasingly live in states like Texas, which already have nonwhite majorities. They fear that Obama’s election, like Lincoln’s, foreshadows the emergence of a new national majority coalition that excludes them and will act against their interest. Having been reduced to the status of members of a minority race, they fear they will next lose their status as members of the dominant local class.

While each of the Newest Right’s proposals and policies might be defended by libertarians or conservatives on other grounds, the package as a whole—from privatizing Social Security and Medicare to disenfranchising likely Democratic voters to opposing voting rights and citizenship for illegal immigrants to chopping federal programs into 50 state programs that can be controlled by right-wing state legislatures—represents a coherent and rational strategy for maximizing the relative power of provincial white elites at a time when their numbers are in decline and history has turned against them. They are not ignoramuses, any more than Jacksonian, Confederate and Dixiecrat elites were idiots. They know what they want and they have a plan to get it—which may be more than can be said for their opponents.

Nice c&p, King0...

...you're the best!

But, when he employs the following, italicized word...

...could you convey what he actually means?

From Salon:

Wednesday, Jun 25, 2014 07:45 AM EDT

Tea Party’s hot mess: Inside a noisy, disenchanted movement

After Chris McDaniel's unlikely defeat in Mississippi last night, an angry movement is about to get even angrier

Elias Isquith

In Mississippi on Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran defeated state Sen. Chris McDaniel in a runoff election to determine who would be the state Republican Party’s nominee for Senate in the extremely conservative state. Despite the fact that the two men were more or less indistinguishable on issue positions, the race was remarkably contentious and largely defined by dueling allegations of impropriety and fraud. Indeed, while non-conservatives may consider the differences between the so-called establishment and Tea Party wings of the GOP to be slight, the primary battle that reached its culmination last night is clear evidence that Republicans themselves strongly disagree.

On that front, if nowhere else, Mississippi GOPers have themselves an unlikely companion: University of Washington associate professor Christopher Parker, who is the author of 2013′s “Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America” and is a firm believer that the divisions within the GOP are significant and likely to endure. Hoping to gain a keener insight into the Tea Party mind, Salon recently called Parker to discuss his research, his recent Brookings Institution paper on the Tea Party and why he doesn’t think the kind of bickering and dysfunction we saw in Mississippi as of late is likely to go away any time soon. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.

You make a distinction between Tea Party conservatives and establishment conservatives, even though they often support essentially the same policies. How come?

There are a couple of really key differences, one of which has to do with change. An establishment conservative doesn’t necessarily embrace change of any kind; in fact, there’s a reason they cling to conservatism, because they prefer stability. So they don’t necessarily embrace change, but what they do do is they know that [change is] necessary in order to maintain a stable society over the long haul … What they want is, if a change is going take place, they prefer to have organic, controlled change versus revolutionary change. In other words, evolutionary versus revolutionary change. You can see that in the works of Edmund Burke, who railed against the French Revolution because it was such a drastic change and [because] he would have preferred more evolutionary change, not something so drastic that it completely overturned the foundations of society. The difference between these establishment conservatives is that they see change as a necessary “evil,” if you will, in order to maintain a stable society over the long run.

Now, a reactionary conservative, they don’t want change at all. In fact, they want to look backwards in time to a time during which their social group — their power and cultural hegemony was unquestioned. Beyond that, they will do anything they can to protest social change of any kind, up to and including breaking the law … That’s what the Klan did; that’s what the Tea Party has done on a couple of occasions with their violence. It’s not as much violence as you saw with the Klan in the 1920s, but you do see some of the ways in which they break law and order. If you’re a real conservative, you’re supposed to be all about law and order. But these reactionary conservatives — they’re not completely about law and order if it means capitulation and the loss of their social prestige.

Let me just tell you one second point: Another axis of difference between the two is that an establishment conservative will see policy differences or policy preference differences between them and progressives as merely political differences. But these reactionary conservatives see policy differences, or differences of policy preferences, as a contest between good and evil. They have this Manichaean way of looking at politics, this apocalyptic way of looking at politics. Therefore, compromise cannot be [allowed]. Compromise will not be tolerated whatsoever, because they see it as concession to evil, whereas an establishment conservative knows that compromise is necessary.

