Legacy, Tricky Dicky Style 2
At The Nation, Max Berger analyzes how Nixon’s and the Republican Party’s odious Southern Strategy has finally reached to the point of backfiring upon its creators and of threatening to backfire upon the United States. (My two or three regular readers will know that the long-term effect of Nixon’s decision to appeal to racism and bigotry for short-term electoral support has long been a recurring theme in these electrons.)
Here’s a bit; do read the whole thing.
(snip)
The emergence of fascism has always depended upon democracy’s failure. The growing proto-fascist, white-supremacist movement in the Republican Party is preying upon non-rich white people who are literally dying of despair, turning to drugs and suicide to deal with a reality they can’t bear, and a society they believe doesn’t care for them. Over the past 15 years, the death rate for white men has actually increased?—?an unprecedented rise in modern times that’s comparable to the emergence of the AIDS epidemic. White people are right that they are under attack?—?they’re just pointing to the wrong culprits. For the wealthy elite who fund the political operatives and media companies that tell white people who to blame for their plight, the race war is a very useful substitute for the class war.
What’s new in this moment is the Republican establishment’s losing control of the grassroots for the first time in the post–civil rights era.
December 7, 2015 at 3:34 pm
That’s Max Berger, not Mychal Denzel Smith.
December 7, 2015 at 11:51 pm
Thank you.