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发帖数: 1191 | 1 http://www.eatthestate.org/not-your-grandfathers-gop/
Not Your Grandfather’s GOP
By Lansing Scott • on October 18, 2012 5:55 pm
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One thing that gets lost in the 24 hour news cycle of political reporting is
a longer view of political developments—-not just for today, this week, or
this election cycle, but over a span of decades.
One of the most significant political developments over the past half
century has been the extreme rightward shift of the Republican Party. The
GOP today would be barely recognizable to Republican presidents Eisenhower,
Nixon, or Ford (much less Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt), and none of them
would be welcome in the party that the GOP has become.
How did this happen? It helps to understand the long arc of historical
developments that built what the GOP is today.
Let’s start with the 1960s, as it was this time of political and cultural
upheaval that motivated much of the right-wing backlash that has been
building in strength ever since.
The Sixties: The Times They Were A-Changin’
During the early ’60s, of course, the civil rights struggle loomed large,
which gradually translated into policy within the Kennedy/Johnson
administrations, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of
1965, and Johnson’s “War on Poverty/Great Society” programs, such as
VISTA, Job Corps, and Head Start.
Liberal progress met with right-wing backlash. One manifestation was the
candidacy of Barry Goldwater as Republican nominee for president in 1964. He
was one of the most severely conservative presidential candidates in a long
time, and he lost in a landslide to Johnson.
On the more extreme right-wing fringe was the rise of the John Birch Society
, virulently anti-communist, anti-labor, and anti-civil rights (claiming the
civil rights movement was part of a communist conspiracy). One of JBS’
founders later split off to form the National Alliance, a white supremacist,
anti-semitic, neo-Nazi organization. Another founder was Texas oil tycoon
Fred Koch, founder of Koch Industries. The JBS was viewed as the outer
fringe of right-wing politics and was shunned by the Republican Party at the
time.
By the mid-sixties, a baby-boom-fueled, broader counter-cultural movement
was in full bloom, exploring new possibilities outside the confines of
existing cultural and political norms.
By 1968, much of this upheaval had reached a boiling point. That year saw
LBJ drop out of the presidential race for a second term, the assassinations
of MLK and Bobby Kennedy, and the riots at the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago. Things were shaking loose in a way unsettling to many
Americans, which helped lead to the election of Richard Nixon in 1968.
Nixon was seen as a law-and-order guy who would return stability and reason
to the country and fend off the leftist radicals.
However, popular progressive movements had become strong enough that, as
president, Nixon was forced to adopt many liberal reforms, such as the
Endangered Species Act; the creation of OSHA, the Consumer Product Safety
Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency; and eventually end the
Vietnam War.
Counter-revolution from the Right
In response to the progressive popular movements of the ’60s and the
influence they had on even a devout conservative like Richard Nixon, right-
wing elites decided they needed to mobilize to press for their own counter-
revolution, and develop a coherent conservative coalition of policy,
strategy, and candidates who would be standard-bearers for a new right-wing
agenda.
Leading the way was the Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich
, Joseph Coors, et al. It became a leading right-wing political force over
the next few years, publishing its “Mandate for Leadership” just in time
for Reagan’s inauguration in Jan. 1981. Many foundation fellows took
positions in Reagan’s administration, and by the end of his first year of
office, 60 percent of the Mandate’s 2,000 proposals had been implemented or
initiated. By 1986 Time magazine called Heritage Foundation “the foremost
of the new breed of advocacy tanks.”
As right-wing think tanks grew in size, number, and influence, so did the
influence of the emerging religious right, with organizations like the Moral
Majority, Focus on the Family, and the Christian Coalition gaining
political prominence. Much of this was also in reaction to the political and
cultural upheavals of the preceding decade.
Conservative evangelical leaders saw the questioning of established cultural
norms as an attack on moral decency and decided to fight back, seeking to
impose their own version of Christian values upon the nation. They engaged
increasingly sophisticated fundraising campaigns, mobilizing a growing base
of support, political strategizing, and grooming and electing their own kind
to school boards, town councils, state legislatures, and judiciary
positions. The “culture war” became an important new front in American
politics.
A third trend emerged alongside the Christian right and right-wing think
tanks: the explosion of political lobbying. In response to the passage of
laws and regulations to protect workers, consumers, and the environment in
the ’60s and ’70s, wealthy elites and big corporations discovered that
investing in politics yielded one of their best returns on investment—
lobbying to weaken those regulations, to create loopholes, and to get new
laws passed more to their advantage and profit. The lobbying industry would
increase by orders of magnitude in subsequent decades.
