Sunday, May 25, 2008 - 4:55 pm
http://www.truthout.org/article/the-fall-conservatism
This runs deep. So deep, that the definition of "Conservative" has been mangled beyond recognition. And this is why I HATE labels. Millions of Americans act as tools every single day, being wielded by powerful interests, who know how this works, and have the means to employ it to what is usually our mutual detriment.
quote:Republican majority, working to create the impression that there were two Americas: the quiet, ordinary, patriotic, religious, law-abiding Many, and the noisy, élitist, amoral, disorderly, condescending Few.
I'm posting this for some perspective. On a recent post, I wrote that Conservative is growing to be just as dirty of a word as conservatives have worked on the word Liberal being dirty.
This is divisive and it does all of us exactly ZERO good.
And Nixon ran as a uniter too!
quote:In order to seize the Presidency in 1968, Nixon had to live down his history of nasty politicking, and he ran that year as a uniter.
Divisive politics. I also wrote in a recent post that the Republican party base is composed of everybody with an axe to grind.
quote:Joining him was his colleague Kevin Phillips, who had just published "The Emerging Republican Majority," which marshalled electoral data to support a prophecy that Sun Belt conservatism - like Jacksonian Democracy, Republican industrialism, and New Deal liberalism - would dominate American politics for the next thirty-two or thirty-six years. (As it turns out, Phillips was slightly too modest.) When Agnew finished his diatribe, Phillips said two words: "Positive polarization."
...and
{Nixon was coldly mixing and pouring volatile passions. Although he was careful to renounce the extreme fringe of Birchites and racists, his means to power eventually became the end. Buchanan gave me a copy of a seven-page confidential memorandum - "A little raw for today," he warned - that he had written for Nixon in 1971, under the heading "Dividing the Democrats." Drawn up with an acute understanding of the fragilities and fault lines in "the Old Roosevelt Coalition," it recommended that the White House "exacerbate the ideological division" between the Old and New Left by praising Democrats who supported any of Nixon's policies; highlight "the elitism and quasi-anti-Americanism of the National Democratic Party"; nominate for the Supreme Court a Southern strict constructionist who would divide Democrats regionally; use abortion and parochial-school aid to deepen the split between Catholics and social liberals; elicit white working-class support with tax relief and denunciations of welfare. Finally, the memo recommended exploiting racial tensions among Democrats. "Bumper stickers calling for black Presidential and especially Vice-Presidential candidates should be spread out in the ghettoes of the country," Buchanan wrote. "We should do what is within our power to have a black nominated for Number Two, at least at the Democratic National Convention." Such gambits, he added, could "cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half."}
Does this crap sound familiar? It should.
quote:The Nixon White House didn't enact all of these recommendations, but it would be hard to find a more succinct and unapologetic blueprint for Republican success in the conservative era. "Positive polarization" helped the Republicans win one election after another - and insured that American politics would be an ugly, unredeemed business for decades to come.
This is power for the sake of having power, not honoring our process and through that, ourselves.
It's sick.
quote:North Carolina and Mississippi Republicans have produced ads linking local Democrats to Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's controversial former pastor. The right-wing group Citizens United has said that it will run ads portraying Obama as yet another "limousine liberal." But these are the spasms of nerve endings in an organism that's brain-dead.
Yeah, this is the current day effort along those lines. Those efforts, nicely rebutted with Obama and "Not this time, not this year."
Exactly. You know, if we can actually sort out the ideas from the labels, good ideas abound. I think a lot of people know this, want this and need this and that's the push back being seen right now.
It's getting damn expensive to grind that axe.
quote:Among Republicans, there is no energy, no fresh thinking, no ability to capture the concerns and feelings of millions of people. In the past two months, Democratic targets of polarization attacks have won three special congressional elections, in solidly Republican districts in Illinois, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
...
quote:Republicans will no doubt accuse Democrats of being out of touch with real Americans long after George W. Bush retires to Crawford, Texas. But the 2006 and 2008 elections are the hinge on which America is entering a new political era.
