One way to understand the divisions in the Republican Party is to note that they have none. They are an almost wholly united Party of No. But, that didn’t used to be the case, as Jacob Weisberg points out:
One way to understand the divisions in the Republican Party is as a clash of regional philosophies. Northeastern conservatism is moderate, accepts the modern welfare state, and dislikes mixing religion with politics. Western conservatism is hawkish, hates government, and embraces individual freedom. Southern conservatism is populist, draws on evangelical Christianity, and plays upon racial resentments. The big drama of the GOP over the past several decades has been the Northeastern view giving way to the Southern one. To see this transformation in a single family, witness the shift from George H.W. Bush to George W. Bush.
So, what’s changed? For starters, Mormons continue to grow in numbers out West, and they bring their own form of social conservatism to the GOP. For another, Barry Goldwater’s Arizona had no ‘negro problem,’ but Gov. Jan Brewer’s Arizona has a ‘Latino problem.’ Add to these changes the phenomenon of Western Governor Ronald Reagan. He made it cool to be a social conservative, even in Orange County. So, the GOP in the West has become less and less live-and-let-live and more and more concerned with racial issues and panty-sniffing. This has aligned them with Southern conservatives to an alarming degree.
Meanwhile, there are currently no Republicans from New England serving in the House of Representatives. There are only two Republicans (one from Long Island and one from Upstate) serving in the House from New York. Eight years of Bush was too much for the Northeast to take. Exurbs, suburbs, it doesn’t matter. In the Northeast, by the end of Bush’s second term, there was simply nowhere where the Republican Party was seen as an acceptable alternative. Republicans were also decimated in the Midwest, although to a lesser degree. And they began to lose ground in the Coastal South, particularly in North Carolina and Virginia, both of which Barack Obama carried in the 2008 presidential election.
These developments led many people to conclude that the Republican Party had become a regional party, incapable of winning national elections. And it still looks that way, despite predictions that they will trim their losses substantially in the upcoming midterms. What’s interesting is how they’re positioning themselves. Here’s how Weinberg describes it:
Yet since the second Bush left the White House, something different appears to be happening in Republicanland: a shift away from Southern-style conservatism to more of a Western variety…
On many issues, such as guns, taxes, and immigration, Southern and Western conservatives come out in the same place. They get there, however, by different means. The fundamental distinction is between a politics based on social and cultural issues and one based on economics. Southern conservatives care about government’s moral stance but don’t mind when it spends freely on behalf of their constituents. Western conservatives, by contrast, are soft-libertarians who want government out of people’s way on principle. Southern Republicans are guided by the Bible. Western Republicans read the Constitution. Seen in historical terms, it’s the difference between a movement descended from George Wallace and one that harks back to Barry Goldwater.
Now, here is where I think Weisberg has it wrong. The Western GOP is increasingly racist. No politician has been more stridently racist in recent years than Colorado’s Tom Tancredo. And it’s Arizona, not Arkansas or Mississippi, that’s at the leading edge of anti-minority legislation at the moment. The Deep South still has it’s racial politics, but all the energy is coming from the West, where demographic changes are beginning to swamp the white majorities. During the Civil Rights Era, the end of Jim Crow didn’t threaten white majorities, it just threatened total white domination. Whites in the West are facing a different kind of anxiety. They are on the cusp of losing statewide power. In New Mexico it has already happened, as Mexican-American Bill Richardson is finishing out his second term as governor. So, what we’re seeing now isn’t a shift of influence in the GOP from the South to the West so much as Southification of the West. They’re not only becoming the hub of a new racial politics, but they’re growing more culturally conservative as well. We’re not seeing a new breed of Western politicians, like Alan Simpson of Wyoming, who are pro-gay and pro-choice, but who are conservative on economic issues. We’re seeing Western politicians who don’t disagree with the Southern politicians in any substantive way.
Weisberg appears blind to these developments.
