Posted on 10/02/2013 12:56:42 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
A House minority from white districts want to destroy the first black president, and the GOP majority abets them.
On the day the Affordable Care Act takes effect, the U.S. government is shut down, and it may be permanently broken. Youll read lots of explanations for the dysfunction, but the simple truth is this: Its the culmination of 50 years of evolving yet consistent Republican strategy to depict government as the enemy, an oppressor that works primarily as the protector of and provider for African-Americans, to the detriment of everyone else. The fact that everything came apart under our first African-American president wasnt an accident, it was probably inevitable.
People talk about the role of race in Richard Nixons Southern Strategy: how Pat Buchanan and Kevin Phillips helped him lure the old Dixiecrats into the Republican Party permanently. Far less well known was the GOPs Northern Strategy, which targeted so-called white ethnics many of them from the Catholic Sidewalks of New York like my working-class family, in the words of Kevin Phillips. Without a Northern Strategy designed to inflame white-ethnic fears of racial and economic change, Phillips imaginary but still influential notion of a permanent Republican majority would have been unimaginable.
The principal force which broke up the Democratic (New Deal) coalition is the Negro socioeconomic revolution and liberal Democratic ideological inability to cope with it, Phillips wrote. Democratic Great Society programs aligned that party with many Negro demands, but the party was unable to defuse the racial tension sundering the nation. Phillips was not trying to defuse that tension, far from it he was trying to lure those white ethnics to the GOP (although he later broke with the party he helped create.) But his Northern Strategy truly came to fruition in 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan. Where Nixon swept the South, Reagan was able to take much of the North and West, too.
I loved Chris Matthews book Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked, but as I said in my interview with him, I think he let Reagan off the hook when it came to race. Ronald Reagan picked up the political baton passed to him by Barry Goldwater and Pat Buchanan, and played his role with genial gusto. Reagan had trafficked in ugly racial stereotyping over the years, about young bucks buying T-bone steaks with food stamps and Cadillac-driving welfare queens. But the Reagan who got elected president was better at using deracialized language to channel racial fears and resentment. He and his strategists had succeeded in making government synonymous with welfare, and welfare synonymous with lazy people, most of them African-American.
When Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg studied the voters of Macomb County, a hotbed of so-called Reagan Democrats the county gave two-thirds of its votes to John F. Kennedy in 1960, and the same proportion to Ronald Reagan in 1980 he found that they no longer saw Democrats as working-class champions. Blacks constitute the explanation for their vulnerability and for almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives, and they saw government as a black domain where whites cannot expect reasonable treatment, Greenberg wrote.
So for a lot of Democrat-turned-Republican voters, government was all about black people, Reagan knew. You didnt have to be racist to thrill to Reagans declaration that government is not the solution; government is the problem, though it didnt hurt. Republican strategist Lee Atwater explained exactly how it worked in a now-infamous 1981 interview that was secret for 30 years. Atwater explained how the GOP dialed down its racial rhetoric for fear of alienating white moderates who might buy the GOPs anti-government crusade, but be uncomfortable with outright racism.
This is Atwater talking to an academic interviewer in 1981, Year One of the Reagan revolution:
You start out in 1954 by saying, Nigger, nigger, nigger. By 1968 you cant say nigger that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states rights, and all that stuff, and youre getting so abstract. Now, youre talking about cutting taxes, and all these things youre talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites We want to cut this, is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than Nigger, nigger.
And then you say Defund Obamacare, and everyone knows why.
* * *
To be fair to Republicans, not everyone is or was comfortable with this strategy. One of the things I remember best from Richard Ben Cramers legendary history of the 1988 election, What It Takes, was the way both George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole grappled with whether and how to reach black voters, in the wake of the Reagan revolution. Each man struggled, in his own way, to understand and accept exactly how party leaders, starting with Goldwater, had actively pushed African-Americans out of the party of Abraham Lincoln. Doles discomfort seemed a little deeper and more genuine; in the end, Bush acceded to Atwater and Roger Ailes, one of Richard Nixons media henchmen, to produce the infamous Willie Horton ad that helped torpedo Michael Dukakis.
Over and over, thats how things got worse: Republicans who know better, who probably arent racist in the old-fashioned sense of believing in black inferiority and opposing the equality and integration of the races, nonetheless pander to those who are, for electoral gain. And when the election of our first black president riled up the racists and launched the Tea Party supposed deficit hawks who tolerated skyrocketing government spending under George W. Bush too many Republicans went along.
Today, the entire government has been taken hostage by leaders elected by this crazed minority, who see in the face of Barack Obama everything theyve been taught to fear for 50 years. Start with miscegenation: Hes not just black, hes the product of a black father and a white mother. (That helps explain an unconscious motive for birtherism: They cant get their minds off the circumstances of his conception and birth.) With his Ivy League degrees, they are sure he must be the elitist beneficiary of affirmative action. Steeped in Chicago politics, hes the representative of corrupt urban machines controlled by Democrats machines that ironically originated with the Irish and once kept African-Americans down, but which are now synonymous with corrupt black power. In Michele Bachmanns words, Obama is a product of Chicagos scary gangster government, or did she say gangsta?
