Bobby Jindal just splintered the GOP: The unholy alliance between Fox News and the 1 percent can no

[DonViejo]

Bobby Jindal just splintered the GOP: The unholy alliance between Fox News and the 1 percent can no longer stand

Wall Street and religious right were a winning team — for the rich. Now evangelicals want their share. Look out!

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s op-ed in the New York Times marks the whimpering end of an unholy alliance. The letter itself was a ham-handed attempt to capture the 2016 evangelical vote before Sen. Ted Cruz does. But the very crudity of his piece revealed that the union at the heart of Movement Conservatism is ripping apart.

In his op-ed, Jindal undertook to explain to business leaders how Movement Conservatism works. Its political strategy, he lectured, “requires populist social conservatives to ally with the business community on economic matters and corporate titans to side with social conservatives on cultural matters.” The governor is right: Since the 1980s big business interests have managed to secure policies that have concentrated wealth at the very top of the economic ladder, and they have managed their coup only with the help of the votes of social conservatives.

But Jindal’s hyperbolic posturing as he warns “any corporation” “bullying” social conservatives into accepting same-sex marriage to “Save your breath,” reveals a touchstone moment: This grand alliance is over.

Its end has been a long time coming. The toxic amalgam of economic and social reactionaries that Jindal identified began to mix after the Second World War. Americans in that era rallied behind the New Deal consensus. Reactionary businessmen loathed business regulation and taxation, but had no luck convincing voters to turn against the policies most saw as important safeguards against another Great Depression. Then, in 1951, a wealthy young writer suggested that social issues might be the way to break popular support for the New Deal. William F. Buckley, Jr. advanced the idea that unfettered capitalism and Christianity should be considered fundamental American values that could not be questioned. According to him, anyone who called for an active government or a secular society was an anti-American collectivist in league with international communism.

Few Americans paid much attention to an argument that equated even Republican President Eisenhower’s wildly successful capitalist economy with communism. But desegregation gave Buckley’s Movement Conservatism the popular social issue it needed to turn Americans against an active government. The year after the Supreme Court handed down the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation, Buckley launched his National Review, which quickly tied business regulation to unpopular desegregation of public schools. Buckley hired Virginia newspaper editor James Kilpatrick to assure readers that an active government that protected the rights of black Americans undermined American “freedom.”

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http://www.salon.com/2015/04/26/bobby_jindal_just_splintered_the_gop_the_unholy_alliance_between_fox_news_and_the_1_percent_can_no_longer_stand/

[eppur_se_muova]

1. Wow, interesting history. To think that Buckley is often presented ...

as a "respectable" Conservative, or "paleo-Conservative", somehow not as radical as today's nutbags. Yet it was the cynical exploitation of racism that gave his efforts their initial impetus. Hardly surprising that same racist component should still be integral to populist conservatism today.

[heaven05]

5. +100

excellent analysis of past and present "respectable" conservatism. Even Goldwater, the grandaddy of modern "respectable" conservatism wasn't so respectable when it came to racial politics.

[ms liberty]

2. K&R...n/t

[Fred Sanders]

3. The Last Stand of the Extremist Christian Evanglical Fundies, without their corporate funders, was never going to be pretty.

[Doctor_J]

4. pssh

Oh, please. The ten thousandth time we've heard this during this century. I think people who say it are moles

[Major Nikon]

6. Racism and other assorted bigotries are the glue that holds the GOP together

I don't the those alliances breaking up anytime soon. There's still plenty of hate to go around.

[n2doc]

7. Pyush didn't do anything

He's just bitter that the rednecks and mouth breathers won't let him into the club, no matter how much xtian haterade he drinks.

[stage left]

8. K&R

for a very interesting article. A political party built on a foundation of hatred should not stand. I wish I believed that it wouldn't continue as it has for decades. As with the Berlin wall, though, I'll have to see it fall before I believe in its demise.

[blkmusclmachine]

9. http://farleftside.com/2010/7-30-2010.png

[Myrina]

10. ... more dangerous than Faux, in my opinion ...

... are the religious cults that run on local networks, "antenna channels", as it were.

It's the tv everyone can afford cuz it's free and they cloak their insane bigotry and dishonesty in a caring, family-focused, "Bible study" sort of Kool Aid ... but if you watch any of their 'news' shows, the message is identical to Faux, just with a much calmer demeanor.

[jmowreader]

11. The weirdest part of the whole op-ed...

...is where Jindal wrote, "if it's not freedom for all, it's not freedom at all."

The whole piece was all about how Bobby Jindal plans to keep gay people from having the freedom to marry the person they want to, and he comes out with THAT line? The freedom to not get your feelings hurt is more important than the freedom to not be compelled to testify in a court of law against the person you want to be married to, and would be married to if you didn't live in Louisiana?