"Real Americans" code for those with some "nothing else matters" issue axe to grind.
quote:This will be true whether or not John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, wins in November. He and his likely Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, "both embody a post-polarized, or anti-polarized, style of politics," the Times columnist David Brooks told me. "McCain, crucially, missed the sixties, and in some ways he's a pre-sixties figure. He and Obama don't resonate with the sixties at all." The fact that the least conservative, least divisive Republican in the 2008 race is the last one standing - despite being despised by significant voices on the right - shows how little life is left in the movement that Goldwater began
quote:On May 6th, Newt Gingrich posted a message, "My Plea to Republicans: It's Time for Real Change to Avoid Real Disaster," on the Web site of the conservative magazine Human Events. The former House Speaker warned, "The Republican brand has been so badly damaged that if Republicans try to run an anti-Obama, anti-Reverend Wright, or (if Senator Clinton wins) anti-Clinton campaign, they are simply going to fail." Gingrich offered nine suggestions for restoring the Republican "brand" - among them "Overhaul the census and cut its budget radically" and "Implement a space-based, G.P.S.-style air-traffic control system" - which read like a wonkish parody of the Contract with America. By the next morning, the post had received almost three hundred comments, almost all predicting a long Republican winter.
Sunday, May 25, 2008 - 4:55 pm
quote:In its final year, the Bush Administration is seen by many conservatives (along with seventy per cent of Americans) to be a failure. Among true believers, there are two explanations of why this happened and what it portends. One is the purist version: Bush expanded the size of government and created huge deficits; allowed Republicans in Congress to fatten lobbyists and stuff budgets full of earmarks; tried to foist democracy on a Muslim country; failed to secure the border; and thus won the justified wrath of the American people. This account - shared by Pat Buchanan, the columnist George F. Will, and many Republicans in Congress - has the appeal of asking relatively little of conservatives. They need only to repent of their sins, rid themselves of the neoconservatives who had agitated for the Iraq invasion, and return to first principles. Buchanan said, "The conservatives need to, in Maoist terms, go back to Yenan."
The second version - call it reformist - is more painful, because it's based on the recognition that, though Bush's fatal incompetence and Rove's shortsighted tactics hastened the conservative movement's demise, they didn't cause it. In this view, conservatism has a more serious problem than self-betrayal: a doctrinaire failure to adapt to new circumstances, new problems. Instead of heading back to Yenan to regroup, conservatives will have to spend some years or even decades wandering across a bleak political landscape of losing campaigns and rebranding efforts and earnest policy retreats, much as liberals did after 1968, before they can hope to reëstablish dominance.
And here is some of the meat. I think the changed definition of conservative is the problem. Somewhere in there, we forgot what for the people, by the people and of the people means.
Much more in this article to think about. Enjoy the read.
Sunday, May 25, 2008 - 8:30 pm
This election cycle reminds me of elections in Canada and Great Britain where Conservatives got clobbered and spent years in the wilderness before finding their way back to respectability. The Conservatives in the Canadian parliament lost so many seats in the early 1990’s that their ranks where nearly depleted.
Canada found success under the leadership of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper after years of Labor party rule. And Gordon Brown of Great Britain may be on the verge of losing his majority in the next election after years of single party rule.
So to say it’s the death of Conservatism in the United States is greatly exaggerated. Maybe they’ll learn something about how one party rule can corrupt if not tempered with humility. And too, George W. Bush’s all consuming emphasis on being a “war president” gave way to many conservatives losing faith with their elected brethren. The lack of fiscal discipline by the Republican’s is an embarrassment to the party and its heritage as responsible stewards of the nation’s purse. They won their majority in 1994 in large measure out of concern for Clinton’s perceived lack of fiscal discipline. So to turn their backs on recent history and behave in such a foolhardy manner has cost them dearly.
Sunday, May 25, 2008 - 9:24 pm
I agree with most of that.
IMHO, sorting out the self-serving behavior from what is actually conservative-American behavior will be both a big challenge and a good thing.
