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Wednesday, December 07, 2011

The "Bigger Picture" of Current GOP Disarray

I've got faculty meetings all afternoon, so in lieu of conventional blogging, here is an exchange upgraded and adapted from the Moot, sparked by this comment from longtime Friend of Blog "jollyspaniard":
The bigger picture is that GOP alliance between religious, racists and crony capitalists is falling apart. The racist and religious fanatic wings of the party don't want to fall in line and vote for the crony capitalist like they always have in the past. They're going to have to reinvent themselves, probably with an outreach to Latinos. The problem is that their racist base won't let them.

Of course the GOP corporatists were always happy to whomp up the enthusiasm of the white racists because it abetted their anti-union politics, ever exacerbating in turn precisely the social insecurity that fed that racism in the first place. This vicious circle was partly overcome by the academic multiculuralism which won the Culture Wars among elites (who do not share their parents politics) and by demographic shifts more generally, including the paradoxical influx of non-unionized non-whites which was, after all, the short-sighted desired accomplishment of all this reactionary politics from the first: no unions and hence the cheapest possible labor and the added assurance that labor productivity gains would yield wealth concentration rather than generally rising standards of living.

Now, moneyed elites and priestly elites have a conservative orientation that makes them more natural allies -- including the shared hypocrisy of elites who are always happy to overlook the sins among our own class, dear, so long as the lower orders are policed into virtue, whether the austerity being preached is economic or spiritual. So, I think hopes of a fraying of the alliance between the authoritarian christianist wing and secular corporatist wing are overstated: fear of the mob and easy hypocrisy have always been the glue there. Increasing secularization and democratization are the only things that can marginalize that alliance into harmlessness.

The current madness of the Republicans' anti-science anti-fact hyper-spin hate politics actually indicates the desperation of their self-marginalization as an organized force, and though I am far from denying it yields organizational and disciplinary victories that can still wreak havoc here and there, it remains true that much of the worst of that ugly nonsense is more symptomatic than finally definitive. I daresay older conceptions of conservatism oriented toward caution over rashness, preservation of values over fetishizing novelty, rationalizing elites through meritocratic rhetoric and so on will return to the fore soon enough, even if they should be relegated to a minor strain in a secular democratic planetary multiculture.

Frankly, Democrats won the argument for social democracy with the New Deal and it was the racist legacy of slavery and the reactionary South which frustrated its adequate implementation (The New Deal didn't extend to sharecroppers and domestics, so many of whom were people of color, for example, in large part to keep the old democratic coalition with white-racist neo-confederates intact and then universal health care was defeated because of the institutional threat it represented to Jim Crow -- and so Truman started instead with the armed forces and the slow road we're still on) and this white racism enabled in turn the Southern Strategy in the aftermath of the eventual belated but righteous Democratic embrace of Civil Rights and the Great Society in the 1960s which did indeed sent the South into the arms of Republicans and set up the last thirty years of Movement Conservative ascendancy.

While Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman provided glib rationalizations to justify the mediated pretense that market fundamentalism "won the argument" in the Reagan presidency through the Gingrich Contract Hit on America through to the Summer of Tea the truth is that their ideas were never popular nor ever won over the academy (hence the necessary creation of an alternate reality of conservative think tanks and hate media). Democrats never lost the argument, it's just that Republican mobilization of white-racism made winning the argument momentarily irrelevant, and now that mobilization is losing its force and the social democratic commonsense that was never successfully defeated or entirely silenced is reasserting itself.

Of course, environmental catastrophe confronts America and the world of which we are a badly misbehaving part with new challenges for which this still winning still-won argument of social democracy are finally inadequate. That really is too bad, since we rather need a new social democratic chapter right about now to clean up the mess left by the Movement Conservative epoch, but there's no time for that, and we'll have to do that clean-up while joining with the world to solve planetary problems at one and the same time. The solutions will look enough like communism or at any rate demand enough sacrifices (planetary raparations and renewable development will cost, like, seriously real money) possibly to mobilize yet another reactionary wave in America, this time not racist (well, except, come to think of it, in the sense of justifying climate genocide in the over-exploited regions of the world in the name of multicultural consumerism here at home, for which the word "racism" isn't exactly entirely inapt), but that's another story.

Hey, you started this by mentioning "the bigger picture" after all!

8 comments:

jollyspaniard said...

