Over at the National Review, Kathryn Jean Lopez essentially urges the million of us who marched yesterday to lighten up and stop being so rude to the President acting like the right to choose is important and threatened, while “Peter Smith” urges the faithful to do whatever is necessary to defeat Arlen Specter tomorrow – or else he might stop the Republicans from ending legalized abortion. Perhaps the two of them should have a conversation. Although, given that Peter Smith is apparently a pseudonym for an anonymous “close observer of the judicial-confirmation battles,” that might be difficult.
Tag Archives: GOP
Mother Jones has an excellent piece on Grover Norquist, the Washington’s premier deregulatory guru. It’s further demonstration that while many in the Democratic party have forgotten how to build broad-based political coalitions which stake out strong stances on difficult issues, the Republicans certainly haven’t.
Mark Kurlansky tells one half of the story of the Nixon election and the Republican “Southern Strategy” that has flourished since, calling the Grand Old Party on its shameless appeals to racism as an electoral tactic. The story he doesn’t tell, however, is the simultaneous breakdown of the New Deal coalition and the agency of the Democrats in its collapse – a story that Democrats have too often obscured in working to expose the mendacious tactics of the right. It was four years earlier that the Democratic Convention sent the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party home.
Rush Limbaugh’s alleged drug addiction represents a public embarassment for the organized right. As well it should. The story here isn’t that national leaders sometimes call for morals that they themselves are unable to live up to. The real story is that Limbaugh’s addiction to large quantities of expensive painkillers will be – and already is being – played not only in the media but on the organized right as a personal indiscretion Rush needs time to reconcile with and move past, and not as, say, an evil crimminal felony. The latter term would be reserved with non-violent first time marijuana possession by lower-class teens. David Brock and Michael Lind, both ex-conservatives whose books I read this summer, both argue in different ways that the social conservative agenda is, for the Republican elite, a tool to rally the base and divide the working class in the wake of the Cold War so as to advance economic conservatism. Brock describes his disgust at discovering that his homosexuality was an acceptable foible as long as he was a rising star on the right and a cause for moral condemnation once he left it. Lind suggests that the social agenda of the right is counter to the personal values of most of its elite but provides a cover for its economic libertarian agenda. Arguments like these gain more credence with each public spectacle of a fallen angel of the right, be it Rush’s drug addiction or Bill Bennet’s gambling addiction. Few right hypocrisies can match that of Bob Barr, who defended his daughter’s choice to get an abortion on the grounds that it was “a private decision.” Conservatives who want to demonstrate their integrity could go a long way right now by calling for Rush Limbaugh to be sent to a prison cell – across from the one Ken Lay should be sitting in.
I mentioned this story a few weeks back. Gregg Easterbrook of TNR is now asking why this story – Southern Republican Governor, citing Christian imperative, calls for redistribution of wealth from rich to poor – has gotten little play in the mainstream media. I think Easterbrook and I agree that the media has been unfortunately complicit in the co-optation of Christianity in the public political sphere as a bastion of social reaction divorced from its economic progressivism (in other words, it’s time to put the “Worker” back in “Catholic Worker,” or – in Michael Lind’s formulation – put the “Liberal” back in “National Liberal”). Easterbrook suggests that this is because the mainstream media hate Christians. I think the problem is that the mainstream media hate the poor.
Faced with Bustamante’s edge over libertarian wonder boy Schwarzenegger, Bustamante’s potential to mobilize Latino voters as the first Latino to lead the nation’s largest state, and the nagging problem of Arnold’s coziness with Nazis, some on the right have been grasping for their reverse Kurt Waldheim scandal. What they’ve come up with is Bustamante’s membership as a college student in MEChA, Movimiento Estudantil Chicana/o de Aztlan. And they’ve had the audacity to suggest that membership in the national Latino student organization occupies the same moral space as close friendship with Nazis, and that the media only displays more concern about the latter than about the former because of – you guessed it – liberal bias. This argument rests on an idea that the right has spent significant effort trying to infiltrate into the American consciousness: that the nationalism and solidarity of the oppressed and the minority is morally equivalent to the nationalism and solidarity of the oppressor and the majority. This idea is a keystone of the far (and not so far) right and far left argument that identification with an in-group is always an obstacle to identification with a larger group and never a path towards it. I think I stand with the majority of Americans in maintaining unequivocally and without contradiction both that blind nationalism, uncompromising sectarianism, and subtle racism pose and have historically been dangerous threats to the construction of a human community and that identification with a small group – be it a neighborhood or one of Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” – can serve both the advancement of marginalized groups and the building of human empathy. But an intentionally divisive fringe, with much of the mainstream media in tow, is steadilly working to build in the minds of Americans a conception of the NAACP as the KKK. This, ironically, echoes the apologia of the hate groups themselves: ” has their organizations looking out for their interests, so shouldn’t have one looking out for ours?”
