The real story of the shutdown: 50 years of GOP race-baiting

[DonViejo]

A House minority from white districts want to destroy the first black president, and the GOP majority abets them

BY JOAN WALSH

On the day the Affordable Care Act takes effect, the U.S. government is shut down, and it may be permanently broken. You’ll read lots of explanations for the dysfunction, but the simple truth is this: It’s the culmination of 50 years of evolving yet consistent Republican strategy to depict government as the enemy, an oppressor that works primarily as the protector of and provider for African-Americans, to the detriment of everyone else. The fact that everything came apart under our first African-American president wasn’t an accident, it was probably inevitable.

People talk about the role of race in Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”: how Pat Buchanan and Kevin Phillips helped him lure the old Dixiecrats into the Republican Party permanently. Far less well known was the GOP’s “Northern Strategy,” which targeted so-called white ethnics – many of them from the Catholic “Sidewalks of New York” like my working-class family, in the words of Kevin Phillips. Without a Northern Strategy designed to inflame white-ethnic fears of racial and economic change, Phillips’ imaginary but still influential notion of a “permanent Republican majority” would have been unimaginable.

“The principal force which broke up the Democratic (New Deal) coalition is the Negro socioeconomic revolution and liberal Democratic ideological inability to cope with it,” Phillips wrote. “Democratic ‘Great Society’ programs aligned that party with many Negro demands, but the party was unable to defuse the racial tension sundering the nation.” Phillips was not trying to defuse that tension, far from it – he was trying to lure those white ethnics to the GOP (although he later broke with the party he helped create.) But his Northern Strategy truly came to fruition in 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan. Where Nixon swept the South, Reagan was able to take much of the North and West, too.

I loved Chris Matthews’ book “Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked,” but as I said in my interview with him, I think he let Reagan off the hook when it came to race. Ronald Reagan picked up the political baton passed to him by Barry Goldwater and Pat Buchanan, and played his role with genial gusto. Reagan had trafficked in ugly racial stereotyping over the years, about “young bucks” buying T-bone steaks with food stamps and Cadillac-driving welfare queens. But the Reagan who got elected president was better at using deracialized language to channel racial fears and resentment. He and his strategists had succeeded in making government synonymous with “welfare,” and “welfare” synonymous with lazy people, most of them African-American.

full article:
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/01/the_real_story_of_the_shutdown_50_years_of_gop_race_baiting/

[pitbullgirl1965]

1. Reagan also kicked off his

campaign with a states rights speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi. As governor of California, he also signed the draconian gun control law, the Mulford Act, aimed at the Black Panthers after they (legally) open carried their firearms to the California statehouse.
Can you imagine him doing that to a group of white gun owners?

He was a horrible person and president. My reaction when President Obama said he was a fanboy of Reagan.

Oh and don't forget the vile Lee Atwater. IIRC, he didn't he regret the damage he'd done? He died of brain cancer correct?



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan's_Neshoba_County_Fair_%22states'_rights%22_speech

[bemildred]

3. California has not yet recovered from the harm Raygun did here.

The schools, the parks, health care, and a vast, expensive, and well-functioning infrastructure just left to rot. And now of course all that stuff is too expensive.

And then he spread it around the whole nation.

[pitbullgirl1965]

4. Remember when the mentally ill were thrown out to the streets?

My mother worked in a pysch. ward and it hit home with her. All those people with no place to live, no meds, no food.

[bemildred]

5. And they are still out there, or expensively filling our prisons now. nt

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

2. The Southern Strategy has been the Republican Mantra for the last 50+ years or so.

Great article.