Eye Of Newt, Toe Of Frog, Wool Of Batsh*t Crazy...How The "Jacobin Revolution" Of The GOP And Gingrich Brought Us Here--
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(Photo credit Salon)
Eye Of Newt, Toe Of Frog, Wool Of Batsh*t Crazy...How The "Jacobin Revolution" Of The GOP And Gingrich Brought Us Here--
Introduction--
It is important, I think, to rise above the anger and incredulity of the moment, and recognize that this week's Supreme Court assault on the US Constitutional system and the rights of the people it has served to protect, (at least to a degree) is not a recent phenomenon born of the rise of Trumpism. This week's decisions, like the one from a year ago overturning "Roe" is the result of a "long game" underway since the late 1970's at least. And rather than going "legalistic" in analyzing the history of precedents and cases, I think what is appropriate is to examine the political context surrounding it. After all, the functional solutions to this crisis reside with the untapped political power of "we the people," not a small working group of democratically-minded litigators and Justice Department prosecutors. Anyone who disagrees with that perspective might as well stop right here.
It Crawled Out Of Nixon's Broken White House Plumbing--
It was during that decade of the '70's that the overtly ideological fascist/McCarthyite wing of the GOP sought to reinvent themselves in the aftermath of the catastrophic Nixon presidency. Many of the worst of them, such as the followers of Libertarian sophist William F. Buckley, found a home within the new "Reagan Revolution," which some commentators today believe was the origin of our current situation.
To a degree that is true, as the Reagan era inaugurated the objectively insane free market culture of greed, the anti-communist wave of vigilante "Rambo Revanchism," and the advent of Wall Street's "Junk Bond junkies" which planted the seeds of today's lawless anti-government extremism.
During the '70's, America's institutions were shaken by a succession of events, such as Vietnam and the fall of Saigon, Watergate, the energy shock, and strategic humiliations at the hands of Khomeini's Islamic Revolution, followed by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. These crises, combined with the destructive policy of 20% plus interest rates (?!) set by Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker (a Nixon administration veteran appointed by Jimmy Carter) dealt devastating body blows to the US economy, especially to heavy industry, family farmers, and led to the a virtual shutoff of credit for long-term investment in basic infrastructure, all in the name of ' fighting inflation." And of course, their message in defense of these measures? Out of control spending by big government was the cause of inflation. It was the same monetarist big lie the GOP tries to sell today.
The Reagan campaign expertly rode the wave of popular anger against the doomed Carter presidency, and bookended that anger with an "October Surprise," courtesy of secret arrangements with Iran to sink Carter's re-election by keeping US hostages until after the election. That was a CIA "old boys" production, scripted by Reagan campaign chairman and OSS veteran Bill Casey.
The Roots Of A New Jacobinism--
What transpired throughout the 1980's up until the late 1990's (which I saw with my own eyes, since I was inside of it) was a kind of counter-revolution, which I would characterize as "Jacobin" in style. It was a deliberate strategy to whip up the hard core racist and fundamentalist GOP base around "hot button" single issues, (abortion, guns, taxes) in order replicate the manipulated French mob of 1789, which in the aftermath of the French Revolution deposed their Monarchy. The Jacobins unleashed an indiscriminate reign of terror against all people and institutions associated with the "ancién regime," and social change was brought about not through new laws, but by the rivers of blood flowing from the guillotines into the sewers of Paris. What was named "The Terror" was conducted by the misnamed "Committee For Public Safety," which rounded up those people of means, the wealthy, the titled nobility, the educated classes, and on the assumption they were monarchists chopped off their heads. People who wore reading glasses were considered the enemy by an enraged citizenry, who cheered on their executions in front of large crowds for that reason alone. And to put a fine point on it, in light of the current events in the fascist hellscape known as the State of Florida, the Jacobins deployed against intellectuals, attacked certain institutions of higher learning, burned libraries and museums, and sought to rewrite the history of France to extirpate any previous views of it which had prevailed up until then. This made a mockery of the revolution's slogan, "liberty, equality, fraternity."
The same French citizens who initially dreamt of having a republic along similar lines as that which the US undertook, those who were inspired by Marquis de LaFayette, instead were led like slobbering hungry dogs to watch their daily entertainment of mass executions. They failed to rise to the historical moment, because their rage and victimization in reaction to the oppressive policies of the former Monarchy was more powerful, and the bloodlust of retribution supplanted it's initial idealism. It is not a big leap to go from bread riots to mass executions, when the mob is being steered from behind the scenes.
Social Darwinism And The Cult Of The "Free Market"--
The so-called Reagan Revolution was in essence a reverse Jacobin insurrection against the Federal government and simultaneously a revolt of the wealthy oligarchical classes against the middle classes and the poor. It was social darwinist in it's character, insofar as the operating idea was that most of the population should be seen as commodities, or "human capital" as were black slaves in the antebellum period. In other words, the value of a human being is measured by how much work you can get out of them to maximize profit at the lowest cost, the premise being that a rising standard of living for labor necessarily meant cutting into profit. Therefore this worldview places a premium on gouging labor in a variety of "traditional" ways.
