Whistling to the Dark Side 0
No longer content with silent dogwhistles, members of the Republican Party have ratcheted up the racism as the election draws closer.
The latest is Congressman Pete Hoekstra’s re-packaging of the “yellow peril,” which Chancey Devega demolishes in a stunning takedown in a post whose title recalls the dog whistes, Me Love You Long Time, Me So Horny: More than Dog Whistles, Republican Pete Hoekstra Embraces the Yellow Peril Strategy.
Any but the most rabid racist today goes out of the way to avoid accusations of racism by using code words and dog whistles. So why does the GOP keep drawing the accusations?
George Monbiot, writing at the Guardian, thinks that conservatives have built themselves and their constituency into such a fact-free, hate-full fantasy world that the appeals work:
Don’t take my word for it. Listen to what two former Republican ideologues, David Frum and Mike Lofgren, have been saying. Frum warns that “conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics”. The result is a “shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based ideology” which has “ominous real-world consequences for American society”.
Lofgren complains that “the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital centre today”. The Republican party, with its “prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science” is appealing to what he calls the “low-information voter”, or the “misinformation voter”. While most office holders probably don’t believe the “reactionary and paranoid claptrap” they peddle, “they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base”.
