Lloyd Green Article in The Guardian-GOP Dumps Lincoln, Is Now the Party of Confederacy-- My Comments and Additional Thoughts
An emphatic yes, to all of this. In the Guardian article linked below, Mr. Green puts the picture together of what this GOP is today, and effectively quotes Faulkner- " the past is never dead, its never even past".
I would add a couple of salient points. The new Confederacy began its takeover under Nixon's 1972 election strategy known as " The Southern Strategy". This was spun as an attempt by Nixon to capture the Wallace vote, but was much worse. It was designed to roll back the gains of the Civil Rights Movement in the 20th Century, as well as destroy FDR's New Deal policy, along with its commitment to expanding the Social Safety net, regulating business and finance, and establishing environmental safeguards. This was done under the rubric, "States Rights", and "Free Enterprise" the thinly masked program of the Confederacy. This was brought in by the ideologues of the Chicago School of Economics, George Shulz, and Milton Friedman, who took the Dollar off Gold, destroyed the Bretton Woods Monetary System, and implemented Wage/Price austerity controls.
During the Reagan Era, these forces did immense damage economically with Dereg and Trickle down economics, but they could not destroy the entirety of the productive economy because we still had a worsening strategic conflict with the USSR. Therefore, some investment in maintaining manufacturing, science and infrastructure was needed in support of the Defense Department and National Security.
Once the Soviet Union collapsed, even that was no longer considered a necessity, and the scourges of financial speculation, Bubble investments, and looting in the name of "Free Markets" became the full program of the GOP. That meant their leadership needed to completely take down the traditional role of the Federal government in defending "The General Welfare". In that context, the GOP ran the most vile racist "get tough on crime" campaigns in the 90's and succeeded in installing racist Confederate from Georgia, Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House. He brought in the so called "Conservative Revolution".
Gingrich's first order of business was to destroy the Presidency, so a sexual entrapment sting was set up with the help of a "Bush holdover" from the Intelligence community, Linda Tripp, and Clinton's Presidency was disabled with an Impeachment which ultimately failed in the end.
Gingrich and his crew of Southern racists like Trent Lott used this Impeachrnent to massively increase the power of Fundamentalist "family values" Preachers, like Falwell, and his friends, like the embezzling sex maniacs Jimmy Swaggert, and Jim and Tammy Fay Bakker, ad nauseam. They were brought into the GOP Strategy at a much greater level, but the driving force of this was always to reverse the gains in economic and social progress of the 20th Century.
In the early 2000s, the GOP openly courted the reemerging KKK as it ran a recruitment drive of the supporters of Louisiana's David Duke, who narrowly won a State Representative seat, then lost the race for Governor. The GOP took note, and what transpired was a young Republican named Steve Scalise got elected to Congress as a Republican by speaking at rallies for Duke's Klan supporters. Scalise's victory was imitated throughout the Southern and Midwestern States, with the GOP openly courting the existing base of the Klan, and won numbers of seats in Congress. This grouping became known as the "Tea Party" Republicans.
You all know what happened then. This Klan/ Confederate insurgency escalated after the election of Barack Obama, and these people elected merged with the Evangelical base, to squeeze out and undermine many of the traditional moderate Republicans who had a history of Bipartisan cooperation. Confrontation, obstructionism, Nullification and Sedition became the predominant political strategy of the GOP. This orientation was weaponized and deployed without any further attempts to mask their true intentions with the ascendency of the deranged fascist provocateur, Donald Trump.
The context in which this takeover occurred was the combined factors of economic dislocation and income disparity, 20 years of war with a new enemy, defined by its identification as an "evil religion", Islam, and a substantial number of Americans were recruited on the basis of hatred, paranoia, fear and rage against minorities and immigrants but especially to turn against their own government and "non-Confederate" leaders. In summary, they became true heirs to the traditions of the "Slaveowners Rebellion".
And this is where we are. But we need not descend further into the madness. We need the political equivalent of a General William Tecumseh Sherman and like minded fighters, to cut in half and burn to the ground (metaphorically speaking) this New Confederacy. And we need Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to complete the unfinished job of Reconstruction, to excise once and for all this political Cancer from our national life.
I have a few ideas on what that could look like, which I will be writing about. But not today. 🙂
