Republicans have only themselves to blame

From the Washington Post, professional talking head and beltway insider guy Richard Cohen makes a very good point:

The Republican establishment acts as if this season’s goon squad of presidential candidates has come out of nowhere, an act of God — a tsunami that hit the party and receded, leaving nothing but nitwits standing. In column after column, conservative commentators lament the present condition, but not their past acquiescence as their party turned hostile to thought, reason and the two most important words in the English language: It depends.

And

This rampant anti-intellectualism is worrisome. The world is a complex place, but to deal with it, the GOP presented a parade of hopefuls who proposed nostrums or, in the case of Michele Bachmann, peddled false rumors about vaccinations. When this started I cannot say — the late Richard Hofstadter won the Pulitzer Prize for his “Anti-intellectualism in American Life” in 1964 — but the embrace of Sarah Palin by the GOP establishment has got to be noted. The lady has the gift of demagoguery and the required anti-elitism, but she knows next to nothing about almost anything — and revels in her ignorance.

More here.

I know when it happened, not long after Hofstadter's book, the 1970s.

Here's the brief version. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law in 1965, announcing to the Democrats that they had just lost the South for a generation or more. Meanwhile, the Democrats were also losing the labor unions. Either that or the labor unions were losing the Democrats. Actually, it was both. The so-called New Left, that is, political forces sympathetic to the hippies and identity politics movements, took over the party; the labor establishment, however, was socially conservative, pro-war, and hated the hippies. It also didn't help that the Democratic establishment was pissed off with labor for not supporting the party bosses, and basically quit trying to help out what had previously been their most important constituency. This put the Democrats and labor hopelessly at odds with one another, and the party's infighting handed the presidency to Nixon in both 1968 and 1972.

And Tricky Dick had a plan: exploit the Democrats' offending of its Southern racist wing while diving straight into the labor/Donkey rift by playing up patriotism and race fears. Watergate shut the operation down for about four years or so, but midway through Carter's administration Reagan and other Republicans picked up where Nixon left off, using the same tactics to attract a weird coalition of fundamentalist Christians, Southern racists, and disaffected union members, all of whom were former New Dealers desperately needed by the Democrats to win national elections. The GOP strategy cut off the legs of its opposition and ultimately led the way to continuing majorities in both houses of Congress by the 90s, and got three Republicans into the Oval Office, two of them serving two terms.

So the Democrats had nothing to offer the working class, but the GOP, at least, offered them patriotism and someone to blame for continual layoffs and the end of the middle class, black people and liberated women. Democrats never had anything at all to offer fundamentalist Christians, especially after they had given up on supporting the labor unions, but the GOP offered them lots of rhetorical red meat that ultimately didn't amount to much in terms of policy, but sure gave all the Jesus freaks a bunch of big huge hard-ons. And for Southern racists, there was red meat rhetoric, too, code words and phrases that let the drooling inbred people of Mississippi and Alabama know that the GOP is a party that hates black people.

Meanwhile, as far as actual legislation goes, the Republicans continued doing what they've always done, stealing from the poor and giving to the rich. But that didn't matter. Nixon's grand strategy was enough. He put together a brand new coalition of voters plucked from the ashes of the old Democratic New Deal coalition. And this new coalition was based on resentment, hatred, a sense of persecution, and intense anger. That is, the Republicans created and then rode herd over a rowdy mob of work-a-day schmucks who were and are far more about being pissed off than about thinking and deeply contemplating the nation's fate. And they've been fanning the flames of such anger and resentment to the party's benefit for some thirty years.

Now, it turns out, they've created a Frankenstein's monster of stupidity and cruelty. The rowdy mob they assembled and exploited is now apparently attempting to take over the party completely. No longer satisfied with rhetoric, they want actual policy victories, and the GOP establishment that ran the show for years is frightened.

Well, that's what they get. You play with fire you get burned. Or, as the case may very well be, you burn the whole fucking house down. I'd laugh if I wasn't so disgusted.

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