Amazingly, if you count how many times members of Congress have mentioned “Earth Day” over the years, you will discover that no Republican member of Congress has uttered the term since Lamar Alexander used it in April of 2010. It is now the day that dare not be mentioned. It seems to me that being that hostile to the Earth is harsher than being anti-puppy or anti-baby. Basic conservation and responsible environmental stewardship are dirty, discredited ideas on the right. This happened very rapidly, soon after McCain lost his bid for the presidency. Obviously, the oil and gas industries had a dominant influence on the right prior to the 2008 election, but McCain ran on Cap & Trade. Of course, his running mate was running around yelling “Drill, baby, drill,” which wasn’t entirely the instantiation of a single-entredre principle…but, nonetheless.
Something broke in the GOP after Palin was nominated. It just went over entirely to the dark side.
Of course this trend is just another example of the general trend of wingnut America coalesing around a single set of approved viewpoints. It’s hard to believe that only 8 years ago you would have no trouble finding GOP leaders agreeing that humans are causing global warming.
But it’s still important to understand why wingnuts are now so hostile to the environment, as demonstrated by the new wingnut bumper sticker “Green is the new Red”. Basically, in order to keep the rank and file wingnuts in line the wingnut sponsors have to get wingnuts to always feel that their enemy is an extreme threat. They did this through two steps:
The situation is ugly. The human species cannot survive long with the wingnut situation we have today.
Something broke in the GOP in 1976 when they decided that poor women weren’t entitled to the same reproductive rights as those with employer paid health insurance or the wealth to pay out of pocket. Was bizarre to watch the party of the 19th century eugenicists and 20th/21st century party of “hating the poor” demanding the birth of more poor children. (Before implementation of the PPACA, close to half of US births in hospitals were covered by Medicaid.)
“Something broke in the GOP after Palin was nominated. It just went over entirely to the dark side. “
That’s because, like most politicians, Palin already had a constituency, and by that I don’t just mean Alaska voters. I mean people and organizations with whom she was already working. It was they who pressed for her nomination; and once she got it, they found themselves in the catbird seat and are not about to vacate it voluntarily.
If anyone is curious about this, you might start here:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/09/19/602757/-The-CNP-Dominionists-Who-Vetted-Sarah-Palin#
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/9/2/1938/63427
Of ocurse, this was just the beginning …
Still, the point stands that Palin, in retrospect, seems to have been the breaking point for the GOP. The moment when they became the party of crazed assholes without exception, on every single issue under the sun. Now we are a totally polarized nation, but only as "polarized" as we would be if a big chunk of delusional Americans wanted to return to the Dark Ages (which is kind of true now…).
Still, I wonder if this was the inevitable trajectory for the GOP. Drunk on race-baiting, they always had to bottom out before they would reform. The problem is they’re taking the rest of us along for the ride!
Breaking point, maybe, but they were nearly there before Palin, otherwise why Palin? It sure didn’t start with her.
It started with Reagan and the forces behind him, which were basically the same as behind Goldwater, except Goldwater didn’t make it and Regan did.
Reagan was a disaster for this country, but it was a disaster waiting to happen.
Palin didn’t break it.
It was broken a long, long time before.
She just gave it some… for lack of better words, some glamour and pizzazz!
It started even before Joe McCarthy.
Maybe when Hoover was proven wrong?
Or the Republicans were proven wrong on isolation, in WWII.
One thing – the anti-communist extremism has always been there.
It gave growth to The John Birch Society.
And then, WF Buckley in magazines and TV, and then, talk radio.
When the Evangelicals started getting involved in politics, even Goldwater wanted nothing to do with them.
And the party kind of made the Birchers keep quiet, for the good of the party.
Nixon sort of courted them, with his “Silent Majority” and “Southern Strategy.”
Reagan openly courted the Evangelicals – as foot soldiers.
And now, they’re running the party.
The final nails in the coffin were FOX “News” – Palin, as was mentioned – and letting the old John Birchers out of the closets and attics of their families, and into the Tea Party.
And now, we have a ‘Perfect Storm” of ignorance, bigotry, fear and loathing and hatred, malice, and “TEH STOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPID!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Tis amazing what billions, well hundreds of millions of Koch brothers money spread through national, state, and local campaigns over four years can do. Those 70-year-olds want to go out in a blaze of glory by torching an entire planet. For “freedom”.
Another nail or two in the coffin of affirmative action and the right of majority of voters in any state to “to erect selective barriers against racial minorities.” It’s also laying a legal foundation for overturning “Brown v. Bd of Ed.”
This should please those readers here at Booman Tribune that I recently sparred with over both issues.
I remember the first Earth Day. It was one of many idealistic notions in the late sixties and early seventies. My experience showed that many of those causes fell far short of hopes.
But I was thinking just the other day how much progress we’ve made on the environmental front. As a kid most days I couldn’t see NYC from the heights of Montclair, only about 12 miles away, because of the pollution. It never happens now.
The Delaware River has been clean enough for the last 30+ years that the Shad run again every spring. Bald eagles have returned to the area as well as many other species.
There are lots of examples and while the planet is still under threat, there is so much to be grateful for and celebrate on Earth Day.
But fuck the wing nuts and consider them more dangerous that DDT.
The picking of Pinhead Palin seems to have finally completed the long process of universal Repub hatred and disdain for the natural environment. Hostility to all environmental concerns is now a litmus test of true “conservatism”—there are no exceptions, as this interesting use of the Google proves.
But my memory banks seem to recall that very deep hostility to the EPA was a standard Repub position quite a ways before the crowning of Palin as Empress Imbecile. It was a “Job Killer!!” all thru the 90s, and St. Reagan laid that groundwork. The question is how the Repub party turned so quickly from widely supporting the landmark environmental legislation of the late Nixon years to the contempt and disdain Reagan had for protecting the environment by 1980.
As GC notes, the brains of the populace have been largely polluted beyond repair by the toxic waste and sewage of the corporate media and the “conservative” Noise Machine. Saying that there has been an improvement from the days of unrestricted pollution—which basically was the case in the late 60s—is not really an answer. The question is how much better are standards since the mid 1990s, the last years in which the EPA was actually funded and the courts were not packed with conservative male activists masquerading as “judges”. The EPA’s mission now seems to be to conclude that whatever egregious pollution occurs is outside its jurisdiction—fracking and its massive wastes, mountain top removal, coal slurreys, etc.
The EPA is a hollowed out agency utterly despised and hamstrung by the Repubs, and there is no likelihood it will ever be returned to its prior level of functioning. As the living standards of most Americans decline so that our heroic plutocrats can take ever more of the wealth, the urge to shit our nest becomes irresistible. The “leaders” are corrupted by campaign bribery and cannot lead on the environment and the plebes have no stomach for it, having less at every turn and believing that protecting the environment will result in them having even less.
It’s kind of ironic, since amending all these pro-plutocrat, pro-capital mobility “free trade” agreements to slap massive tariffs on environment-destroying manufacturers like China could help return some industrial jobs to America. That would help the global environment and increase American employment. But that’s a no-go for our corporate masters.