All three of these trends converged in the Reagan administration, busily
rolling back the progress made in previous two decades and advancing new
policies favoring those interests. Taxes, for example.
Republican President Dwight Eisenhower had presided over a tax system in
which the top marginal tax rate was 90 percent, while the economy was
booming in the 1950s; the top rate remained at 70 percent under Nixon. It
was considered normal and patriotic that those who reaped the greatest
benefits would give the greatest share back to their country.
Reagan reduced the top rate, first to 50 percent and later to 28 percent,
while raising the rates for lower income taxpayers. Consequently, wealth
inequality suddenly began to soar.
For three decades after World War II, the rising tide of economic growth did
indeed lift all boats equally. Those at the bottom of the income scale
benefited at roughly the same rate as those at the top. But Reagan changed
that, ensuring that those at the top would rise dramatically while those at
the bottom would fall, a trend that would only grow worse over the next
three decades.
Tax reform was just one element of the Reagan (Counter)Revolution. Other
significant shifts included corporate deregulation, increased military
spending and bellicosity in pursuit of “US (read: corporate) Interests,”
diminishing the strength of labor unions, and intensifying the “War on
Drugs.”
All these new conservative policies and the forces behind them created a “
new normal” and pushed political debate dramatically to the right through
the ’80s.
New Landscape in Politics and Media
It wasn’t just Republicans who moved to the right during that period. The
Democrats followed after them with the creation of the Democratic Leadership
Council, which eschewed New Left politics in favor of a centrist, “third
way” approach. The DLC abandoned any kind of economic populism in favor of
pursuing corporate donations and market-based solutions. The DLC was very
pro-military as well. Bill Clinton became poster boy for the DLC as
president in the ’90s, enacting policies like welfare reform, NAFTA, media
deregulation, and deadly sanctions in Iraq.
One of the less heralded changes under Reagan was the elimination the
Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which had required broadcast media to present
opposing views on controversial issues in a balanced manner. Once this
requirement was, lifted it opened the door for broadcasters presenting only
a single viewpoint. One of the first people to take advantage of this new
playing field was talk radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh, whose show began airing
nationwide the year after the Fairness Doctrine had disappeared. Many other
right-wing talk-radio personalities quickly followed suit, and finding
scapegoats for angry white males to blame for their problems became a major
national industry.
After the success of right wing radio, Rupert Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to
launch Fox News in 1996 as a 24/7 propaganda machine to bring right wing
views and policy positions to a wide TV audience. Now all those right wing
think tanks and political strategists had a direct outlet to the masses.
Fox not only championed right wing ideas, but viciously and relentlessly
attacked all things Democrat and liberal. Fox News brought a meaner spirit
and more partisan tone than anything seen on TV before, and encouraged a
harsher, more partisan tone in American politics in general.
Bush and the Post-9/11 Era
After eight years of the mostly centrist presidency of Clinton, it became
George W. Bush’s turn to explore how far to the right the country could be
taken. The big opportunity came with 9/11, when the country was in shock and
could be persuaded to accept policies that would have been previously
unacceptable, if not unthinkable. In domestic policy this translated into
draconian abrogations of civil rights; in foreign policy, it meant boom
times for the military-industrial complex. For all the militarists who
dearly missed the Cold War, the “War on Terror” came just in time.
Many members of Bush’s foreign and military policy team came from the
neoconservative think tank Project for a New American Century. PNAC was
founded in 1997 to promote an expanded military to exert American will upon
the rest of the world. The attacks of 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror
gave them the opportunity they’d been seeking, and they seized on it.
American empire would be expanded, US (private) interests would be advanced
by military means, and the US would adopt a policy of “invade first, ask
questions later,” for which our country is still paying dearly.
Even more than with Reagan’s two terms, the Bush administration represented
a merger between corporatist and Christian fundamentalist agendas. The War
on Terror combined these elements in a dangerous and volatile mix: the Iraq
invasion and occupation advanced corporate interests in the Middle East as
well as giving end-times believers a holy war to fight.
Current Times
Obama’s election raised great hopes among many. Some of us were less
ebullient, seeing him as a cautious corporate centrist and standard-bearer
for a Democratic Party that followed the GOP in its rightward march. However
you assess Obama himself and his accomplishments over the last four years,
it’s important to acknowledge the political context he is trapped in.
