Monday, December 05, 2011
Newt! Newt! Newt!
Oh, please please please let his run as not-Romney savior flavor of the month last long enough to land him the nomination! Obama will beat any of these killer clowns, that's not something I lose a second of sleep over -- but with Newt at the head of the Killer Clown College (or forcing a brokered convention with so acrimonious and demoralizing an aftermath that even Mitt -- or Jeb! -- in the GOP Pope-Emperor gown is just as bad or worse) Dems keep the Senate and win back the House and we get another do-something Congress to preside over the implementation and improvement of Health Care Reform and nominate judges, we get immigration reform, we get EFCA, we get green stimulus, and coast into the demographics that make the Democratic majority permanent unless and until the GOP changes with the times in ways that can only make them, and our public discourse in general, more sane. Go Ghost of the Past, go Crazytown, go Newt!
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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.
The corporatists were always happy to whomp up the enthusiasm of the white racists because it abetted their anti-union politics yielding precisely the social insecurity that fed that racism in the first place. A vicious circle partly overcome by academic multiculuralism for the elites (who do not share their parents politics) and by demographics more generally, including the paradoxical influx of non-unionized non-whites which was the accomplishment of all this reactionary politics in the first place. 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. The current madness of their anti-science anti-fact hyper-spin hate politics actually indicates the desperation of their self-marginalization as an organized force, it 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. 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 first frustrated the implementation of social democratic health care and then enabled the Southern Strategy in the aftermath of the Democratic embrace of Civil Rights to set up the last thirty years of Movement Conservative ascendancy. While Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman provided rationalizations to justify the mediated pretense that market fundamentalism "won the argument" in the Reagan presidency the truth is that their ideas were never popular nor won over the academy (hence the alternate reality of think tanks, Hate Radio, Fox). Democrats never lost the argument, it's just that Republican mobilization of white-racism made winning the argument 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 with new challenges for which the winning argument of social democracy are inadequate. That's too bad, since we rather need a new social democratic chapter too clean up the mess left by the Movement Conservative epoch, but we'll have to do that while joining with the world to solve planetary problems at one and the same time. The solutions will look enough like communism possibly to mobilize another reactionary wave in America, this time not racist (well except in the sense of justifying climate genocide in the over-exploited regions of the world in the name of multicultural consumerism here at home), but that's another story. Hey, you started it by mentioning "the bigger picture" after all!
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