Some, according to this social schema, might be considered useful as managers and cheap labor, child breeders, or gophers, but those remaining are essentially "dead wood." The marginalized people, (especially minorities, the elderly, the sick, and the homeless) are considered unfit by virtue of race, gender, the lack of means, and are therefore a burden to the wealthy who have to pay taxes to support "those people" who didn't measure up.
At it's core, "Reaganomics," also known as "supply side" and trickle down economics, was methodologically and morally bankrupt, rooted in the Hollywood cult mythology of cowboy type rugged individuals, out there taming the frontier of whatever new phony financial market they chose to invent on any particular day. The claim was that the obscene hoarding of wealth by an entitled few would ultimately benefit the general population, with the help of "the invisible hand" of Adam Smith, guided by the "magic of the marketplace." And people actually believed this monetarist drivel.
Government, ie; laws and regulations, was deemed the leading obstacle to prosperity and therefore the reason the American people were being unfairly taxed to pay for it's operations. The GOP used populist rhetoric to mask their anti-government policies as a "tax revolt." And they sold this rebellion to their own rabble as "patriotism" which was in the tradition of the American Revolution. This is why the leading edge of the Reagan program was the passage of the "Kemp-Roth" tax reform, to focus people narrowly on the idea that dismantling "big government" would put more money in their pockets. Greed was the hook that pulled them in. That, racism, and religious bigotry.
By that time, the old southern Jim Crow "Dixiecrats" who still held Confederate sympathies had moved en masse into Nixon's GOP, (the so-called "Southern Strategy") consequently they swallowed this anti-historical garbage in its entirety.
Much of this social darwinist outlook overlapped and originated with radical Calvinism, the religious belief that some were privileged to be part of "an elect" who were prosperous because they were favored by God. This is the unique Christian heresy behind so--called "American exceptionalism." It is also known as "Prosperity Gospel."
The Origins Of America's "Culture War," Today's Civil War--
And from this milleu there emerged a number of power brokers and opinion mongers, one group on the televangelist side led by Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and the sad collection of anti-Christian charlatans like the Bakkers and Jimmy Swaggert. Their message from God was that liberals were the source of satanic evil who had destroyed our public morality, and were using government to overturn God's kingdom. (This while these TV preachers were enriching themselves by stealing from their flock and screwing around like the true hedonists that they were) These were the front-men for the real cult controllers, the Rushdoonys and other creatures from the pit of the Dallas Theological Seminary which launched "final days" Dominionism as an engine for mass brainwashing. They brought with them the pulp fiction publishing empires of Hal Lindsey and other Armageddonist self-appointed prophets who sold Americans on the idea that a "final conflict" with the non-christian world was not only "biblical," but both inevitable and imminent.
Also during the Reagan/Bush years there came the TV and talk radio pundits such as Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan, who were the provocateurs and propagandists that pushed the envelope of public discourse from slander, to defamation, to the politics of personal destruction of their chosen liberal targets. They laid the groundwork for today's fascist propaganda ministry for Trumpism which we now know as Fox News.
Also we would be remiss to not mention the ascendancy of a group of "dirty tricksters" who were weaned as the understudies of Nixon's White House "Plumbers," Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Lee Atwater, who share with Donald Trump the infamous Roy Cohn as their political mentors in their career-long war against democracy. This trio accumulated outsized power in the GOP precisely because of their unprincipled and destructive political tactics, based on personal villification and continuous campaigns rooted in division, chaos, and lies. They were the GOP's "poison pill" for which there is not yet an antidote, except for them going to jail.
And there were the grifters, right-wing think-tankers and political junk mail kingpins like Grover Norquist, and Richard Viguerie, who bombarded their "low information" constituencies with millions of fundraising letters decrying the attacks on American values by the godless liberals, their favored targets being Ted Kennedy, Jane Fonda and other Hollywood liberals, and later the Clintons, and Jesse Jackson. Those targeted were the "socialists and secular humanists" which backed the ACLU, who they claimed "destroyed America" by first taking prayer out of public schools in the 1960's, according to these groups.
The new Jacobins even invented an issue out of thin air to raise millions from these duped people, which was a call to launch a Constitutional convention to pass an Amendment banning "flag burning." They dredged up photos of protesters against the first Gulf War torching a flag, and spun that into a fundraising gimmick which built up their donors list. Think about it, an amendment to the Constitution over that. This was but one of many similar straw issues they contrived to inflame their mob. This included their national "gay bashing" campaign in the context of the AIDS epidemic, and the infamous "satanic panic" in which evangelicals were whipped up to believe that liberals were enabling and protecting child murderers and gay pedophiles, a precursor to today's QAnon conspiracy.
The purpose was to dumb down their already victimized and grievance-ridden base, and sell the idea that liberal Democrats were a satanic, dope using, anti-gun, anti-freedom baby-killing godless "enemy within," using our tax money to fund abortion, and using teachers unions to brainwash children to become gay communists. They flaunted their racism openly with the famous Bush 41 campaign attack ads targeting Massachusetts liberals like then Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis for freeing black criminals like Willie Horton. This one in particular opened the GOP's doors to racist constituencies, who gained real power in the party, no longer on the fringe but sitting at their table. It was literally that stupid, and that bad.
