As Gary Younge points out in this week's Nation, racism in GOP campaign rhetoric has returned with a pungency we haven't seen for decades. In Iowa two weeks ago Rick Santorum stated that he didn't "want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money." Soon after, Gingrich one-upped him on the trail in New Hampshire by declaring his bold intention to "go to the NAACP convention and explain to the African-American community why they should demand paychecks... [instead of] food stamps."
Far from having advanced toward a postracial society, we appear to be heading back to what we might call the era of high racism in the Republican Party -- the time period, say, from Goldwater to Atwater. In recent decades prominent Republicans sought to distance themselves from the racial legacy of the party. As historian Gary Gerstle has shown, George W. Bush was personally committed to his own vision of multiculturalism and racial reconciliation, and Republican National Committee Chair Ken Mehlman apologized to the NAACP for the very Southern Strategy that brought conservatives to national power. Condi Rice meanwhile sought to justify the Iraq War by associating it with the American Civil Rights Movement.To be sure the policies pursued by Republicans (and Democrats as well) in the last two decades have been disastrous for Black and Latino communities, but race was deployed less openly as a political identification than it had for Republicans in prior decades.
Why then are national Republicans returning to overt racial demonization on the campaign trail in 2012? In the context of the Great Recession, Republican contenders have a tough time peddling the salutary effects of the free market. With Americans across demographic categories suffering its results, optimistic appeals to the promise of social mobility fall on increasingly deaf ears. Arguments in favor of Republican-inspired policies require extra force -- a potent narrative that depicts choices starkly between freedom and submission. In this context, the battle has been defined as the state versus the market, with the state associated with a black president depicted as dangerous socialist. The extraordinarily pro-Wall Street sympathies of Obama matter little here, because the narrative is emplotted through familiar themes that have been rearranged and enhanced.
In the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, conservative rhetoric consistently depicted an unholy alliance of invasive state elites above and criminal, parasitic blacks below against a virtuous middle of hardworking white Americans. This was the language of Goldwaterites, of Nixon, and of Reagan. As a black Democratic president Obama represents both of these poles- - a nightmare of the modern Right imaginary that has played a major part in the emergence of the Tea Party. As I have argued elsewhere, the last significant instance of the Right's deployment of a menacing black face for political purposes was Lee Atwater's use of convicted rapist "Willie" Horton. There as here, blackness was linked to criminality to discredit a Democratic opponent. The difference is that in the 1988 Bush campaign "liberalism" was meant to evoke fears of a white president, unleashing black criminals on a vulnerable nation. For the contemporary Right, "socialism" is meant to evoke fears of a black president unleashing a criminal state on a vulnerable nation. In the former, the state enabled unchecked black aggression, whereas in the latter blackness enables unchecked state aggression.
Republican contenders realize that they have little to gain in attempting to appeal to either black or racially moderate white voters. As political scientists Michael Tesler and David O. Sears demonstrated in their book Obama's Race, the 2008 election more severely polarized the electorate in terms of racial attitudes than any presidential election on record. And as GOP strategists well know, this polarization has only intensified in the intervening years. Republican campaigns, cognizant of the white racial unease to be harvested among GOP caucus and primary voters, and requiring greater justification for their antiregulatory, anti-tax, and anti-spending policies, will continue to avail themselves of a rhetoric that racializes poverty and ties it to the specter of a menacing state.
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i lost a lot of respect for Juan Williams after his NPR controversy, but props to JW for hitting the Grinch right back for this shameful display of dog whistle politics, and people tend to forget that Newt is from the "willie horton" era
To win the primary, the wannabees are appealing to these furious voters by reflecting and amplifying that rage back at them*. Because most of their rage is at its heart about race, the wannabees are uttering the thinnest of coded racial appeals. They're rilin' up the tribe.
*It's tradition!
A regulated market is not a free market. A regulated market is a market where the politicians create winners/crony's and losers/all others. When a regulated market fails as ours did in 2008 then the politicians and their sychophants call for more regulation.
It's all rather insane behavior if you ask me; unless what you really want is power.
Liberals want to pick the winners and losers based on "their" view of merit. Now this does not mean they help minorities though. The company getting the most Government help in America is GE, and the group getting the most help from this Administration is the UAW, neither can be considered a minority interest.
My view of the GOP is an unholy alliance of the white blue collar and the business/corporate interests. The corporate core of the GOP and its goals are obvious. The fears of the white voters are more complex than just racism. I doubt most of them consider themselves racist. They see themselves defending an onslaught of federal laws that endangers their entitlements. Those entitlements include a permanent job, a pension, an appreciation of their Christian values, a political and economic advantage for being white, a pride in not being on the public dole. They are likely to see SS and Medicare as something they paid for and are entitled to. The explosions of IT and globalization have diminished their entitlements. Secularization, and its constitutional defense is especially threatening. Add to that, immigration reform, defense of women’s rights, and legitimization of “sodomy”, plus a black president.
The establishment GOP entitlements are also under attack. Financial regulation, environmental regulation, responsibility for worker’s pensions and health care, laws restricting their ability to hide profits overseas, all negatively affect their bottom line.
The call for smaller federal oversight at all levels becomes a powder keg. It exploded in 2008. I hope the GOP and the Dems can define the real choices. Then America can decide what we want to be. I am not so sure that will happen. These issues are more emotional than logical.
I believe the Tea Party(who 1- suddenly became concerned with spending under a black President, and started a movement before he had time to implement any of his policies 2- was perfectly fine with Bush's squandering of our balanced budgets, and 3- who seem to idolize the guy who introduced deficit spending to begin with (Reagan)) helped push the GOP firmly back into full Southern Strategy mode.
http://www.obamaftw.com/blog/republican-party-racism/republican-tea-party-racism
Wing Commander Gibson would surely blush at the boldness of today's Once-Grand, Old Party.
Guy's dog, on the other hand, may be inclined to either bite or "hump" today's remaining Republican Presidential contenders, since they behave as female dogs....
BTW, as food for thought, it may be that much of the denial of science in the GOP is the direct, proximal result of the recent seminal findings (or betrayal, as some have voiced) by UC Santa Cruz, Harvard, and Max-Planck-Gesellschaft - regarding the other, much older "N-word".