On 3/8/2016 10:29 AM,
koo...@maricaibo.com wrote:
> Most loser religious zealots finally end up like Hartung----unable to
> accept change, clinging to a strict interpretation of
> (unproven/unprovable) religious dogma.
>
> Dealing with people like him---is historically a waste of time
>
> Fortunately, that side keeps losing ground generation after
> generation.
I ran across an article explaining this which I thought I'd share.
http://www.thenation.com/article/why-todays-gop-crackup-is-the-final-unraveling-of-nixons-southern-strategy/
To grasp the GOP’s dilemma, it helps to understand that the modern
Republican Party was founded on some basic contradictions. It has been
an odd-couple coalition that unites the East Coast Republican
establishment with the hardscrabble segregationists of the white South.
Richard Nixon brokered the deal with Dixiecrat leader Strom Thurmond at
the ’68 convention in Miami, wherein states of the old slave-holding
Confederacy would join the Party of Lincoln. It took two election cycles
to convert the “Solid South,” but Nixon and GOP apparatchiks made it
clear with private assurances that Republicans would discreetly retire
their historic commitment to civil rights.
Scott Lilly, a liberal Democrat who for many years was the sagacious
staff director of the House Appropriations Committee, explained the
GOP’s intra-party fracas in that context. Boehner’s resignation, Lilly
wrote in The Washington Spectator, “was, in fact, about the steady
unraveling of a coalition that has allowed the Republican Party to hold
the White House for 27 [sic: 28] of the past 47 years and maintain a
seemingly solid base for continuing control of the U.S. House of
Representatives.”
“The country clubbers don’t care about prayer in the public schools, gun
rights…abortion and immigration.”
Nixon’s reconfiguration brought together “polar opposites among White
Americans,” Lilly noted. The traditional wing of the party—“country
club” Republicans, who include corporate leaders, financiers and
investors—became partners with poor, rural, church-going voters, among
them the Southern “segs” who had previously always voted for Democrats.
Black Southerners didn’t count in the equation, since they were still
mostly being blocked from voting.
After Congress enacted the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Lyndon Johnson
confided to a White House aide, “I think we just delivered the South to
the Republican Party for a long time to come.” Nixon’s new Republicans
became a formidable national party, Lilly explained, but they always
straddled the tension between rich and poor. “The problem,” Lilly said,
“is that this latter group has almost nothing in common with the country
club wing.… The country clubbers don’t care about prayer in the public
schools, gun rights, stopping birth control, abortion and immigration.”
On the other hand, common folks don’t worry over marginal tax rates,
capital formation, or subsidies for major corporations. “If they ever
fully understood that their more prosperous party brethren were
contemplating deep cuts in Medicare and Medicaid to pay for those
policies, they would be in open rebellion,” Lilly observed.
Nixon and his successors hid behind ideology and obscured the
contradictions by pursuing a strategy I would call “no-fault bigotry.”
Every now and then, especially in election seasons, the Republicans
played the race card in dog-whistle fashion to smear Democrats, with
savage effect. The GOP never attempted to repeal civil-rights
legislation but sought cheap ways to undermine enforcement and remind
whites, South and North, that the party was on “their” side.
In his first term, Nixon himself made a memorable gesture by supporting
federal tax subsidies for the private “seg academies” springing up
across the South. He didn’t prevail, but he won lots of political
loyalty among Southern whites—a generation of voters who had been raised
to vote Democratic, but who were beginning to switch parties.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan opened his presidential campaign at the Neshoba
County Fair in Mississippi—a few miles from where three civil-rights
workers had been murdered in the 1960s. Reagan announced his intention
“to restore to the states and local communities functions which properly
belong there.” That is Dixie’s euphemism for opposing racial
integration. In 1988, George H.W. Bush smeared Michael Dukakis with his
notoriously racist “Willie Horton” ads. In 1990 in North Carolina,
Senator Jesse Helms ran for reelection against Harvey Gantt, a black
former mayor of Charlotte, with a provocative ad attacking affirmative
action.
In 2008, when Americans elected our first black president, most of the
heavy smears came after Barack Obama took office. Grassroots
conservatives imagined bizarre fears: Obama wasn’t born in America; he
was a secret Muslim. Donald Trump demanded to see the birth certificate.
GOP leaders like Senator Mitch McConnell—who had been a civil-rights
advocate in his youth—could have discouraged the demonizing slurs.
Instead, McConnell launched his own take-no-prisoners strategy to
obstruct anything important Obama hoped to accomplish.