Tea Party darling Rand Paul’s objection the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is clearly Goldwater’s, not Wallace’s. Wallace and his followers resisted civil rights because they wanted to maintain segregation. Goldwater favored integration but thought the civil rights bill infringed upon private property rights and free association. In a similar way, the Palin-Beck opposition to universal health insurance is based on their intrinsic dislike of activist government, rather than on a Southern Strategy argument that federal benefits will help poor blacks and not working-class whites. Many reporters have gone to Tea Party rallies looking for expressions of bigotry. What they have tended to find instead is a constitutional fundamentalism that argues that Washington has no right to tell individuals or states what to do.
Again, this is wrong. You can’t go to a Tea Party rally without tripping over a protester who portrays Obama as a monkey or who tells him to go back to Kenya. During the 2008 campaign, Sarah Palin’s rallies were rife with racist posters and attendees making overtly racist remarks. Racism flows easily from the mouths of Republicans like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly. What’s going on is a melding of Southern and Western conservatism. So, you’re as likely to get a lecture on the Bible from a Tea Partier as you are to get a lecture on the Constitution. The only distinction is that people are more likely to openly express their constitutional fundamentalism than their feelings of race hatred. But, even this is not that much of a change. During the Civil Rights Era, respectable opponents of desegregation also relied on constitutional arguments to shield them from charges of holding unenlightened tribal attitudes.
The modern GOP doesn’t have a coherent governing philosophy. But they are more united than ever. Race hated is central to that unity, and it is growing in the West by leaps and bounds. Shit, it’s even growing in Kentucky.
This is an important post. You’re highlighting something I expected to happen after the historic election of America’s first melanin-enhanced President, but I have been surprised at how overt and intense it’s all been so far.
I do think it’s good for the long run to have all this racism exposed so clearly. Makes it easier to cut it off for good. Their ideology is like a cornered rat that’s lashing out with all it’s got before it’s eventually killed anyway. Good riddance.
The Sarah Palin opposition to universal health insurance is based on a big lie. This is all part of her attempts to push herself into national politics.
The fact is that all of the Palin children and grandchildren all had socialized health care through Indian Health Services and the Alaska Native Medical Center.
This coverage for Track ended when he attained the age of 19 years. If Bristol is still under 19 years of age she is still covered until age 19. The rest of the children and grandchildren, even Tripp.
[blockquote]The modern GOP doesn’t have a coherent governing philosophy. But they are more united than ever. Race hated is central to that unity, and it is growing in the West by leaps and bounds. Shit, it’s even growing in Kentucky. [/blockquote]
You have no idea how right you are. It’s especially bad here in NKY, close to Cincy.
Good article, BooMan.
The thing that worries me, and I am full Latino and could never be mistaken for anything else with my skin color, eye color, hair color and the way my nose is shaped, is that no where has a truly prosperous western style Latin country arisen.
How much is that the northern countries exploiting the southern ones I don’t know, but there’s always the fear that whatever we may be as individuals, the whites really ARE just better. Could we ever have built what they built? The fear is always there even I support the bold new future.
.
There is nothing new to witness here. Feelings of superiority to another culture is more often a grab to stay in power. Hitler exploited this human trait by positioning lower class Germans in the elite military and to oversee the prisoners in the death camps. An human being apparently thrives on this feeling of superiority and will always be in search of minority groups. Isn’t that what bullying amongst kids (or adults) is all about? Humans act cowardly and prefer to gang up on less capable persons.
See also my recent comment on use of the term termites. Analyse the history of colonization throughout the world, apartheid regime in South Africa and present day Palestinian territory.
Christians and the concept of whiteness
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Part of that, and I think a very big part, is that no truly prosperous western style Latin country has ever been allowed to arise. The Latin American countries were colonized by a white minority every bit as racist and oppressive as the English and the French and the Dutch in North America. The fact that they speak Spanish while the northerners speak English is just an historic detail. The same racist, elitist, dominionist, subjugationist dynamics were at work. Put the brown people in their place and keep them there. And even today, when non-European, non-white majorities are nominally in charge in many Latin American countries, as far as I can tell the real power structures are still dominated by the same colonialist elites that have existed for centuries.
One hypothesis I’ve heard from a central European who lived for decades in Latin American is that the Hispanics came to Central and South America to plunder, where as the prime motivation of the early Ango settlers was for land to farm. Totally different approach and mentality. This isn’t to say they didn’t plunder, but it wasn’t their primary goal.