Could you expand a bit on the point you just made about Tea Party lawlessness, because one of the common claims the right makes in defense of the Tea Party is to contrast its supposed law-abiding nature with the — again, supposedly — more anarchic behavior of the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

Think about what happened in Arizona, with the attack of some of the Arizona representatives’ offices that voted in favor of the Affordable Care Act. Some of their offices were vandalized by Tea Partyers — that’s one example. A more recent example, quite honestly, is what recently happened in Nevada, those people that went on that shooting spree that killed those cops … those people were linked to the Tea Party. I’m not saying they were members of the Tea Party, but they were Tea Party sympathizers. As a matter of fact, [their victims] were draped in the Gadsden flag. So, I’m just saying … [Tea Party supporters are] not above breaking law and order. They’re not above challenging law and order.

What are some other popular conceptions about the Tea Party that you think are mistaken?

The bottom line is that a lot of people assume that the Tea Party people are just crazy … but that’s not the case. I mean, that’s really not the case, and I want to dismiss that misconception as soon as I can … Another misconception [is] that the Tea Party is really just a bunch of racist people and that their movement is about racism — and it’s really not … It’s bigger than racism. People who tend to support the Tea Party, they tend to be sexist, they tend to be homophobic, they tend to be xenophobic; so it’s not just about race. It’s about difference. It’s about anything that violates their phenotypical norm of what it’s supposed to mean to be an American: white, mainly male, middle-class, middle-aged or older, heterosexual, and native born. Anything that falls beyond that description is considered not to be a true American and therefore … these groups are encroaching on what they see as the “real” America, the America that they’ve come to know and love through their lifetime.

Would you include Christian among those things a Tea Partyer is likely to think an American is supposed to be?

Christian, writ large, yeah. I would definitely say that.

To that point, though, what would you say to Tea Party folks who would point to the popularity of women like Sarah Palin — or people of color like Ben Carson — as proof that charges of bigotry are unfounded?

They would say people like Ben Carson and Herman Cain [are] these sort of “silver-minded Negroes.” They’re the exceptions. Now if we want to talk about looking at black folks as a whole, no — they’re racist. There are some exceptional people that agree with their views whom they like and whom they want to hold out there to blunt any claims that they’re racist; they’re going to pick a couple token people. But that doesn’t absolve them of racism.

OK. So what was your other point about Tea Party misconceptions?

My other point was that [Tea Partyers are] not crazy. People want to say that they’re crazy, and they’re really not. They want to maintain their social position, their social prestige; and as Frederick Douglass once said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will.” So it’s rational to want to hold onto your position; it’s completely rational. It’s about the means through which [Tea Partyers] do that — that’s what the problem is.

One could say, “Maybe they need to be more educated!” But that’s another fallacy as it pertains to the Tea Party: People think they’re dumb. They’re not dumb. Twenty-six percent of all strong Tea Party identifiers have at least a bachelor’s degree. People think they’re poor, or that they’re working-class. No, they’re not. Twenty percent of all Tea Party households have at least a $100,000 of income. So they’re not dumb, and they’re not working-class or poor — and this has been the case with Birchers, this was the case with the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, this was the case with the Know-Nothing Party in the 1850s. Same demographic group, every time.

Another problem is just the double-talk that they use. They claim they’re about small government; they’re really not. They claim that they don’t like Barack Obama cause he’s a progressive; have they really looked at his legislative record? He governs as a centrist, regardless of what they believe his beliefs to be. On that, if you look at what happened on George Bush’s watch — I mean, let’s be for real: the deficit on George Bush’s … expanded 104 percent … If you look at Clinton’s tenure, it only expanded about 14 percent. If you look at the national debt, how much that expanded on George Bush’s watch; if you look at the extent to which discretionary spending in George Bush’s first term expanded — I think it expanded by like 48-49 percent. I mean, come on! We didn’t see any Tea Partyers out there at the time. We saw nothing when George Bush was doing all this stuff. George W. Bush got TARP passed. We saw nothing. Now we get Obama in, and now the world is going to shit …

If I could play devil’s advocate here, what about the argument that many Tea Party types — like Glenn Beck, for example — like to make that says George W. Bush was bad, and they didn’t like him either, but that Barack Obama’s taken everything about Bush that was bad and made it even worse?