Michelle Malkin, in her attack on MEChA, quotes an early document of the organization from several decades ago, which reads in part:
“We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent. Brotherhood unites us, and love for our brothers makes us a people whose time has come and who struggles against the foreigner ‘gabacho’ who exploits our riches and destroys our culture. With our heart in our hands and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture.”
In other words, Latinos have been oppressed and persecuted by an illegitimate campaign of white violence, and should work together to beat back a continuing assault on the opportunities, communities, and culture of Latinos. And the homeland of Latinos belongs to them, and not to the United States that used war to occupy it.
Malkin says of the piece she quotes:
Substitute “Aryan” for “mestizo” and “white” for “bronze.” Not much difference between the nutty philosophy of Bustamante’s MEChA and Papa Schwarzenegger’s evil Nazi Party.
One difference would be that to be Aryan is to be racially “pure,” whereas to be mestizo is, by definition, to share a mixed heritage. The other major difference would be that the Nazi party engaged in a campaign of systematic genocide against oppressed minorities on the grounds that ensuring the purity of the Aryan nation by eliminating the groups secretly responsible for the decline of Germany was a historical imperative. MEChA engages in political and educational work directed towards improving the role of an oppressed minority within a dominant society that incorporated it through violence. That’s the difference.
Nathan Newman explores the issue here:
So what this statement says is that celebration of race mixing is the same as racial purity. Yes, Orwell rides high in the saddle when the rightwing guns for MEChA.
Well, what about the “bronze nation” nationalism? What a shock– an exploited group talking about its ethnic solidarity. The Irish never engaged in such rhetoric or engaged in political cronyism based on ethnic ties — or if they did, they were all Nazis? The Jews never speak of international solidarity with other Jews in say a small country in the Middle East?
The only difference between MEChA-style ethnic nationalism and most historic white ethnic groups, is that the latinos have a clearer grievance by historical standards. It was racist white nationalism that fueled “Manifest Destiny” to take over the whole southwest in a series of wars. Sorry– the only thing that looks like Nazism is the “white mans burden” conceit of America backed by military invasion that allowed it to attack Mexico and annex its land to the United States.
David Neiwert debunks the associations made between Bustamante and a few real racists who are also connected to MEChA here.
And I don’t think Colorado Luis is off the mark when he suggests that
…in a significant way, white Democrats are the target audience for these attacks. Not necessarily just to make them think twice about voting for Bustamante on the recall, but in the longer term, to promote the fear that when Democrats run minority candidates, they will lose…Meanwhile, Republicans gear up to run their own candidates of color — Condi Rice for California governor is a popular one I’ve seen mentioned. Republicans would love it if Democrats were too afraid to nominate people of color for important jobs, while Republicans go ahead and do it. So it is important for the GOP not only that Bustamante lose, but that white Democrats see race as part of the reason for his defeat. That’s why we’re seeing the MEChA smear instead of, oh, say, an examination of Bustamante’s voting record in the California legislature.
The most important site to check out, however, for anyone interested in making a thoughtful informed evaluation of MEChA, is its own website – funny how none of the conservative bloggers I’ve run across touting this counter-Waldheim discovery have bothered to link there (I would be dangerously remiss if I didn’t also link here to MECha de Yale). As MEChA’s current philosophy reads:
The Chicano and Chicana student movement has been plagued by opportunists that have sought to rechannel the energies of our people and divert us from our struggle for self-determination. The educational plight of Chicana and Chicano students continues to be ignored by insensitive administrators. Overall, Chicano and Chicana junior high, high school and college push-out rates have risen since 1969, forcing many Chicanos and Chicanas to a life of poverty. These factors along with a growing right wing trend in the nation are combing to work greater hardships on Chicanos and Chicanas. New repressive and racist immigration laws are continuously directed at our Gente. The Federal government is campaigning to pacify and assimilate our Gente by labeling us “Hispanic.” The term “Hispanic” seeks to anglicize and deny our indigenous heritage by ignoring our unique socioeconomic and historical aspect of our Gente. These factors have made it necessary for Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán to affirm our philosophy of liberation (i.e. educational, socioeconomic, and political empowerment) for our Chicano and Chicana nation.
