I often read commentaries and social media posts asking, in reference to the particular clusterfuck that is our politics of late: “How did we get here?”
A lot of people still cannot comprehend how we arrived at a point where armed Nazis walk into coffee shops, where right-wing electeds almost daily propose—and often pass—legislation that defies common sense and substitutes spite, and where politicians and pundits apparently have a running bet over who can spit out the craziest shit imaginable.
I mean, a member of Congress (three guesses) says banning assault rifles will mean Americans will start eating dogs, like they do in Venezuela?
Esquire magazine’s redoubtable Charles P. Pierce today posted a blog piece with the excellent headline, “Republicans Are Nominating More Fringe Than Victorian Drapery.” Mr. Pierce, author of the 2010 best-selling book, “Idiot America,” is no stranger to this topic and should be regarded, in fact, as something of an expert. He gets to the nut in his next-to-last paragraph:
“Of course, when you spend 40 years telling people that government is the problem, it’s not hard to turn politics into a carnival act whose only purpose is to be a spectacle of public amusement.”
That’s part of how we got here, and it actually goes back a good deal further than that. Like Mr. Pierce, I grew up in the 50s, as Joe McCarthy’s grip on the body politic’s throat finally loosened. While the man himself died in dissolution and disgrace, his tactics and style lived on, though the Red Scare took a back seat to racism. Being reared in a hard-right Republican Midwestern family (Phyllis Schlafly was a friend of my parents), I was steeped in both. I eventually changed, as I described in a piece seven years ago, but tens of millions of Americans were drawn like moths to a flame. Republican movers and shakers saw an opportunity.
In June, 1963, two conservative columnists, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, published a piece entitled, “The White Man’s Party.” The piece reflects their coverage of a Republican National Committee meeting in Denver. There, they saw the seeds of the modern party being planted:
“[S]ubstantial numbers of Party leaders from both North and South see rich political dividends flowing from the Negrophobia of many white Americans. These Republicans want to unmistakably establish the Party of Lincoln as the white man’s party.”
Thus began the confluence of several powerful interest groups who agreed to use racism as their primary weapon for, on the individual level, dividing Americans, and on a larger scale, promoting distrust of government.
Big business wanted to roll back New Deal programs and undermine the power of unions to gain rights and benefits for workers as well as the power of government to tax and regulate. Racists wanted to roll back the gains of the Civil Rights movement. “Religious” extremists (the quotes are deliberate, there) wanted a theocracy. As the 1960s rolled on, economic, social, and political change gave all three of them more and more fodder for future use.
They went to work. They organized; they planned; they funded. They honed messages. Oligarchs like Charles Koch started funding groups to strategize and execute. Lewis Powell, shortly before joining the Supreme Court, wrote his famous memo outlining a strategy for business to combat the progressive forces that had gained strength in the previous decade. I remember a series of magazine ads in the 1970s warning Americans government was going to take away their ability to choose (one asked you to imagine a little girl losing her favorite ice cream).
By 1980, with the Carter administration mortally wounded by the hostage situation in Iran and rampant inflation at home, Ronald Reagan encapsulated the Right’s message, saying, “Government isn’t the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
In Reagan’s footsteps, Republicans took a more fangs-and-claws, blowtorch-and-bludgeon approach. Rush Limbaugh stirred white victimization and resentment. Newt Gingrich made divisiveness his primary strategy. Rupert Murdoch hired Roger Ailes. Karl Rove ginned up the voter fraud myth, adding energy to long-running efforts to cripple voting rights. Astroturf groups like the Tea Party convinced the media that there was groundswell happening.
White Americans’ growing realization that this will soon be a minority-majority country kicked in. There’s a 2014 study that posits this realization has stirred whites’ anxiety over losing their majority status, pushing them into “conservative ideology and policy positions.” In fact, the authors suggest that this shift mean the generally held view that a more diverse America would benefit Democrats “may be premature.”
So, while you’re watching all this happen—and, hopefully, fighting against it—always remember this is not something organic going on, not some tide of history. We are where we are because the Right has been working hammer-and-tong, from every conceivable direction, to get us here.
Later,
Posted by scaypgrayce 
Scaypgrayce 