Was there a Tea Party when Bush was in office? No. [Laughs] All right? I’m not saying that it’s not possible; all I’m saying is that, to the extent to which there was some sort of tangible push-back or counter-mobilization [on the right] against Bush, we didn’t see it when he was in office. So there might have been some people at the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute, and there were — especially at the Cato Institute — who had serious issues with Bush’s policy. I’m not saying that there weren’t. But we didn’t see any mass movement. We didn’t see any mobilization of this kind. Not even close to the mobilization of the Tea Party. Think about the number of people that are Tea Party members, just at the national level: We’re talking maybe 700,000 people. But if we’re talking about Tea Party sympathizers, people who strongly identify with the Tea Party, we’re talking about 45-46 million people … We didn’t see anything like this when Bush was in office, period.

That ties in with another one of your arguments, which is that the Tea Party is, fundamentally, not an astroturf phenomenon but rather a legitimate grass-roots movement.

It’s not the astroturf movement that a lot of people think it is. I said that in that Brookings piece and I’ve backed that up with some evidence. Now, we saw what happened in Virginia, right? You had this guy, Brat, who got almost zero support from national Tea Party organizations — and look what happened. So I think there’s really valid data showing that the Tea Party movement is not the astroturf movement that people think it is.

You’ve argued before that we shouldn’t expect to see the Tea Party movement dissipate so long as Barack Obama — or even Hillary Clinton — is president, because it’s fundamentally a reactionary movement driven by people who are afraid of losing privileges. That makes sense, but at the same time, if their complaints are so much about power and station rather than more abstract ideological disagreements, that doesn’t leave those of us who aren’t conservative may options when it comes to negotiating with these people. So while I get that establishment Republicans will make their peace with the Tea Party because their differences are relatively minor, what are the rest of us supposed to do?

What happens with these reactionary, right-wing movements, historically, is that they tend to coalesce whenever [the people involved] believe social change is happening too fast … So if there’s no threat to the “American way of life,” these people will go underground, as people say. But that doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily go away. For a while, they will go underground and we won’t have to deal with them. But as soon as they perceive another existential threat, then they will reappear again. It happens all the time, historically.

Something I’m wondering is, since reactionary conservatism is so tied-up with identity — specifically, a white, mostly male and Christian identity — does this mean that we can expect to see movements like the Tea Party disappear in the future, when the U.S. is projected to no longer be majority-white? (I know the whole question of what is whiteness is loaded and the definition has changed throughout American history, but let’s table that element, if we could.)

I think it’s possible, but I don’t think it’s going to happen in the near future. Maybe in 50 years … But when you see these voter-suppression efforts, and the ways in which [voter ID proponents] continue to move the goal posts in order to ensure that they get the [voters] who are, for lack of a better term, more pro-status quo … and if they continue to move the goal posts, then they will continue to extend this sense of cultural entitlement and the hegemony they feel they are supposed to have.

But they’re losing and [that dominant position] is slipping away, little by little … They’re prolonging their cultural hegemony through these shenanigans that they’ve been conducting for the last four or five years, and it’s going to continue to be that way until the demographics in this country change sufficiently so that Republicans [have] more of an incentive to start listening to the policy preferences of people that don’t look like them …

That makes me wonder something that, in all honesty, makes a me a bit uncomfortable but: If you’re correct and it’s the case that these people won’t ever back down so long as they feel their social placement threatened, would it be possible to argue that Democrats would be better off nominating candidates who are not superficially threatening — i.e., who are white guys — while still pushing the same policy goals as they would under Obama or Clinton?

It doesn’t make sense logically because — you see what the Tea Party is doing to the Republican Party right now? It’s tearing it apart. So if I were a strategist, I’d continue to pick candidates that make the Tea Party group want to remain politically viable because it’s ripping the Republican Party in half.