Joining with other community-based Chicano and Chicana nationalist organizations, M.E.Ch.A. is committed to ending the cultural tyranny suffered at the hands of institutional and systematic discrimination that holds our Gente captive. We seek an end to oppression and exploitation of the Chicano and Chicana Community
Michael Gecan of the IAF has a searing, sobering piece in the latest Village Voice on the Democratic and Republican elites and the Americans left behind:
They are angry, and they are driven. They are profoundly and passionately clear on what and whom they are against. They intend to vanquish the upstart elite, the progressive establishment. It’s not Osama, Dead or Alive. It’s Dean, Dead or Alive. It’s Clinton, Dead or Alive. They have only one major problem: They don’t know what in the world—in the bigger, broader world where most moderate Americans live and work, play and pray, and try to raise their kids—they are for. Their relationship with their base is better than the Democrats’, but still terribly thin. It is not rooted in the interests of families struggling to survive in a service economy, with few or no benefits, in schools that continue to stumble and decline. It is not based on a foundation of respect for the working American, the struggling American, the vast majority of Americans who lack wealth. Not at all. Like the upstart elite, the new Republicans could care less about these matters. No, their newfound commitment to building a base is an instrument and offshoot of their tribal war with the progressive left. It is as clinical and cynical as the attitudes of some of the anti-war student leaders of the ’60s.
The Democrats lack this depth of passion and focused clarity. They aren’t as heated or as hardworking as the Republicans. They still sip sparkling water and make smug little jokes about Bush’s malaprops. They keep telling themselves how much smarter and slicker they are than the boobs on the right and the bohunks in the middle. They still think that getting straight A’s and appearing on television and having famous friends will dazzle the hoi polloi.
Both parties are led by women and men who believe it’s their God-given right to make more messes—from the Yale Commons, to blighted cities, to White House sleeping arrangements, to failed health reform, to bankrupt companies, to gutted industries, to post-war Iraq. They count on a wide and appreciative following in the media to report their antics and a silent servant class to clean up the wreckage.
Cheney says in the debates marriage rights are for the states to decide, and then Bush last month calls for a federal marriage ammendment. Now, from the AP, yet another demonstration that the “federalism” of the Republican Right represents a defense only of “states’ rights” to be more conservative than the federal government:
California and other states that want to make marijuana available to sick or dying patients are flouting federal drug laws in much the same way that Southern states defied national civil rights laws, a senior Bush administration lawyer said.
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he’d been “kicked in the guts, slapped in the face.” Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
“It was the end of the world,” said one officer Thursday. “It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers.”
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don’t ever talk to the media “on the record” — that is, with your name attached — unless you’re giving the sort of chin-forward, everything’s-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for…
Laying the groundwork for the unveiling of his new new tax plan, Bush has trotted out the tired accusation of “class warfare” to fend off criticism. “Class warfare,” when used by Republicans or DLC-leaning Democrats, labels comparison of, say, a tax cut’s impact on the rich and the poor in this country, or the level of economic stratification in the US and Norway, as an attempt to pit one class against another. The vitality of the term seems directly linked to its efficacy and its elegance – it removes the need to enter the fray and address the gaping inequalities in this country, it reframes cooperation as the agreement of all people to grin at the gains of the privileged few, and it does so with just the appropriate hint of red-baiting to scare off opponents without seeming, say, “partisan.” The Civil Rights Movement of the ’60s, with equal logic, could be described as “race warfare,” insofar as it addressed injustice in racial terms. Today’s Republicans, however, are all too eager to take credit for that one – in part because it gives them the chance to portray opposition to Affirmative Action as a logical continuation of the same process. The extreme of the conservative stance on race today, in fact, is epitomized by Ward Connerly’s recent description of race as a “cancer,” we must “consign to the ash heap of history” – thus his campaign in California to forbid the government to track whether, say, Black drivers are stopped more often than White drivers, or White women on welfare are sent to vocational training programs, while Black women are sent to “dress for success” classes – solve racial injustice while ignoring it. Conservatives cannot as easily demand that the government not keep track of family income (not that none will try), but they can try to sweet-talk voters into turning away the “anachronistic,” “partisan,” “divisive” politics of “class warfare.” Only such a choice will give them a free pass to bring back that pizza napkin creation “trickle-down economics,” one of many 80’s ideas (like slap bracelets) that some just aren’t ready to give up. Public jobs are socialism, we’re told – the best way to create jobs is to flood the top with enough money that a little bit can’t help but slip on down. Never mind, for example, the role of consumer demand, rather than management budget, in determining hiring and firing… If you look left or right at what conservative-style capitalism has wrought, you won’t be looking up to notice the windfall trickling down… Bush, keep in mind, is a “compassionate conservative,” “a uniter, not a divider.” Look for a long-overdue extension of unemployment benefits and economic bail-outs for the state governments whose economic crises are most embarrassing as the proverbial canaries in the magician’s hand to distract us from the proverbial elephant behind him – generous tax breaks for the usual suspects. Welfare rolls are climbing, unemployment is climbing, and the Bush solution is…tax cuts on stock dividends. But don’t worry – Bush “understand[s] the politics of economic stimulus.” Decades ago, the Rev. King declared, “To end humiliation was a start, but to end poverty is a bigger task.” Accusations of class warfare should be rejected for what they are – baseless tarring of those of us who think solving problems tends to start with addressing them.
Josh Eidelson 