Andrew Breitbart writes an incoherent conservative call-to-arms in today’s Moonie Times. I was particularly taken with his strategy for turning back the tide.
Republicans, on the other hand, act like a snobby condo board and appear to seek out potential voters for their savoriness. The party expects pre-existing respectable organizations, Protestant churches in particular, to do the heavy lifting. In this day of dwindling Republican appeal, the party’s ace in the hole is heard at the end of the polling day: “Have they counted the overseas military vote yet?” It’s amazing Republicans ever win…
…In the next election cycle, things need to be drastically different. Democracy is not Augusta National Golf Club. It’s a messy free-for-all, and in a two-party system, the GOP will not survive if it doesn’t accept the fact that the Democrats are its enemy and that it must begin to play for keeps. That means finding another Lee Atwater – only meaner – and not apologizing when we get him.
Now, if you were asking what might be the opposite of savoriness, Breitbart answered that, as well.
Democrats invest – with taxpayer money, mind you – in groups like ACORN that, among other sordid tactics, seek out Skid Row bodies and wheel them to polling places. All the Democratic National Committee needs are vans and smelling salts. Pop culture and the “education system” have done the rest, making “D” the default choice on Election Day.
I remind you that ACORN registers voters in precincts that have at least 65% Democratic registration, although they make no partisan appeals and will turn in every registration card regardless of partisan preference. As someone who used to analyze registration data for ACORN, I can tell you that 65% Democratic precincts are almost all precincts of color. They are almost all low on the socioeconomic scale. You might call these precincts ‘Skid Row’ if you wanted to be uncharitable, although many of them don’t fit that description at all. What they are, is heavily latino and black. That’s right, ACORN registers (mainly) latino and black voters. And that is why the right-wing keeps attacking them. They don’t want to admit that is why they are attacking them, so they say that ACORN is registering winos, giving them smelling salts, and then driving them to the polls. That’s pretty offensive, Breitbart. Just so you know.
But, there’s an unintentional irony in this piece. Breitbart criticizes Republicans for acting like snobby members of a condo board who won’t let anyone unsavory into their building. I think it is possible that he doesn’t mean what he seems to be saying. But he seems to be noting that the GOP is increasingly acting like an exclusive club where blacks, latinos, women, gays, Jews, Muslims, and agnostics needs not apply. He reinforces this reading by going on to mention the Augusta National Golf Club. The Club has never accepted a female member and has, to my knowledge, only accepted one black member (in 1990). Thus, at first reading, it seemed like Breitbart was going somewhere with his analysis. But he ends up by saying the answer is to find a new Lee Atwater and not apologize when they do Atwateresque things. Things like this:
Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he’s campaigned on since 1964… and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster…
Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps…?
Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
So, that’s how the GOP can overcome their snobbishness?
If the nut the Republicans are trying to crack is how to hoodwink women and minorities into voting for a party that that hates their fucking guts, well, good luck with that. There just aren’t enough stupid, self-loathing, and above all, docile and pliant, women and minorities out there to give them enough votes. (That there are any at all is amazing as it is.)
The thing that struck me here, though, was this weird Republican insistence on never apologizing. It’s part of a larger dysfunction, which is the inability to admit errors, even to themselves.
It’s reassuring in a way. If the GOP is fundamentally unable to even recognize its mistakes, they won’t be around much longer. And that should cut down on the number of unsavory characters in American politics.
something about showing weakness…
Can’t do that.
Well-let me just paraphrase their last president-George Bush-when asked-couldn’t come up with any mistakes he’d made during his eight years in office. That mentality was a truly “defining moment” for the Gop-in my book.
And by playing meaner, I suppose they mean making up even more stuff? They are really starting to look like the crazy guy on the street corner shouting at the clouds..
The Republican party, now with new and improved phrasing.
Or…
The New Republican Party, meaner than ever.
Might it not be true, though, that in the short term, should the efforts by the Obama administration to right the economy fail or we encounter some other dire set of unforeseen or unpredictable circumstances that we could potentially see another successful resurgence of this Atwater-like strategy?