But what about the idea that though the Tea Party has unquestionably hurt the GOP in some ways — they’d probably control the Senate by now if not for the Tea Party, for example — it’s also helped them gain a real iron hold over the House of Representatives and many state governments? Might their effect on the Republican Party not be quite so uniformly negative, then?

I think that’s a legitimate argument … Short of having some election reform … then that’s going to continue to be the case … That’s a tough question, Elias. I think you’re right, I think it could continue to muck up the world before we can get legislation passed; and if that’s the case, then we have to get a strong president in there that’s not afraid to pass an executive order, if it comes to that.

As Obama is doing now, with his strategy of doing as much via executive order as possible.

Right. We’re probably going to have to resort to something like that.

Last question: Were you surprised to see Rep. Kevin McCarthy beat out Rep. Raúl Labrador in the vote for a new House majority leader, now that Rep. Eric Cantor is stepping down? Labrador was generally seen to be the Tea Party’s preferred candidate, but McCarthy won. Do you think this is surprising and does it mean the establishment within the GOP is more powerful than conventional wisdom implies?

To the extent that the Republicans still run the House and Boehner’s speaker of the House, I’m not surprised at all that the establishment is starting to exercise a little more of their power. Boehner has the control; he’s the speaker of the House. He has a lot of discretion and a lot of power. So while these folks are sitting in the House right now, and they know that the Republicans are more than likely to win the House again in 2014, they don’t want to run against Boehner. I don’t think they want to do that. So I’m not surprised in the least that an establishment person won. Now, we’re going to see what happens in the continuing primary season as they continue to roll along, because I think the Tea Party is going to be around and I think they are far from finished. So we’ll see. I think the real litmus test is going to be what happens in the next Congress. That’s going to be the real litmus test.

Not to speak for LadyVer, but I think the most important points in the article are:

1) Despite the fact that outside observers see little space between the establishment-conservative-evolutionary and TP-reactionary-revolutionary wings of the GOP, the divide is very real to them and is not about to go away.

2) It is a mischaracterization or rather an incomplete characterization to call the TP "racist," they are fearful of all elements in American society that are not middle-age-or-older middle-class-or-higher white males. Angry White Men, IOW.

3) Despite astroturf elements it really is a grassroots movement of AWM as described above.

4) The TPers are mostly not poor and ignorant rubes, they are solid middle-class and upper-class people. That is why the TP exists -- they are defending their position, their power and privileges and property, from perceived threats by government, the poor, the working class, and the ethnic/racial/cultural/generational Other. More on that here:

Sunday, Oct 6, 2013 07:05 AM EDT

Tea Party radicalism is misunderstood: Meet the “Newest Right”

Our sense of the force currently paralyzing the government is full of misconceptions -- including what to call it

Michael Lind

To judge from the commentary inspired by the shutdown, most progressives and centrists, and even many non-Tea Party conservatives, do not understand the radical force that has captured the Republican Party and paralyzed the federal government. Having grown up in what is rapidly becoming a Tea Party heartland–Texas–I think I do understand it. Allow me to clear away a few misconceptions about what really should be called, not the Tea Party Right, but the Newest Right.

The first misconception that is widespread in the commentariat is that the Newest Right can be thought of as being simply a group of “extremists” who happen to be further on the same political spectrum on which leftists, liberals, centrists and moderate conservatives find their places. But reducing politics to points on a single line is more confusing than enlightening. Most political movements result from the intersection of several axes—ideology, class, occupation, religion, ethnicity and region—of which abstract ideology is seldom the most important.

The second misconception is that the Newest Right or Tea Party Right is populist. The data, however, show that Tea Party activists and leaders on average are more affluent than the average American. The white working class often votes for the Newest Right, but then the white working class has voted for Republicans ever since Nixon. For all its Jacksonian populist rhetoric, the Newest Right is no more a rebellion of the white working class than was the original faux-populist Jacksonian movement, led by rich slaveowners like Andrew Jackson and agents of New York banks like Martin Van Buren.

