|
But that was the day when they were to appearances the party of middle-of-the road Northern small businessfolk and proposed to be the party of Lincoln. But even then they weren't a particularly morally well grounded lot, with this respectability-centered middle class approach. They were the party of corporation managers and their prostitute underlings all along. (Think: Nixon.) The people who really ran the Party kept in the background for a long time and cut deals with the Southern Democrats (in particular) to get things they wanted. And remember that this was a country of white men and bosses at the time- really, no one else even got close to real power. MLK was the first non-white man with truly great power in the American imagination since Tecumseh, and you know how that ended in both cases.
The Republican Party is now exactly the party of bosses and white men who want that game- their exclusive power- to continue for as long as possible. There were always two reasons why the Republican alliance up to the 1980s wanted 'small government' and 'less government intrusion' and 'fiscal responsibility'. For the little guy Republican, it was a way of asserting a moral superiority and maturity and individualism against a hughly expanding society (100 million in 1931, 200 million in 1964, 300 million in ~2010) and the chaos...it was also kind of a throwback to agrarian society, where people lived far apart from one another that looking into your neighbor's business involved a deliberate effort.
But the plutocracy and corporate CEO/Board sorts wanted 'small government' etc simply so that there would be no checks on what they did to people with less wealth, qualifications, and powerful friends than themselves. These have been simply bullies wanting to fight for individual glory and take out rivals and step all over simpler people, and banding together when they got accused of criminal violations.
These days, now that these kind of people have gotten control of 'the government' in all the ways that matter to them- the electorate let them have it fully once the Cold War was settled, because they claimed to know what to do and the electorate didn't. Now they're simply using government to bully the people they don't like, impose order on things they don't understand, and play out all the resentments and games they wanted to play that the Cold War forced them to defer. All these "principles" don't matter, really- this is politics, not organized religion. The little moralistic people were easy to corrupt- the big people lied to them, and let them share in the fun of bullying and projection and victimizing scapegoats.
It's easy to see now that the Reagan Presidency was a rearguing of the FDR reforms, Bush Sr. replayed Truman/Korea, and Clinton's time was a rehashing of the domestic fights of the Fifties- the McCarthy era (the 'Contract') and early feminism (Lewinsky affair) and early/mid Civil Rights resentments (the Bush/Gore campaign). Bush Jr.'s Presidency started out replaying the Gary Powers affair (the E-3/China incident), the Kennedy cleanup of the Mafia (Enron etc), then the Cuban missile/extremism crises (9/11 & Afghanistan), then the Gulf of Tonkin (WMD) and South Vietnam (Iraq 'democratization') plus refighting the domestic conflict around/about Vietnam (the Swift Boat people, the Kerry campaign).
The Bushies started off pretending to be Eisenhower Republicans in 2000, shook off their Goldwater sorts via '9/11' and e.g. Jeffords, their Civil Rights Act is now the gay marriage matter...they're now fully Nixon types, with lots of incompetent and reactionary people choosing them because the world seems too chaotic. We've seen the 1968 effect, where a bunch of moderate Republicans went over to Democrats and a lot of reactionaries went over to Republicans. We've gone through our 1972-ish election, and right now we're seeing the Bush people go through what the Nixon people were doing in 1973: a war is lost, almost putting the War (for/against Modernity) in a larger sense at risk; the aim was too ambitious and known to be so. The domestic governance scandals are slowly creeping up, the economy is in disarray and overexposed to globalization and being screwed with in the wrong way, Roe v Wade is being argued about but neither side has the energy to change the result.
And yes, the Nixon people were as authoritarian and backed by all the plutocrats of the country as the Bush people are now. But don't forget- the Bush people are recapitulating the past and its resentments at a rate of about 4:1 in time (4 years of the Seventies/one year in the present) and are perhaps accelerating that rate, mining this past for all the political capital they can and extinguishing the political value of that past at the same time. They do intend to screw with Iran (remember 1978-80) and Castro's allies in Latin America (remember 1978-86)- iow, with Iran and Venezuela- again. But also, don't forget that once they get at the Reagan era part of their agenda (should be in 2006) the backlash involved can be predicted to be liberal/Modern rather than reactionary/antiModern.
So I wouldn't take any of this retro 'small government' and other stuff seriously. It's all obsolete stuff, no Republican leader actually believes or implements any of it (except to disable regulation of some industry run by his buddies)- a country of 300 million people can't function with the 1800's 'small government'. In fact, Republicans are proving it every day and every hour. Doesn't 24/7 Republican propaganda and the need for it amount to a Republican 'lifestyle', to a cultism, to the way their faith in themselves requires a ridiculous amount of propping and rationalization and obfuscation and escapism and idolatry, provided by their rulers? Could any Republican voter really do without a constant dose of that psychological crutching and drugging?
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
