Francis Wilkinson is a master of understatement. He notes that the Republican Party has moved seemingly irrevocably away from any notion of enacting immigration reform, despite the best intentions of their party strategists. And he notes that this might not be very popular with certain minority populations.
Immigration reform, including the legalization of millions of immigrants already living in the U.S., is on hold because tens of thousands of Central American children have surrendered to border authorities. Also, because a sadistic army is killing people in Syria and Iraq. McCain, often a summer soldier when the forces of demagogy call, was perhaps too embarrassed to link Ebola to the new orthodoxy; of course, others already have.
It’s hard to see how Republicans walk this back before 2017 — at the earliest. What began with the national party calling for immigration reform as a predicate to future Republican relevancy has ended with complete capitulation to the party’s anti-immigration base. Conservatives are busy running ads and shopping soundbites depicting immigrants as vectors of disease, criminality and terrorism, a 30-second star turn that Hispanic and Asian voters, in particular, may not entirely relish.
I keep coming back to this but I’d welcome a new kind of politics in which the stakes of our elections were less dire. While I don’t mind the GOP doing things that make electoral victory for them more unlikely, I really would prefer that they stop moving in a fascist direction.
I know that the word “fascist” is loaded, but I don’t mean fascist in the Nazi sense. I just mean that they are increasingly a party for which racial identity in central, and in which intellectuals, scientists, artists, feminists, homosexuals, and ethnic and religious minorities are suspect. They are vulnerable to jingoistic messages, will support military adventurism without much prompting, believe in a false and mythological national history, and think of themselves as unique and superior to other peoples with a mandate from God to exercise their power. Scapegoating and conspiratorial thinking are central to their worldview, and they consume media based on fear, hate, and resentment on a near-constant basis. In addition to this, they oppose labor unions and lend their political support to corporate system that fuels militarism at the expense of investment in people and infrastructure.
So, you can point out all the ways that this party is unlike the Nazis, but the concern is with the similarities. With their recent embrace of voter suppression tactics that are now routinely being shot down by the courts, even their commitment to representative government is in question.
If these upcoming elections were just about tax rates, I’d be a lot happier.
The fact that these nutjobs keep getting elected makes me question the benefits of representative government.
It’s not representative government, it’s the hijacking of the same by big money that uses fascism as a handy tool.
I know but there are also an awful lot of people that they DO represent quite well. John McCain’s meetings with constituents are usually quite tense because he isn’t crazy right winger enough for them. That’s frightening, and I don’t think you can blame it entirely on propaganda.
Fascism has been here for years…working silently towards their goals…until recently that is…they cannot keep hiding behind their normal masks, Bibles and Flags…It is slowly being un-masked, but will it be soon enough??? we are witnessing the “fruits of their labors”…
When illegal immigration = cheap labor (and labor that won’t/can’t report violations of labor laws) and ballot boxes can’t be bought by the GOP base (aka bosses), why would the GOP have any interest in immigration reform?
Oh, and EBOLA! and ISIS! arrived just in time to replace the stale rallying cries of Benghazi!, and whatever else that has been rocking the Baggers’ boats since November 2008.
Non-rich American conservatism has always had a definite fascistic element to it — it wouldn’t surprise me at all of Mussolini synthesized his doctrine from analyzing American right-wing social movements. We can draw a pretty straight ideological line from the Know Nothings to the 1st and 2nd incarnations of the KKK to the fundamentalist revival to the McCarthy era to the hard hats to the religious right to the Tea Party.
What’s different isn’t so much that American conservatism is being ideologically radicalized. It’s always been like that. What’s novel about the current spate of millenialism are these two things:
Social conservatives are feeling the maw of cultural obsolescence about to close in on their throats in a way that they haven’t before. The country has undergone huge cultural changes but every time before they’ve been assured that WASP male bucolic supremacy is still the law of the land — just that their lessers would be a bit closer to them in status. The current changes in society don’t just threaten to ameliorate their privilege but eliminate it altogether. This scares social conservatives, because above-all their views are based on hierarchy.
The plutocracy’s fate is tied together with social conservatives in a way that it hasn’t in the past. What’s curious about American conservatism is by how long it took for these interests to really collude; both Archie Bunker and Thurston P. Howell can be broadly described as conservatives but they fought on different battlefields until the Reagan Revolution. The KKK was targeted at social deviants, not the plutocracy. FDR was by and large willing to bootlick the social conservatives to usher in the New Deal. The McKinleyite elites opposited Bryan’s economic populism, not his religious fundamentalism. So on and so forth. This time around, if Rush Limbaugh and Eric Erickson falls, so does Mitt Romney and Donald Trump. The plutocracy has every incentive to help the neoconfederates make their last stand in the Kulturkampf, because once the Obama coalition dismantles the social conservatives it’s very likely that they’ll be next. So they get outsized support from their plutocratic sugar daddies even though it’s quite obvious that the Norquists and Romneys couldn’t give a hot damn whether the country was dominated by black lesbian separatist atheists who banned guns and American football as long as they got their fucking tax cut.