The third misconception is that the Newest Right is irrational. The American center-left, whose white social base is among highly-educated, credentialed individuals like professors and professionals, repeatedly has committed political suicide by assuming that anyone who disagrees with its views is an ignorant “Neanderthal.” Progressive snobs to the contrary, the leaders of the Newest Right, including Harvard-educated Ted Cruz, like the leaders of any successful political movement, tend to be highly educated and well-off. The self-described members of the Tea Party tend to be more affluent and educated than the general public.

The Newest Right, then, cannot be explained in terms of abstract ideological extremism, working-class populism or ignorance and stupidity. What, then, is the Newest Right?

The Newest Right is the simply the old Jeffersonian-Jacksonian right, adopting new strategies in response to changed circumstances. While it has followers nationwide, its territorial bases are the South and the West, particularly the South, whose population dwarfs that of the Mountain and Prairie West. According to one study by scholars at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas:



The Tea Party right is not only disproportionately Southern but also disproportionately upscale. Its social base consists of what, in other countries, are called the “local notables”—provincial elites whose power and privileges are threatened from above by a stronger central government they do not control and from below by the local poor and the local working class.

Even though, like the Jacksonians and Confederates of the nineteenth century, they have allies in places like Wisconsin and Massachusetts, the dominant members of the Newest Right are white Southern local notables—the Big Mules, as the Southern populist Big Jim Folsom once described the lords of the local car dealership, country club and chamber of commerce. These are not the super-rich of Silicon Valley or Wall Street (although they have Wall Street allies). The Koch dynasty rooted in Texas notwithstanding, those who make up the backbone of the Newest Right are more likely to be millionaires than billionaires, more likely to run low-wage construction or auto supply businesses than multinational corporations. They are second-tier people on a national level but first-tier people in their states and counties and cities.

For nearly a century, from the end of Reconstruction, when white Southern terrorism drove federal troops out of the conquered South, until the Civil Rights Revolution, the South’s local notables maintained their control over a region of the U.S. larger than Western Europe by means of segregation, disenfranchisement, and bloc voting and the filibuster at the federal level. Segregation created a powerless black workforce and helped the South’s notables pit poor whites against poor blacks. The local notables also used literacy tests and other tricks to disenfranchise lower-income whites as well as blacks in the South, creating a distinctly upscale electorate. Finally, by voting as a unit in Congress and presidential elections, the “Solid South” sought to thwart any federal reforms that could undermine the power of Southern notables at the state, county and city level. When the Solid South failed, Southern senators made a specialty of the filibuster, the last defense of the embattled former Confederacy.

When the post-Civil War system broke down during the Civil Rights Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, the South’s local notable class and its Northern and Western allies unexpectedly won a temporary three-decade reprieve, thanks to the “Reagan Democrats.” From the 1970s to the 2000s, white working-class voters alienated from the Democratic Party by civil rights and cultural liberalism made possible Republican presidential dominance from Reagan to George W. Bush and Republican dominance of Congress from 1994 to 2008. Because their politicians dominated the federal government much of the time, the conservative notables were less threatened by federal power, and some of them, like the second Bush, could even imagine a “governing conservatism” which, I have argued, sought to “Southernize” the entire U.S.

But then, by the 2000s, demography destroyed the temporary Nixon-to-Bush conservative majority (although conceivably it could enjoy an illusory Indian summer if Republicans pick up the Senate and retain the House in 2016). Absent ever-growing shares of the white vote, in the long run the Republican Party cannot win without attracting more black and Latino support.

That may well happen, in the long run. But right now most conservative white local notables in the South and elsewhere in the country don’t want black and Latino support. They would rather disenfranchise blacks and Latinos than compete for their votes. And they would rather dismantle the federal government than surrender their local power and privilege.

The political strategy of the Newest Right, then, is simply a new strategy for the very old, chiefly-Southern Jefferson-Jackson right. It is a perfectly rational strategy, given its goal: maximizing the political power and wealth of white local notables who find themselves living in states, and eventually a nation, with present or potential nonwhite majorities.

Although racial segregation can no longer be employed, the tool kit of the older Southern white right is pretty much the same as that of the Newest Right:

The Solid South. By means of partisan and racial gerrymandering—packing white liberal voters into conservative majority districts and ghettoizing black and Latino voters–Republicans in Texas and other Southern and Western states control the U.S. Congress, even though in the last election more Americans voted for Democrats than Republicans. The same undemocratic technique makes the South far more Republican in its political representation than it really is in terms of voters.