"I daresay older conceptions of conservatism oriented toward caution over rashness, preservation of values over fetishizing novelty, rationalizing elites through meritocratic rhetoric and so on will return to the fore soon enough,"

This decade saw the neocons, The "Young Guns" (remember them), The Tea Party (already passe), a whole parade of flavours of the month candidates and political memes which apparently explode in popularity before vanishing. These people aren't slowing down on the novelty factor, they're ramping it up.

The GOP would have to be locked out of politics for more than a decade before it countenanced reinventing itself.

Contemporary Christianity seems to have turned into an extension of the self help movement which runs on novelty like some organism use oxygen. I suspect that's where contemporary American conservatism has aquired its flash in the pan nature, you don't see it in the UK's conservative politics for instance.

Jose

Dale Carrico said...

These people aren't slowing down on the novelty factor, they're ramping it up.

Nothing is more apparent than that the spectacle to which which you refer is serial re-packaging and re-branding of the same old tired bullshit over and over again. It didn't take long for most people to realize (and then for social scientists to provide hard evidence to back this realization) that the Tea Party was nearly indistinguishable from the same old pack of know-nothing white-racist patriarchal pricks screaming about "small government" except for all MY handouts and except for the police state apparatus required to enforce MY parochial "family-values" hang-ups on everybody else. Again, I see the "ramping up" you describe as a symptom of desperation presaging utter self-marginalizing dissolution, I certainly see nothing remotely resembling novelty so much as, possibly, reductio ad absurdum.

I cannot speak for Christianity -- being after all a worst nightmare atheist pinko pacifist vegetarian techno-geek San Francisco liberal arts professor and so on -- but I do hope I am right to suppose that neither do the Domininionists with the Megaphone speak for Christianity, much as they would like us to think otherwise.

jollyspaniard said...

I wanted to be a Catholic Priest when I was little. That was before I discovered that Science was infinitely cooler and that you can live without religion and still be moral.

Nobody speaks for Christianity, it's too amophorous and it mutates at the drop of a hat. That doesn't stop people from trying and these people are incredibly annoying, even to other christians (see Rick Santorum and Michelle Bachman). The whole christianity is under threat is an oft used dog whistle but it doesn't work reliably.

jimf said...

> [O]f course, environmental catastrophe confronts America
> and the world. . . That really is too bad, since we. . .
> need. . . to clean up the mess left by the Movement Conservative
> epoch but there's no time for that, and we'll have to do that
> clean-up while joining with the world to solve planetary problems
> at one and the same time.

Ah, well, that's where the Robot God will come to the rescue.
It will think like Ayn Rand, but that's OK, because nanotech
will supply enough wealth lower the cost of "charity" to zero.
Of course, purists may still want to let ne'er-do-wells and losers
perish in spite of that, just on principle. ;->

jimf said...

> I cannot speak for Christianity -- being after all a worst
> nightmare atheist pinko pacifist vegetarian techno-geek
> San Francisco liberal arts professor and so on. . .

Well, it's a good thing you don't eat in Queens and New Jersey
diners, or you'd be reminded on a daily basis by Fox News
just how much of a nightmare you are to right-thinking
Americans. ;->

jollyspaniard said...

If you don't scare those people, you're probably doing something wrong in my book.

jimf said...

> It didn't take long for most people to realize. . .
> the Tea Party was nearly indistinguishable from the
> same old pack of know-nothing white-racist patriarchal pricks
> screaming about "small government" except for all MY handouts
> and except for the police state apparatus required to
> enforce MY parochial "family-values" hang-ups on everybody else.

Speaking of police and family values -- comment found on a blog:

"I can't tell you how much Andy Griffith's, and Ron Howard/Opie's,
betrayal to me, and all the American People, has been..
Just devastating.. I had no idea, that the man, I grew up
with watching on the Andy Griffith Show, all those years ago,
that he would turn out to be an Anti-American Obama Socialist
Marxist.. It's just a backstabbing, in your face, kind of betrayal..
that's all I can say about it.. it's too bad that he just doesn't
get it.. that Liberal Socialist Marxism, is NOT American,
and NOT what American's want.!!!"
http://dailycaller.com/2010/09/08/andy-griffith-throws-away-50-years-of-goodwill-in-30-seconds/

I happened to watch _A Face in the Crowd_ the other day
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050371/
and I was curious to know what the politics of an
actor who spent 8 years playing a North Carolina
sheriff on television might be. Sometimes you can guess
an actor's politics from the kind of roles they
play. Other times -- I guess you can't!

jollyspaniard said...

It's easier to tell with writers. Out of work actors aren't likely to turn down a part because the character being portrayed is unlike them.