Skeeter Sanders has had quite a bit of success posting on DailyKos and has recently started posting here at Green Mountain Daily. He’s been publishing The ‘Skeeter Bites Report since the end of ’05 and central VTers may also know him as the DJ of The Quiet Storm on 91.1 WGDR-FM.
We taped the day after Obama’s health care address, so we both had Joe Wilson on the brain. This clip begins as Skeeter is finishing up enumerated other less publicized instances of Republican boorishness during the presentation to both Houses. Then the discussion broadens:
I found Skeeter’s referencing of 1964 particularly fascinating, perhaps since I had just finished reading Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland. The book traces both Nixon and the Republican Party’s journey from the political graveyard in 1964 to Nixon’s 1972 landslide. The undoing of the liberal consensus in the intervening years was in part stoked by larger events (Vietnam, urban riots) but Nixon had a large role in orchestrating a politics of division that remains today. Perlstein argues that Nixonland (Southern Strategy, the appeals to emotional and cultural discontents, the politics of resentment) defined the blue state/red state divide that became a cultural shorthand in this decade.
A prerequisite for the flipping of a liberal consensus to decades of a Republican White House (with interludes for Southern Democratic centrists) was the ideologically purifying campaign of Goldwater in 1964. What at the time was political suicide– a hard tack to the right during a liberal era– ended up creating just the contrasts necessary to capitalize on the collapse of that liberal era.
So at the risk of forwarding tortured historical analogies, is the present Republican public hissy fit a kind of purifying ritual that will reap them rewards in the future? Or are we witnessing something quite different, a wholesale shrinkage of a party that will have no claim to vast swaths of the electorate save religious regional voters?
Further, ideological purification as a prescription for a party out of power does not seem to ever be followed by the Democrats. The Democratic Party has not embraced its left flank in my lifetime although many a progressive has insisted that the key to success is to rhetorically and legislatively practice class politics and win the great majority of Americans who are not members of the overclass. When Rove was delusionally declaring a permanent Republican majority in 2004, it was a moment like 1964, where it appeared that the party out of power had been reduced to irrelevancy. The Democrats did not take that moment as a signal to ideologically purify; rather they enlarged the electorate and placed their bets with a biracial conciliator, a man who frequently evoked the other President from Illinois tasked with reuniting and healing a nation. They chose someone who is gifted in minimizing, as opposed to highlighting, contrasts.
But perhaps Perlstein’s formulation is for an era that has ended. He wrote Nixonland in 2008 and perhaps the election of Obama signalled that “there are no red states there are no blue states” anymore. Maybe the present ideological purification, this hard tack to the right we are witnessing as Republican madness, will result in further marginalization.
Skeeter pointed out that when Bush lost his own party around immigration reform, it should have been an early warning sign of the extremism to follow. What we are seeing is an exorcism of Bush– with the party base refashioning itself hypocritically as deficit hawk America firsters. Maybe what we are witnessing this time is not the ideological purification of 1964, but the complete inability to compute the reality of a black President, resulting in a mass psychological breakdown.
Good diary, Randolph.
And I want to pick a bone with you over just one phrase: “religious regional voters.”
Every time we use the term “religious voters” (or their own preferred term “values voters”) to refer to right wing (primarily white) fundamentalist Christians, we are lumping in a whole hell of a lot of religious folks who couldn’t disagree more with the political values of the RWFCs (and I’m not calling them ‘evangelicals’ because evangelicals want to spread the good news; the folks I think you mean are more interested in imposing their exclusionary beliefs and a selection of holiness rules they think everyone should at least profess to live by).
I’m talking ‘religious voters’ like Episcopal Bishop Tom Ely, who fully supported marriage equality and helped Rep. Jeff Young understand why his opposition was a mistake in time for the override vote.
People like Gene Robinson, Episcopal bishop in New Hampshire.
Lots of folks who belong to denominations such as United Church of Christ, which has supported equality for decades. Unitarians, Quakers, Jews in Reform synagogues, Buddhists. Some Methodists, many Lutherans, some Catholics. Others whose denominations I’m not remembering right now.
They are all ‘religious voters.’ Their religion tells them to treat everyone the way they would like to be treated, or that all life is sacred and deserving of as much consideration as they themselves are.
They’re unlikely to be carrying guns to public meetings or questioning the legitimacy of the president’s birth certificate or declaring a segment of the population sub- or non-human because of skin color, lack of residency documentation, or sexual orientation.
Naming the RWFCs as ‘religious voters’ uses too broad a brush and disrespects the religious convictions that many of our humane allies bring to the voting booth.
Letting RWFCs claim the label ‘religious voters’ is like letting Republicans lay sole claim to ‘patriotism’ or the flag or the constitution, to the exclusion of the rest of us who also live in this democracy and want to see it continue while working for it to achieve its promises.
I know, I know, there’s that pesky word ‘regional’ in there, by which I think you mean “Southern and Southwestern,” although Rick Warren’s Saddleback megachurch is in California, and the Mormons, who should also be included in the RWC group (minus the fundamentalism, maybe) are in states from Ohio to Utah (and Vermont and NH and Maine among other states, in small numbers, probably not enough to form a significant voting bloc).
Speaking of Maine, there are RWFCs there, too, perhaps even enough to overturn Maine’s marriage equality law passed by the legislature last spring.
I’m not religious and haven’t been for decades. But some of the best voting allies I know are religious, and I hate to see them tarred with the same brush as the RWFCs who can’t manage to vote in their own interests, much less in ours.
NanuqFC
It is beyond our power to explain either the prosperity of the wicked or the afflictions of the righteous. ~ The Talmud