The Filibuster. By using a semi-filibuster to help shut down the government rather than implement Obamacare, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is acting rationally on behalf of his constituency—the surburban and exurban white local notables of Texas and other states, whom the demagogic Senator seems to confuse with “the American people.” Newt Gingrich, another Southern conservative demagogue, pioneered the modern use of government shutdowns and debt-ceiling negotiations as supplements to the classic filibuster used by embattled white provincial elites who prefer to paralyze a federal government they cannot control.

Disenfranchisement. In state after state controlled by Republican governors and legislators, a fictitious epidemic of voter fraud is being used as an excuse for onerous voter registration requirements which have the effect, and the manifest purpose, of disenfranchising disproportionately poor blacks and Latinos. The upscale leaders of the Newest Right also tend to have be more supportive of mass immigration than their downscale populist supporters—on the condition, however, that “guest workers” and amnestied illegal immigrants not be allowed to vote or become citizens any time soon. In the twenty-first century, as in the twentieth and nineteenth, the Southern ideal is a society in which local white elites lord it over a largely-nonwhite population of poor workers who can’t vote.

Localization and privatization of federal programs. It is perfectly rational for the white local notables of the South and their allies in other regions to oppose universal, federal social programs, if they expect to lose control of the federal government to a new, largely-nonwhite national electoral majority.

Turning over federal programs to the states allows Southern states controlled by local conservative elites to make those programs less generous—thereby attracting investment to their states by national and global corporations seeking low wages.

Privatizing other federal programs allows affluent whites in the South and elsewhere to turn the welfare state into a private country club for those who can afford to pay the fees, with underfunded public clinics and emergency rooms for the lower orders. In the words of Mitt Romney: “We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care.”

When the election of Lincoln seemed to foreshadow a future national political majority based outside of the South, the local notables of the South tried to create a smaller system they could dominate by seceding from the U.S. That effort failed, after having killed more Americans than have been killed in all our foreign wars combined. However, during Reconstruction the Southern elite snatched victory from the jaws of defeat and succeeded in turning the South into a nation-within-a-nation within U.S. borders until the 1950s and 1960s.

Today the white notables of the South increasingly live in states like Texas, which already have nonwhite majorities. They fear that Obama’s election, like Lincoln’s, foreshadows the emergence of a new national majority coalition that excludes them and will act against their interest. Having been reduced to the status of members of a minority race, they fear they will next lose their status as members of the dominant local class.

While each of the Newest Right’s proposals and policies might be defended by libertarians or conservatives on other grounds, the package as a whole—from privatizing Social Security and Medicare to disenfranchising likely Democratic voters to opposing voting rights and citizenship for illegal immigrants to chopping federal programs into 50 state programs that can be controlled by right-wing state legislatures—represents a coherent and rational strategy for maximizing the relative power of provincial white elites at a time when their numbers are in decline and history has turned against them. They are not ignoramuses, any more than Jacksonian, Confederate and Dixiecrat elites were idiots. They know what they want and they have a plan to get it—which may be more than can be said for their opponents.

Thanks.

 

[julybaby04]

We have a stable society. That's part of the problem -- nothing whatsoever (and least of all the Tea Party) really threatens the power and wealth and position of the 1%.

The 1% is not the problem.

I never really understood the issue with the 1% anyway. That 1% has both democrats and republicans.

 

[nowisthetime]

The truth is something you people all have trouble with. You really ought to be worried about your party's prospects this Fall.

The irony of neo cons claiming 'the truth'!

Neo cons love to mask their lack of critical thinking, reasoning, and humor as the truth. It's convenient for them.

 

[jeninflorida]

the obama stupidity, is, well, stupid.

you people es stupido

 

[jeninflorida]

The 1% is not the problem.

I never really understood the issue with the 1% anyway. That 1% has both democrats and republicans.

KingofAssTards - just wants to become QueenofHandouts. that little cunt needs to get a job