All of these figures hammered away at the same message, the central one delivered by the mostly clueless Reagan himself. Government is the problem, ie; big Democratic government, which had to be shrunk. It was equivalent to the idea that the organized crime interests in 1920's Chicago led by Al Capone would lead a public campaign to shrink the police force because they cost too much and were corrupt, when it was always about eliminating the obstacles to expanding their lawless criminal business empire.
And it was this cultural/political impulse, which in the same fashion as a fish rots from the head, that gradually took over what was once the Republican Party, then soon devolved into their Clinton era "Conservative Revolution," which in turn led to the "Tea Party," which produced the MAGA monstrosity of today whose flanks are politically covered by this cult of fascist ideologues on the Supreme Court.
Franklin Roosevelt Was Their "Devil Incarnate"--
And for all of that you can definitely thank the modern day Talleyrand, Georgia's very own Newt Gingrich for organizing this modern day Jacobin mob in the 1990's which is currently cutting off the collective heads of democracy. His "Conservative Revolution" was designed to nullify the essential functions of our Federal government, and meant to bury the 163 year long attempt by many esteemed American leaders to free our nation from the legacy of America's oligarchical plantation slavery system.
The "ancién regime" which the current GOP has been out to guillotine was the four administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency, and his committment to the "general welfare" of all Americans. His presidency succeeded in saving the US and the world from the fascist system which the Republican radicals of that time had initially defended, in the days when they went by the moniker "America First."
Every legal precedent of settled law currently under attack by this Court, in the areas of civil rights, economic rights and voting rights, is in large part the residual historic legacy handed down from the Depression and wartime years of Roosevelt's presidency, and that of FDR's role model Abraham Lincoln before him.
The Federalist Society, Command Center For A New Confederacy
The intentions behind the Gingrich led "Conservative Revolution," and his strategies of using impeachment as a political weapon, his tactic of shutting down the government to extract concessions on the budget, (which amounted to mass triage of the "unfit" through austerity cuts) and his demonization of liberals as "pure evil or left-wing fascists," served to weaponize the Republican Party into a Neo-Confederate rebellion against the very idea of a "United States." The Gingrich Republican's war against the Federal government was celebrated as their second American Revolution, which they launched under the banner of "states rights." The obvious proof that this is the case is the ongoing legal war in which the post Civil War "reconstruction amendments" are the most heavily targeted by the current fascist majority of the Court.
(It should be noted that the Gingrich "Terror" also did what every fascist revolution gone bloody has done, by deploying to purge the GOP of any remaining traditionalist Republicans who still believed government could work, and that collaboration with Democrats in doing so was preferable. These "old guard" types, as opposed to the war mongers and racists were more akin to Eisenhower Republicans, who went into government to provide public service for their constituents, not to abrogate power on behalf of some financial benefactor. One by one they were picked off, broken, isolated, or died off)
And that is where the growing insurgency emanating from billionaire funded law schools, think tanks, legal foundations, PACs and dark money conduits, organized the abomination known as The Federalist Society and proceeded over a forty year period to assemble and sew together the various body parts of the old Confederacy, and reanimated this "Frankenstein's monster" of a Supreme Court.
Everything that the GOP has done to stack the Federal court system (even though they are outvoted consistently in presidential elections) through years of obstructionism and political brainwashing conducted by mega-churches and talk radio lunatics, was engineered through redistricting, gerrymandering, voter suppression, vote theft, (Florida 2000) and was a consciously planned out "long game." And we, who should have seen this coming, let it happen like the proverbial frog in a pot of water being gradually boiled alive because we adapted to the temperature.
I found the older short article linked below very informative on some of this chronology. I especially like the fact that the writer at the end characterized Gingrich himself as a Jacobin, which is historically as accurate as it gets.
Conclusion--
I would think that if anything, retracing this history should not be a source of demoralization, rather a wake up call that impels us to abandon both short-term thinking and the desperate desire for a "quick fix" for a crisis which we mostly watched unfold over several decades. There is no "quick fix" and never was. Even a Biden-Democratic victory is no "fix" as many wish it would be, though it is the optimal outcome. It will take decades to even get back to square one in reversing the damage done by this bloodthirsty mob known as MAGA, the former Republican Party. If we aren't in for the long haul, (regardless of age) then we are not in it at all, we are as good as out.
And with that, I'll leave it right here.
Sources--
http://workethic.coe.uga.edu/hpro.html
https://theintercept.com/2022/05/10/roe-v-wade-federalist-society-religious-right/
https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/ronald-reagan-and-supply-side-economics
https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/ronald-reagan-and-supply-side-economics
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/us/politics/jimmy-carter-october-surprise-iran-hostages.html
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/laundering-racism-through-court-scandal-states-rights-federalism/
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/06/16/reagan.80s/index.html?_s=PM:SHOWBIZ
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror
https://www.ft.com/content/45ab5a45-6f32-49b3-be5d-9193071de970