Well there’s also the fact that the N. Americans just killed off their native population while the Hispanics intermingled with them.
.
The common denominator of the Republican party across the continent is the fundamentalist christian religion.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Thanks for a great socio-political analysis. I can’t validate how right you are, as I don’t live in the US. However if you ask qui bono “who benefits” from Republican policies, it certainly isn’t minorities.
But perhaps there is also an economic overlay. Better off whites have no objection to minorities if they provide cheap labour. Poorer whites do because they are labour competitors and drive down the price of labour.
However both better off and poorer whites get concerned when “people who are not like us” threaten to achieve political power and challenge their subordinate economic status.
So what unite’s the GOP on class lines (rich and poor whites) is a fear that their political and economic hegemony is challenged. And the closer minorities get to succeeding, the more demonic that fear becomes.
MNPundit’s fear that Latino dominated states haven’t been as successful as white dominated state is more a reflection of the class structure in those states – which tends to be very rigid – than it is of their racial composition.
In the US, fear of minority domination is what keeps the white ruling class in power because it makes it easy for them to co-opt poor whites ion their struggle even though, objectively, poor whites and poor minorities have more in common with each other than they have with the white dominated ruling class.
I think you get it better than a lot of Americans do. Your last paragraph in particular is spot on. As I wrote as part of a long discussion on Eurotrib about Jim Webb during his 2008 Senate campaign:
Poor working class blacks and poor working class whites do indeed have more in common than the wealthy and privileged. Get them together in a massive labor union effort as was done in 1938 and the wealthy and privileged have the governor bring out the National Guard.
Today, there are huge cultural institutions and well-funded movements dedicated to making sure that this remains the situation. From Bob Jones University, Liberty University, and Regent University (who have large scholarship programs for working class kids, who come from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, New Jersey as well as from the South) to local Chambers of Commerce (who co-opt black professionals and business owners) to the thousands of small business owners who love to tell racially charged jokes in front of their employees, there is a massive institutional effort to keep this wedge there.
So why don’t political leaders with a poor white background make this point? They would have more credibility with poor whites than either rich liberal whites or minority leaders.
What seems tragic (to the outsider) is how easily rich whites manage to co-opt poor whites using the fear of externalities – blacks, Hispanics, gays, commies, Russians, Islam, Science, conservationists, northern white liberals, and feminists – using the tools of religious fundamentalism, homophobia, male chauvinism, ignorance, prejudice, police repression, a skewed justice system, white supremicism, creationism, authoritarianism, militarism, xenophobic nationalism, imperialism and free market ideology to make it clear that poor whites had better fall in line with rich whites OR ELSE!
Is the public education system in the US that bad that it cannot teach people elementary political/ideological analysis? Is the MSM so dominant that people can’t think for themselves? Is the materialist culture so all pervasive that almost everyone can be bought off very cheaply? Is the cult of the individual so all pervasive that there is virtually no concept of group solidarity or the common good? How can such an avowedly Christian part of the population be so easily bought off by Mammon?
As a general rule of thumb, the more someone trumpets their religion, the less I trust them, and this attitude is widespread in Europe. This is because their religiousity always seems to be about them and what they should have and deserve which generally includes more power over others (for their own good, you understand…)
How has this self-destruction of such a large part of humanity been accomplished?
Excellent questions all, to which I have few and pitiful answers.
Occasionally a white from a less than stellar background does try to speak out. Jim Webb is one of those. I thought, and to some degree still think, that John Edwards was another. Most of them get co-opted by the powers that be long before they gain enough clout to matter. The rest get sabotaged politically or tarred and feathered with the dreaded librul label.
And yes it is tragic how easily most poor whites get co-opted by the worst in human nature, but it is tragically all too true. They are manipulated, most of them, by a self serving power structure and its propaganda machine from cradle to grave.
And yes the public education system in the US is woefully inadequate at anything like a true general education. It is at best a moderately successful vocational training system, turning out for the most part politically illiterate, intellectually incurious worker drones and mindless consumers of the status quo, while the wealthy and well connected send their children to elite institutions where they learn how to gain and maintain their power and privilege. And those trends have only gotten worse in the last thirty years or so, at least since Reagan.
