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Werner Herzog’s Bear muses on the similarities between American politics today and in the 1850s. A nugget:

They (the 1850s Southern Democratic Party–ed.) were a crazy lot who intentionally broke the Democratic party apart in order to hasten secession. This reckless strategy was based in the belief that seceding would be the only long-term way to preserve the South’s slavery-based economic structure. While most white Southerners weren’t as radical, once Abraham Lincoln won the presidency, secession began. Politicians in the Deep South simply refused to accept the legitimacy of the Lincoln administration to the point of leaving the country. . . .

Obviously, if a large number of elected officials refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the president, the country either falls apart or becomes ungovernable. Although we aren’t in any real danger of civil war today, we are back in a place where the legitimacy of the president has been rejected, leading to strife and a dysfunctional government. As I’ve said before, the Republican Party has ceased to be a party in the traditional sense. It is merely the vehicle for an extremist conservative movement that values its ideology above all else.

The state of “becoming ungovernable” seems to have been attained.

Gene Nichol, on viewing Republican antics in North Carolina, wonders what truth-in-labeling might mean for the Republican Party. A nugget:

So when they (North Carolina Republicans–ed.) retire to craft our policies – repealing the Racial Justice Act, passing voting restrictions largely aimed at African-Americans, packing black voters into gerrymandered legislative districts, rejecting the paid-for Medicaid expansion, crushing unemployment compensation, limiting welfare benefits – no black member rises to address the issues. A white Republican governor and an all white cabinet round out the sweep. Some here say this is impolite to mention. Accurate, but impolite. The Carolina racial lineup frequently triggers an appalling aesthetic. Dismissive white legislative and executive officials call Moral Monday protesters “morons” and “outside” agitators – evoking images of the desegregation era. State representatives treat “NAACP” as a tacitly assumed epithet, rather than the historic champion of American promise it is.

(snip)

Imagine that, under a strange, somehow enforceable, truth-in-labeling demand, our Republican Party was forced to re-name itself as the White People’s Party. Would a young, tech-driven, libertarian explain: “I don’t like capital gains taxes, so I joined the White People’s Party?” Would an accomplished and respected investment banker declare: “I’m committed to the carried interest exception, so I vote for the White People’s Party?” Would a devout, patriotic, evangelical forthrightly proclaim: “We need prayer in our classrooms, so I’m with the White Party?”

Via Juanita Jean. Follow the link for the context.

In case you missed it, Dennis G. explains it all* (emphasis added–follow the link for the rest):

The base is outraged that a black man is President. They are outraged that he dares to exercise the exact same type of Presidential powers that white Presidents have used in the past. They are outrage (sic) that he does not seek permission of the white GOP minority before he acts.

John Boehner gets the outrage of his base. He fears his base and needs them at the same time. To fluff them he will do anything. And so he is preparing to sue the President of the United States for the “crime” of being an uppity negro.

Fifty years ago, the Republican Party decided that the road to power was paved with racism, leading to the nomination of Barry Goldwater and, eventually, to Nixon’s odious “Southern Strategy,” which has since turned on and consumed the Party. In an epic role reversal, the Republican Party has become the party of the Secesh; loyalty to and fear of the Secesh influence and inform its every action.

If you haven’t figured that out by now, you haven’t been paying attention.

_______________

*Apologies to Clarissa, who explained it all first.

Dick Polman reviews the origins of the contemporary Republican Party and of the New Secesh. Do please follow the link and read the rest.

Fifty years ago yesterday, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which banned segregation in public accomodations. The act had been passed with major help from moderate congressional Republicans. But two weeks after LBJ put pen to paper, Republicans lurched sharply to the right. They nominated, as their ’64 presidential candidate, a guy who had voted against the Civil Rights Act. And thus, under Barry Goldwater, the modern conservative movement was launched.

In other words, just as America was finally poised to reject institutional racism, the GOP made common cause with the people (primarily, southern whites) who liked institutional racism. Sadly, Goldwater’s reactionary fervor, at the expense of African Americans, became a foundational cornerstone of the conservative moment.

Goldwater wasn’t personally racist, but his rhetoric was packed with what we now call “dog whistles.” Angry whites deciphered his code phrases, and they got the message loud and clear.

I was detailed to paint the corn stack in the summer of 1964 and listened to coverage of the Republican Convention on my portable radio as I worked. At the time, Jim Crow was still in force and the school I attended was still all-white.

As a child of the Jim Crow South, I can attest that we all knew while it was happening that Goldwater and his Republican Party were on our side and on the side of preserving segregation and what grown-ups referred to as “our way of life.”

Remember, when someone says “states’ rights,” ask, “States’ rights to do just what exactly?”

After explaining that the “New South” as the “era after Reconstruction and before the Civil Rights laws when the states of the old Confederacy seemed most determined to preserve a social and economic order that encouraged low-wage industrialization as they fought to maintain Jim Crow,” Nelson Lichtenstein points out that it’s back.

This is not only a product of racial fears and resentments, however. It also appears to reflect an increasingly inbred Southern hostility to the exercise of economic regulatory power on virtually any level. As in the 19th century, many in the South, including a considerable proportion of the white working-class, have been persuaded that the federal government is their enemy.

As in the New South era, Southern whites, both elite and plebian, have adopted an insular and defensive posture toward the rest of the nation and toward newcomers in their region. Echoing the Jim Crow election laws promulgated by Southern states at the turn of the 20th century, the new wave of 21st-century voting restrictions promise to sharply curb the Southern franchise — white, black and brown.

The new New South rejects not only the cosmopolitanism of a multiracial, religiously pluralist society, but the legitimacy of government, both federal and state, that seeks to ameliorate the poverty and inequality that has been a hallmark of Southern distinctiveness for more than two centuries.

(Update: Link fixed.)

Leonard Pitts, Jr.:

Perhaps, then, you can appreciate the frustration some of us feel when others of us proclaim with complacent satisfaction that “we have come a long way” in correcting America’s habit of racial bias – as if we did not have many miles yet to travel. Indeed, it has become an article of faith on the political right that racial bias has been well and truly vanquished. It’s a silly contention that does not survive the merest collision with statistical fact . . . .

If America is anything, it is an implicit promise of fairness, a promise that you will not be arrested, suspected, rejected, demeaned, denied, suspended, scapegoated, held back, pushed down or killed on account of the color of your skin. For 238 years, we have lurched in fits and starts toward fulfillment of that promise, periods of progress followed by periods of regress. We find ourselves in a latter such period now – mass incarceration rampant, the courts hostile, voting rights again under siege, black boys being killed for wearing hoodies and playing their music too loud.

Follow the link.

What happens in Vegas . . . .

. . . but it is.