Leading Republicans who know better have demeaned the president with a long list of racially coded slurs. Obama is the food stamp president, Newt Gingrich told us. He wants to help black people (or was it blah people?) by giving them somebody elses money, Rick Santorum said. Even his so-called GOP friend Sen. Tom Coburn insists Obama is spreading dependency on government because it worked so well for him as an African-American male.
Where Mitt Romneys father, George, stood up to the rising tide of racism in his party and marched in fair housing protests in the 1960s, Mitt himself embraced the birther-in-chief Donald Trump during the 2012 campaign. And when things got tough in the fall campaign, he and Paul Ryan doubled down on racial appeals by accusing Obama of weakening welfare reform he hadnt and of giving white seniors hard-earned Medicare dollars to Obamacare recipients. And we all know who they are.
Now we have John Boehner, elected House speaker thanks to the Tea Party wave of 2010, shutting down the government over Obamacare. Boehner has the power to open the government by bringing a clean continuing resolution to the floor and allowing it to pass with the help of Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats. Should we expect such courage? In one of his first major media appearances after becoming speaker, he refused to rebuke the birthers in his caucus. Its not up to me to tell them what to think, he told NBCs Brian Williams.
Now hes kowtowing to the roughly 30 House Republicans from bright red districts that also happen to be almost exclusively white, in a country that is more than one-third non-white. They want to shut down the government to torpedo Obamacare, the signature program of our first black president. Obviously, though hes the leader, Boehner believes its not up to him to tell the GOP suicide caucus what to think. Although the speaker told reporters after Obamas re-election that Obamacare was the law of the land, and that a government shutdown would be bad for the country, he changed his tune when confronted with an insurrection, and the de facto House speaker who happens to be a senator, Ted Cruz. (Cruzs father, by the way, just joined the ranks of those who seem to believe Obama is a Muslim, telling a Colorado woman who made that claim: [Sen. John] McCain couldnt say that because it wasnt politically correct. It is time we stop being politically correct!
In the end, its all about Obama. I keep waiting for John Boehner to have his Take this job and shove it moment, since hes not the House leader, hes being led by Ted Cruz and the House suicide caucus. But Ive been waiting a long time for Republicans to do the right thing and repudiate their partys lunatic fringe, particularly its racist fringe. I assume Ill be waiting a while longer.
Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large and the author of "What's the Matter With White People: Finding Our Way in the Next America."
how is someone born of a white mother of slaveowner stock the first black president. at most hes the first light skinned biracial.
This *unt wants to be black so badly but she cannot wish her white skin away. Instead... she has blackened her soul with hate and is guilty of the sins of which she accuses those who disagree with her. She is the CONSUMMATE democrat demon.
Writings like this try to create white guilt. White guilt is why whites stay silent in the face of black on white violence. By not fighting back, it only encourages more violence white at the same time creating black entitlement. Black entitlement is why there is not criticism from black leaders on this issue.
Then again, progressives thrive on violence.
I’ve been hearing this stuff for fifty years. Any attempts to rein in federal spending have always been met with cries of racism directed at people who are trying to keep costs from going out of sight. Walsh is just the latest in a long line of not-too-bright libs who use the epithet of racism to attempt to disguise the fact that liberalism is a destructive vehicle. They shout “racism” because they have no legitimate arguments. Major welfare reforms were undertaken during the Clinton admin. But of course, Clinton wasn’t a nasty racist, he was the first black president. If Reagan or either Bush had done the same thing, the shouts of “racism” would have been deafening.
I would hit it - with a car door.
She views black people as helpless children - and WE’RE the ones who are racists?
It never ends, does it?
Who’s listening (or reading) anymore? Lame Duck waddling...
There is a lot of White Guilt with this one.
Oh Lord, they are frantic when they try to play the race card on this issue.
I wonder what time the White House fax ordering the press to play the race card arrived at the WaPo? Has Mika mentioned it yet?
The regime ans its media army took a cut and dried criminal episode between a person working security and his attacker and perverted it through its propagamda arm into a racial incident and because of it martyrs result . Until the facts get outed figers get pointed at those media sources that were complicit this krap is going to continue and their pretence of using them as reliabile informational sources sustained.
She engages in fantasies instead of research and objectivity, which is an interesting way to write an article.
Who is the fool who paid this fool?
While in Fort Collins, Colorado, I was engaged in a political tiff with some liberal. I brought up a series of constitutional points on why Obama wasn’t doing his job. The liberal’s reply was predictable: “You’re just a racist.”
This is not stupidity. It IS psychotic behavior.
Dear Joan, I’m curious. Do you take drugs or do you need drugs? Seriously. Yes. I hate Obama. Yes, it is about color. He’s red. Your specious accusations that people who are against Obama simply because of race is the most obscene lie ever cast against a patriotic people and is so intellectually dishonest one has to wonder about your sincerity if not your sanity.
Please stop.
Immediately.
You’re right. It is psychotic. Brainwashed groupthink. It’s disturbing that the lib/prog/dem mind is so easily controlled and directed. I don’t trust any prog on any level because they don’t think for themselves. They have a pack mentality, like a mob. And if they can be convinced as a group to chant “racist, racist”, what else can they be convinced to do?
Barabas! Barabas! Or,
Crucify him!
Take your pick.
Exactly.
I highly recommend Ann Coulter’s”Demonic.” It covers the mob mentality quite well.
Thank you for the suggestion. I’ll pick it up at Audible.
It won’t end until after CW2, if even then.
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