Marjorie Taylor Greene's Georgia Backyard-- Eugenics, Apartheid, Nazis and Confederates

 

April 23, 2021

The following is an addendum to yesterday's article on the history of Marjorie Taylor Greene's birthplace, Milledgeville Georgia, the site of the worlds formerly largest mental hospital, with a century and a half long legacy of extreme racism, abuse, torture, murder, Nazi style medical experimentation, Lobotomies, and mass sterilizations in the name of Eugenics. It would be easy to make a glib joke about whether she was an escaped inmate, but that would be demeaning to the mentally ill or otherwise unjustly institutionalized people who were the victims of this charnel house. 

This will be short, but it's meant to address the question of how someone of such low character, destructive ideas, and unfiltered racism could possibly get elected to Congress in 21st Century America. Simply to offer the explanation of her coming from a racist Red State, and the effects of the Trump phenomenon doesn't quite give the answer we need. This pocket of Confederate insanity has been sitting there dormant, and was brought to life by the Republican Party movement known as the "Tea Party", recently evolved into the Orwellian named "Freedom Caucus". There is, however a degree to which that this devolution should be viewed by Democrats as a kind of "self-inflicted wound". I'll elaborate. 

This GOP formation was launched by the grouping around Georgia's Newt Gingrich in the mid 90's, then known as "The Conservative Revolution".  It was the response to Bill Cliinton's election after 12 years of the Republican Presidencies of Reagan and Bush 41. 

What Gingrich did was a twofold operation. First, was that he provided an umbrellla concept under which to unite the varied disaffected constituencies which were either conservative, populist, religious, single-issue oriented, (anti-gun control, anti-taxes, anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-immigration, anti-Muslim etc. You see a pattern here? ) unemployed industrial workers, and good ole fashioned Redneck Southern style racists, who never accepted the progress of Civil Rights.  You might refer to this as the "David Duke, former KKK" wing of the Tea Party. (picture above) It also emphatically became a stalking horse for right wing Billionaires committed to deregulation, eliminating the anti-Wall Street legislative protections for Americans in place since the New Deal such as "Glass Steagall", and expanding the agenda of the Social Darwinists on economic policy across the board. 

Second, is that Gingrich and crew took advantage of Bill Clinton's two vulnerablities as a leader and a person.  He exploited Clinton's political profile as a centrist Southern Democrat, a kind of New Age hybrid, also the first Baby Boomer president in our history. They compromised and broke him politically through their use of obstructionism to force the adoption of "Triangulation" as a policy orientation. What that meant was that Clinton would adopt the programs of the conservative right wing, attempt to water them down a bit, then announce their passage as his own political accomplishment, then mitigate after the fact the damage done by his own compromises. This was how he came to embrace Welfare Reform, the War on Crime and Drugs, NAFTA, and the repeal of Glass Steagall, allowing Banks to speculate on Stocks and Bonds for the first time since 1933. (That repeal sowed the seeds of the 2008 housing market bubble crisis which almost collapsed the whole system,  which then required bailing out, and todays new building explosion of speculative pyramids related now to Hedge Funds, NFTs, possibly housing again, and Crypto)

His other vulnerability of course was his inability to master the most important functions of the zipper, and his failure to keep it closed when the need arose, pardon the expression. His ridiculous sex scandal and Impeachment was a red cape to a Bull.  What this did was to provide the right wing religious zealots in America's burgeoning Megachurches a target for all of the "Family Values" campaigns, candidates, PACS, and fundraising to create a financially super-enabled power bloc, whose influence in money and activists far outstripped their actual voting numbers, relative to the traditional Democratic Party base. 

This was Bill Clinton, the "Manichean" at his worst. (The Manicheans were an early Christian gnostic heresy which believed in the division between physical and spiritual world, arguing that because of the "fall of Man" Satan runs the World, while God the Father only rules over Heaven.  Therefore, because we all are sinners, Satan's power over our World and us is something we cannot stop. We can only adapt to it, never defeat it. Therefore, allow evil to persist, simply try to lessen its effects. That was Bill Clinton, through and through) 

Because of Bill Clinton's presidential misleadership in support of the Dick Morris inspired Triangulation policy with the GOP, many Democrats who were traditional in Congress were leveraged in support of Centrism against their better instincts in the name of party loyalty. This had awful after effects, not the least of which was widespread demoralization among Democratic Civil Rights and Union leaders, as well as the Democratic activist base.  Senator Joe Biden, who had those tendencies already became Clinton's accomplice in Triangulation, a posture which he is now trying to atone for, given the demands of the current situation. 

This Gingrich led "Conservative  Revolution" took an even more destructive turn in the afrermath of 9-11 and the Bush-Cheney led "War on Terror". With the election of Barack Obama, the GOP amped up their courting of the most extreme elements in the US. It included extreme fundamentalist Christians, ex-Klansmen, alt-right Neo-Nazis, and  Confederates and separatists who were active in militias. They were stoked with the "Birther" lie, that Obama was born a Muslim in Kenya, that was designed to demonize the President and equate him with the 9-11 hijackers, those "terrorists" whom we had our sons and daughters fighting with boots on the ground in three theaters of war over the years. This was in fact the first "trial balloon' issue around which Trump launched his presidential ambitions. 

Remember also, in 2008 they picked a racist and vacuous airhead Sarah Palin, ("I can see Russia from my house") with her very diverse constituency of Alaskans to run for VP with the otherwise sane John McCain.  This was entirely crafted by the GOP leadership as a strategy to pull in the money and activists who were in the right wing fundamentalist "gun nut" wing of the party. Palin and other groups were deployed to Fox News and elsewhere after the election to attack Obamacare as a Nazi Euthanasia program to impose healthcare rationing and triage, to be administered by "Death Panels". This was used to kick into gear the somewhat recently subdued "pro-lifers" in the GOP.

The response to Obama's election, which occurred with a somewhat sizeable crossover GOP vote, was a conscious attempt to even further radicalize their base around literal hatred/demonization issues, in which Democrats at every level were lumped in with Satan as their enemy to be opposed at every turn. Up until this point, American politics was somewhat ugly, but this was the turning point at which we saw the end of civility and compromise, to be replaced by the rise of the "politics of destruction".  

That is some of the context for the growing influence of the radical rightist, fascist Jacobin mob currently referred to as the Freedom Caucus, which in the name of Trumpism has embraced the morally and intellectually depraved creature from the Georgia backwoods, Marjorie Taylor Greene. 

To be continued--