"Most voters, he had found, still voted on the basis of ethnic or cultural enmities that could be graphed, predicted and exploited."
~ 1970 New York Times article on one of the architects of Nixon's Southern Strategy, available here
Wedge issues, as always, are once again a huge part of the Republican Party's electoral campaign strategy this election year. The past two election cycles saw the crash and burn of Republican fearmongering about ruddy-complected terrorists that had been so effective in the two election cycles before that. It is clear that the economy finally emerged as the deciding issue in elections recently and people were seeing that Ronald Reagan's trickle down had turned into a seeping toxic sludge that was annihilating the middle class. Well the Republicans still don't have any answers to that problem except the same old same old, so we can expect to hear a lot more diversion being screamed through the news tickers of corporate media in the next three months. Prop 8, illegal immigrants, health care portrayed as welfare...all the old standards will be new again. Any real debate on how to revive the economy will be drowned out.
As for the Democrats, they do not have the luxury of running against a Republican Party in power, so their strategy is to make people remember how we got here. It will be difficult, since there is the growing realization that the economy will not recover any time soon and may be in permanent decline, only temporarily alleviated by short-lived speculative bubbles. They seem content to let the Republicans go on abusing archaic parliamentary procedures to obstruct any meager attempts to pull us out of the death spiral. Even without their obstructionism, there are no signs of the bold type of actions necessary, such as a radical transformation to renewable energy, and shifting priorities from the military and prison industrial complexes to education and living-wage job creation. This is where the Democrats must take the debate. We shall see how effective they will be.
It seems one seldom goes broke while exploiting the short attention span and prejudices of the U.S. electorate.
4 comments:
"Prop 8, illegal immigrants, health care portrayed as welfare...all the old standards will be new again. Any real debate on how to revive the economy will be drowned out."
This and this:
"It seems one seldom goes broke while exploiting the short attention span and prejudices of the U.S. electorate."
...capture what is wrong with this society. It's still about fear, however, but now fear of our neighbors south of us.
You never hear outcries over those who enter illegally from the North.
Politicians need scapegoats. How else can they control the will of the masses--and it is all about control, but the control that gets the electorate to press the right button, or pull the right lever, or mark the right candidate at the polls.
What's more surprising, is not that the Right, who has refined its fear-mongering techniques to a science, but the ninnies that keep falling for it.
What does it say about the independence of thought that prevails in this country, and the depths of bigotry into which this country has descended over the years, when Republicans can continue to use these threadbare tactics with increasing success at the polls?
It doesn't make you proud to be an American, does it, when so many us are vulnerable to these divisive tactics?
What does it say about a political party that's willing to allow this country to suffer needlessly in the throes of a recession in order to rise to power as the Democrats struggle hopelessly, and unsuccessfully (from the perspective of Republicans) to turn the economy around?
And what does it say about a people who can't see this, and are willing to reward at the polls those that obstructed a recovery, as well as deepened the recession?
If states had received the bailout money that was proposed months ago, instead of only now, the hopes for an economic recovery would be rosier, but the Repubs would have no part of that.
it's a bloody shame!
BD...I'm becoming convinced the Republicans want to bring about the Apocalypse, or as they call it, the Rapture. It's the only thing that makes sense. Why else would they be so hell-bent on poisoning the enivronment, war-mongering, fear-mongering, race-baiting, gay-bashing, and replacing the middle class with a poverty-stricken feudal state?
If they weren't part of a major political party they would all be in jail or an insane asylum!
Ernesto said...
"BD...I'm becoming convinced the Republicans want to bring about the Apocalypse, or as they call it, the Rapture."
You're right: It makes no sense. What price power?
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