How has all this been accomplished? As far as I can tell, human nature hasn’t changed much since Charlemagne’s Europe or Caesar’s Rome.
Booman Tribune ~ Comments ~ Yes, It Is About Race
Human nature has also accomplished many great things in the interim, including the development of human rights, international conflict resolution mechanisms which don’t involve the use of war, democratic political systems and enlightened judicial systems.
However what doesn’t appear to have changed is not human nature, but the nature of imperial rule when one power becomes almost monopolistically powerful. Is what we are seeing the price the USA and the rest of the world are paying for allowing the US to become too dominant in the world political system?
It is perhaps no coincidence that the Reagan era coincided with the end of the Cold War and the Obama era with the impending defeat of the US in its imperial ambitions in Europe and the Middle east.
Does enlightened political leadership depend on the limits of power becoming predominantly visible? The Neo-con project was all about asserting US global dominance and recognised no limits to what US power could do.
Ironically the US Constitution was drafted precisely to avert the corrupting power of one branch the power becoming too predominant. Do we need what amounts to effectively a world constitution or balance of power which prevents one nation from becoming too predominant? It is no accident that the neo-cons were viscerally opposed to the UN, international treaties, or anything that appeared to put any limits on US power.
Please note I say this as an Americaphile. It seems to me that much of the damage caused by US hegemony has been suffered by Americans themselves.
You are right on all counts, of course, except possibly that last one. The Iraqis and the Afghanis, and the Vietnamese before them, would probably disagree on that point. And while it’s true that we in the US have suffered some collateral damage from our almost accidental inheritance of hegemony, primarily in the corruption and subversion of our political systems, we have also enjoyed many of the benefits of empire. At least two generations of Americans have enjoyed a standard of living and an importance in world affairs that their parents and grandparents could not have imagined.
And I’m sorry if that last comment came off as an angry rant. I am angry at what has been done, and continues to be done, to my country. Rest assured my anger was not directed at you.
The damage done to Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq is of course very obvious, and what is remarkable is the lack of bitterness in (say) Vietnam in response.
However I am more intrigued by the damage done within the US because of the kind of governance imperialism has fostered – huge military industrial complex, authoritarianism, racism, fear of terrorism, increased inequality within the USA.
A central tenet of Christianity is that you are destroyed by your own sin, not the harm done to you by others. Nowhere does this seem to be more true than within the fundamentalist Christian population within the USA itself.
Jimmy Carter did. Look where it got him
Jimmy Carter was not from a poor white background. He was from a middle-class farming background.
BTW, John Edwards’s dad was a supervisor, which makes Edwards from a middle-class background as well.
Log cabinism is permanent feature of American poliics.
I know Carter wasn’t poor white, and you know he wasn’t poor white, but that’s how he sold himself to the country and that’s how he was bought, and that’s where he got the cred he did to bring such things up.
It’s John-Kerry-in-reverse.
correction:
Weisberg is wrong about this:
What Weisberg fails to acknowledge is the great extent to which the West benefits from past government action. From leasing public lands to construction of water projects to military facilities and contracts, the West’s economy has been built on government handouts and earmarks. As for the South, he misses the fact that “constituents” for Southern Republicans is very narrowly defined. And that the South has its resentments in some localities about the eminent domain taking of private land for national forests and national parks that drive the timber and tourism industry–which makes them a lot like the West.
Also, the politicization of the Southern Baptist Convention and networks of independent churches operate very much like the Mormons do in the West.
The South also has a Latino problem as work teams hired to work in Southern agriculture bring in people who can find other work and then become local entrepreneurs. The West may have its “coyotes” but the South has its debt peonage camps (especially in the wintering area of Florida). Slavery is not dead in the South but it now crops up with Hispanics as the enslaved.
The West that does not have a “Latino problem” has a “Native American problem” — primarily the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming. That shapes their racial politics.
Plot the number of US DoD facilities in the NE against the number of Republican Congress-critters from the NE.
Straight-line correlation.
It’s not just the number of sunny days, or the lower heating costs, or the expensive (read unionized) local civilian labor markets, that have the NE down to basically Forts Dix and Drum, Maguire AFB, NSB New London and the Portsmouth Navy Yard — and all are perennials on the closure list).