I don’t think we can jump the gun here. There are still a significant percentage of whites in this country who would be receptive to the demonization of the minorities if a few of the dominoes fall the right way. And since we are so recently out of the gate on the proposals and programs by Obama there is really no way to measure the potential success or failure of this path he is taking. Yes, the election of Obama was an historic moment. But I think it would be naive to extrapolate that there has been a permanent and seismic shift in the overall attitudes of the white electorate. Yes, things are changing, but the shift is by no means irreversible.
I agree that with the shifting demographics it is inevitable that the Atwater Southern Strategy will have diminishing returns going forward. But it is by no means dead as an effective strategy, should circumstances prevail that feed it’s foundation. So let’s cheer at its increasing irrelevance. But let’s also be cautious that we not get overconfident that it will now and forever be viewed only in our country’s rear view mirror. You know what they say about counting your chickens………..
Very true Mike.
A couple things;
Sundown towns were a north and west phenomenon. If things get bad, really bad, then those old emotions will boil to the surface.
Not 8 years ago the common refrain was that the Democratic Party was gone for at least a couple of generations, and would have to reconstitute itself to ever have relevance.
For just about forever in this country people of color (and women) have been held to higher standards. They had to do better than their co-workers to advance LESS. Don’t fool yourself that it is any different with Obama and his administration. Any mistakes he makes will be exaggerated, any gains will be downgraded. It’s what American’s are.
All administrations have financial scandals by a few bad apples. When those apples start to fall off this tree (and rest assured, they will), Obama will get painted with the brush, no matter how minor, or how far from him.
nalbar
For those not familiar with sundown towns, here is a great book by James Loewen on the subject. I found it quite fascinating. It was a subject with which I was completely unfamiliar until reading about them on Dave Niewert’s blog. It is a relatively unknown part of our history, but certainly a story worth retelling.
If the Southern Strategy does not fail, it will be because places outside the South (the Village, rural America, ethnic Catholic urban areas, etc.) get “Southernized” in their attitudes.
Right now the countervailing force to this is from labor and from the economic pain that the middle class is going through–and which they can rightly ascribe to the elite bankers and non-performing CEOs.
There will have to be a major distraction – urban riots did it in the 1960s, forced busing in Boston did it in the 1970s, and abortion opened the wedge with Catholics – to have that countervailing force disappear.
If the Rush and Fox nonsense and the GOP tweets aren’t moving public opinion, it’s gonna take one hell of a Lee Atwater clone to turn GOP fortunes around.
even atwater recanted:
although there is speculation as to whether he really meant it or, like w.c. fields, was looking for loopholes.
I’m not in a position to pass any judgments on Atwater’s deathbed epiphany, but after watching this documentary of Atwater on Frontline a while back it makes one realize just how loathsome and despicable we humans can allow ourselves to become when it comes to dealing with others in the political arena. Atwater had no misgivings at all about what he was doing. I have sympathy for his family’s loss. But I have little compassion for Lee Atwater. His political methods left a cancerous legacy that is still eating at the soul of this country.
A little GOP history lesson will shed some light on the direction of the Republican Party. Once upon a time, there were two strong branches comprising the Republican Party. There was the eastern Republicans home to a number of family names with deep ties to American history, like the Cabot’s, Lodges, and Rockefellers. Also there were the western Republicans led at the time by the so-called Goldwater Republicans. The vitriolic face off during the 1964 primary between ultra-right wing conservative Barry Goldwater and New York liberal Nelson Rockefeller exhibited a severe national split in the Republican Party solely along ideological lines. Goldwater embraced extreme right wing hate groups from the John Birch Society to the KKK, to anti-United Nations groups. Goldwater’s speeches were peppered with statements such as “Extremism does not exist when Liberty is being defended”.