After Democrats won the White House and both houses of Congress in 2008,
many political pundits (including many conservatives) said that finally the
GOP’s drift to the right had gone too far. Clearly it was time to adopt a
more moderate, centrist approach moving forward.
That’s not what happened. The extreme right doubled down. The Tea Party
arose, and was immediately given big financial backing by the Koch brothers,
sons of Fred Koch, one of the founders of the John Birch Society. What was
once an extremist fringe was becoming the new normal.
In Congress, Republicans closed ranks and agreed at the very beginning of
Obama’s term to use whatever power they had to block all progress. On the
very day Obama was inaugurated, GOP strategist Frank Luntz met with seven
Republicans from the House (including Paul Ryan) and five Republican
senators to agree to “show united and unyielding opposition to the
president’s economic policies.”
On Fox News and other right wing media, Obama was relentlessly attacked:
cast as a foreigner, a Muslim, a socialist, and an overall threat to America
. Whereas just a few years earlier, criticism of the president was
considered treasonous, suddenly, vicious criticism of the president had
become a patriotic duty among “real Americans.”
Such criticism was in no way slowed by the reality that Obama was in fact
acting as a cautious centrist who repeatedly sought bipartisan compromise
and adopted conservative policy ideas in hopes of getting cooperation from
the other side of the aisle. Which never came. To conservative, anyone to
the left of Karl Rove was now the enemy—-even those moderate congressional
Republicans left over from a previous era, who found themselves facing
challenges from the right wing of their own party.
Amid such concerted criticism, obstructionism, and rise of the well-funded
“grassroots” movement of the Tea Party, Republicans made great gains in
2010, taking back the US House of Representatives and many state
legislatures. The latter was particularly important, as it was a US census
year and thus a year of legislative and congressional redistricting. Those
who controlled state legislatures would control drawing new district lines (
to their partisan advantage) as well as setting new voting rules for the
2012 election–a political opportunity that GOP-controlled states have used
to full partisan advantage.
The US Supreme Court’s landmark 2010 “Citizens United” decision also
played a major role. The GOP had held the White House for 20 out of 28 years
from 1981-2009, thus nominating a conservative majority of justices to the
Supreme Court. Meanwhile, right wing economic and tax policies had been
redistributing wealth to the those at the top during that same period, such
that 80 percent of all economic gains had accrued to the top one percent
over the past 30 years.
That led to a degree of wealth inequality that is positively medieval,
harkening back to a feudal society of lords and serfs. With “Citizens
United”, the Supreme Court gave these newly minted plutocrats a gift that
would keep on giving. “More money than you know what to do with? Invest in
political campaigns and influence! Anonymously, in unlimited amounts!” A
plutocrat’s wet dream.
This perfect storm of wealth concentrated at the top and unprecedented
influence of money in politics had a huge impact on the 2010 elections, and
will have an even bigger impact in 2012. When money is speech, those with
all the money can outshout the rest of us, and persuade just enough voters
to support their agenda to win. They’re betting on it. Heavily.
This year, the GOP nominated a poster boy for the one percent as their
presidential nominee. His agenda: to redistribute even more money to him and
his plutocratic friends, to dramatically “strengthen” an already bloated
military to advance US corporate interests around the world, and to bring a
conservative majority to the Supreme Court that could last for decades.
The party he is part of has parted ways with historical precedent. What was
once politically unthinkable gradually became merely extreme, which then
became acceptable, and now has become the new normal. Whether you want to
call it a return to feudalism, or invoke that other f-word (see accompanying
blog post), there are clearly some powerful, dark forces at work here. They
’ve been winning for more than three decades and seem to be gathering
forces for a final victory in which they can change all the rules to their
favor in perpetuity.
The the results of the 2012 election will tell us whether the long arc of
GOP think-tanking, wealth accumulating, political investing, religious
mobilizing, media manipulating efforts will control our future, or whether
we’ll finally unmask this extremist agenda for what it is and return to a
common-sense, problem-solving approach to the many challenges that confront
us. | f*********g
发帖数: 1637 | 2 Non wonder the Powell's chief staff said yesterday that " Let me just be
candid: My party is full of racists." | P*O
发帖数: 4324 | 3 民猪党的大佬 said to themselves, " My party is full of dumbasses"
【在 f*********g 的大作中提到】
: Non wonder the Powell's chief staff said yesterday that " Let me just be
: candid: My party is full of racists."
| f*********g
发帖数: 1637 | 4 If rumor mill makes you happy, go for it. |
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