Oh, FFS — Obama taps Ron Klain as Ebola czar
Another lawyer and political operative to be the public face and “manager” of a public health issue/scare. Yeah, that’s the ticket for assuring the public that the issue is being handled.
btw — Klain was the one that managed and sold Obama on the Solyndra deal. It was a POS and Democrats that defend/rationalize it are no better than Republicans that defend/rationalize all the POS deals that GWB/Cheney approved.
Klain’s had a pretty long career as a senior political staffer. Based on one issue, you want to claim he’s as incompetent as the Bush/Cheney team? Drawing an implied comparison between Solyndra and Social Security privatization or Iraq War II is unjustified.
And the point of BooMan’s post here is that the Republican Party has become so thoroughly and viciously radicalized that it is a primary danger to the future of our democratic republic. It’s weird that even a post like this has Obama-bashing in its comments thread.
Did I need to add “O/T and Breaking” to the subject line for you to get that I wasn’t commenting on the topic of this thread?
Obama had an opportunity to make an appoint that would scream this is the right and a good person for the assignment. Klain doesn’t. No medical experience, let alone expertise. Who knows if he’s even any good as a spokesperson. I mentioned Solyndra because Klain was instrumental in getting the half billion dollar federal funding for it and while chump change compared to many of the Bush/Cheney deals, it was still a POS.
Obama’s approval rating is at 40%. So, making an obviously excellent decision would help him. His diehard cheerleaders defending/rationalizing this poor choice for this assignment doesn’t help.
Obama can make “an obvious excellent decision” for a person to lead the Federal Government’s response to Ebola that “would help him” with his approval rating? That’s simply untrue.
And, frankly, gets us back to the subject of BooMan’s post here. There’s a position in the Cabinet which would be the natural one to lead a response to this situation, along with the CDC and other agencies they would help oversee. That would be THE SURGEON GENERAL. Why is that position open, even though Obama nominated Dr. Vivek Murthy to fill the position nearly a year ago? Because the NRA, and thus GOP Senators, oppose him.
Are you failing to see the forest for the radical Republican obstructionist trees here?
Before, we had September 11, 2001, the work of a mad Muslim Osama bin Laden, living in the land of the Taliban; Saddam Hussein, the evil dictator who was going to destroy us/everyone with WDM (remember, the missiles could reach London in 45 minutes, praise Tony Blair, and a US city was going to disappear under a smoking mushroom cloud, long live Condalezza Rice); and the mysterious appearance of anthrax in the mail and elsewhere. Today, we have the Muslim extremists of IS, who act very nastily towards everyone in their region, including Americans; the evil dictator Al Assad, who supposedly used sarin on his people (though no one seems to be sure how true or false the report was and he relinquished his WMD); and ebola.
Is it coincidental that these issues become conflated in the minds of the ‘people’: evil dictator, WMD, Islam, deadly sickness. It almost makes me see a conspiracy. Evidently these evil forces are out to get us one way or the other. And now there is the annoying problem of immigration, including all those children, to complete the deadly cocktail.
The moral is always: go to war. Now there will be war for 30 years, big shots in the know say! Are you ready for it? And then another 30. The US goes to war reluctantly, you might hear on the TV, but it has its moral obligations to fulfill. So there you are. Live with it. And what will be the effect of all this war on the country: generations who nothing but war. They might conclude that war is the business of the US.
In last two years, I’ve been writing the Obama administration was making the wrong decisions on foreign policy, the house of cards build in the Middle-East and the Ukraine has come crumbling down. There will be no simple solutions.
Looking at the ever sliding poll numbers, Democrats should put all differences aside and work towards a clear message for coming November. The US can’t permit itself another turn towrds the right and more fascism.
From the poll numbers, the prospects are bleak because the Obama voters will stay home, so we need to GOTV or suffer another great loss at the midterms. Corporate power knows no mercy and boundaries, more globalization, hostilities and foreign intervention.