Rockefeller lost the Republican nomination for President in 1964 and the Republican Party began to close its doors to the liberal eastern Republicans. In 1980, Ronald Reagan sensing the large voting presence of the disaffected Southern Democrats, known as Dixiecrats, developed his “Southern Strategy” designed to break down more than a century of post-Civil War steadfast adherence of loyalty to the Democratic Party. White Southerners hated Lincoln’s Republican Party going back to the days of the Civil War, and vowed never to have anything to do with any Republican. But Reagan, the former TV pitchman for 20 Mule Team Borax and General Electric used his talent to convince the Dixiecrats that the “new” Republican Party shared their concerns about the preservation and protection of “the White Southern Way of life in the South”. This was decoded by the Dixiecrats to actually mean a guarantee that the “new” Republican Party would be dedicated to aggressively suppressing the ambitions and rights of ALL NEGROS, everywhere, relentlessly without exception. It is important to note here that the Dixiecrats were severely disappointed in the Presidency of Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) who preceded Reagan in the White House. They regarded him as a “sell out” and a bumbler who did nothing to suppress the rising tide of Negro political power.
Thus, without the balance of a truly national party from 1964, the Republican “big tent” became home to con men and political charlatans. The hate groups welcomed into the Party by Goldwater were augmented in 1980 with racist Dixiecrats. With the exception of a large contingent of Libertarians the composition of the Republican Party in 1981 was essentially made up of groups motivated by some form of hate based ideology, with the vested root in all cases traceable back to opposition against one racial group or another.
The Republican Party cannot be reconstituted by another champion of hate groups as that is what the essence of the party is today. Consider this; if you continue to brew coffee after it is done, all you succeed in doing is to increase the bitterness of the drink. You cannot create a new desirable flavor by over-brewing coffee. If the Republican Party is to rise from the ashes, it must create a new vision of America, one that is totally functional and encourages America’s growth in a global world where wealth and power will be shared multiculturally.
Goldwater in his 1964 acceptance speech said:
“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice;
Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
In 1964, Strom Thurmond supported Barry Goldwater over Lyndon Johnson; LBJ was not amused; the Democrats in Congress stripped Thurmond of his chairmanship; the Republicans offered him seniority if he would switch parties.
In 1968, Richard Nixon campaigned to get the George Wallace voters, wooing Southern Democrats with dog whistle racism. It was this that was the Republican’s Southern Strategy. It created a Republican Party in Southern states where there never had been an effective one before (in the name of having a two-party system btw). It was Nixon, not Reagan who got the Dixiecrats and a number of racist blue-collar ethnic voters (the stereotypical Archie Bunker voters).
What Reagan did was add the religious right, created by Jerry Falwell (a segregationist), Pat Robertson (a politician’s son and entrepreneurial preacher), and other who reacted negatively to Carter’s push for continued desegregation and his unwillingness to oppose federal funding for abortion. What the religious right did was expand the Republican base to Catholic big-city ethnic voters opposed to abortion and other values issues.
In the Clinton years, Republicans used the gun issue to pick up formerly Democratic western voters.
No matter how many wedge issues and even crazies there are in the Republican party, the agenda is still driven by Wall Street and local country clubs.
Given this history, the only ones who can yank the chains and create the vision that you describe are the Wall Street and country club folks who decide that the crazies are bad for business. This is what the appeal to “principles” is about, staving off the split that will occur when the bankers no longer can tolerate the crazies.
The following comment by Parvenu is such a malicious falsehood that I could not let it pass without comment:
“Goldwater embraced extreme right wing hate groups from the John Birch Society to the KKK.”
Barry Goldwater explicitly condemned the Birch Society and its founder, Robert Welch. He did so both publicly and privately.
Furthermore, anybody familiar with Goldwater knows that he was incapable of “embracing” ANY hate group because there wasn’t a mean-spirited or hateful bone in his body.
The exact same type of malicious falsehoods were circulated about Ronald Reagan.
Such malicious libels originate with people whose hatred of anything right-of-center controls and contaminates everything that comes out of their mouths.
I agree. Bill Buckley helped Goldwater gently disassociate himself from the Birchers.
Fuck Ronald Wilson Reagan. May he burn in hell.
I really appreciate your defense of ACORN and who it truly is registering. That’s why I find that the Supreme Court could even be hearing a case on Voting Rights repulsive. I spent the latter part of the election season involved with a Voter Suppression Wiki. I do not exaggerate when I say that we could barely keep up trying to list all the attempts to suppress votes in this country.