○ Poll shows Obama approval low, GOP enthusiasm higher than Democrats’ | WaPo | Poll |
○ Trouble Looms for Obama, Democrats with Election Day 2014 Approaching | ABC News |
They’re baaaacckkkk
Just without the tacky uniforms and the heavy-duty anti-Semitism.
They’re baaaacckkkkk
Just without the faaabbbulous outfits and the heavy duty anti-papism.
And this:
Another freaking anti-immigrant ophthamologist
The Tea Party is a media campaign. The folks in the field who stand up, salute, and wave the Gadsden flag are representative of all types of crazy. And the Republicans want the crazy to vote for them.
The GOP won’t change its position on immigration until a wave election throws it out of power and it has no procedural firewall tactics left.
Pinochet’s Chile is a better comparison. An Extremely divided society in which the right hand side of the spectrum embraced everything you mention, but which did not reach the mass-scale of death that the Nazis did (though they did their share once they got into power). And they still exist there, neutralized, weak, watching as their enemies take over and move Chile forward into the modern era.
I hope we can get to that point without going through all the shit they did.
Where did Pinochet get his support? Big business USA {ITT} and the Central Intelligence Agency. Nothing has changed, just worsened. The US has veered away from democratic and universal moral principles. It would be a sad day, but it has all the hallmarks of a violent overthrow or a military coup d’état with oppression. The religious fervor is weakening, unless I’m mistaken, otherwise revolt could combine in a theocracy – see Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Pinochet didn’t need US big business or the CIA to take over Chile. I’m not saying that there weren’t American interests that benefited from the coup but that these things can and do happen without American impetus.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141453/jack-devine/what-really-happened-in-chile
○ “The Pinochet File” by David Kornbluh
Yes, the article I posted mentioned the initial CIA coup attempt in 1970. My point is that Pinochet could well have succeeded without that support. I’d say the same for the current Ukraine situation. Elements of our government apparatus, whether the CIA or the NED, capitalize on deteriorating situations to achieve their goals, whatever they may be. I just prefer to give most of the credit, good or bad, to local actors.
Michael Dunn convicted of first-degree murder for fatally shooting a teenager in an argument over loud music outside a Jacksonville convenience store was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
At Friday’s sentencing hearing, Dunn apologized to Davis’ parents. “I want the Davis family to know that I truly regret what happened. If I could roll back time and do things differently, I would,” he said. “I am mortified that I took a life whether it was a justified or not.”
Davis’ mother, Lucia McBath said she always taught her son to love and to forgive. “Therefore, I too must be willing to forgive and so I choose to forgive you Mr. Dunn for taking my son’s life,” McBath said in court.
Let’s hope all the racist f–kwads notice and that there is no open season for attacking young black men. Now the loophole for racist f–kwads with a badge needs to be closed ASAP.
The details are irrelevant. As far as I can tell, there’s only one important way that the GOP is unlike the Nazis–the Dems still have enough power to keep the GOP under control. Give them free reign, and nobody will be surprised by death camps and world domination.
Running through my personal archive on HD, searching the Roman Curia I of course came across the term fascism.
My post nearly 10 years ago …
A follow-up diary by Ray Pensador in July 2013 – How Come Some People Understand What’s Happening And Others Don’t.
The control now is absolute, but it took 40-plus years to get us to this level (the thingy about creeping fascism)… In the final analysis, the ruling class views the population as just another resource to be exploited in order to extract profit, just like cattle, or herds of sheep.
But human rights, constitutional rights, worker protections, etc., protect our humanity, and therefore interfere with the profit motives of the ruling class.
So that explains the systemic take-down (tearing down) of pillars of democracy. So once the symbiotic relationship between the moneyed elite and the politicians was cemented, they then became what we have today: a corporate oligarchy, or Corporatocracy.
The secret of American prosperity – a cartoon typifies a capitalist nation to communism. How the tables have been turned in some 60 years: democracy, freedom, wages, right to work, education. In the 1950s …
Statistics of today:
Education: OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) – rating per nation
Automobile production: (millions)
USA 11.0
Germany 5.7
India 3.9
China 22.1
Japan 9.6
Russia 2.2
EU 14.6
Income GDP – IMF year 2013: (trillions US dollar)
USA 16.2
Germany 3.6
India 1.9
China 9.5
Japan 6.0
Russia 2.1
EU 17.5
By 2030, the six countries with the largest number of vehicles will be China, USA, India, Japan, Brazil, and Mexico. China is projected to have nearly 20 times as many vehicles in 2030 as it had in 2002. This growth is due both to its high rate of income growth and the fact that its per-capita income during this period is associated with vehicle ownership growing more than twice as fast as income.