Republican "Southern Strategy" Moves North

To my friends up north, including a lot of relatives in Wisconsin where my wife was born, and in Indiana and Ohio and out West too, in Arizona: If you want to know where Nixon’s cynical “Southern Strategy”—baptizing racists into the Republican Party in the 1970s—is leading you—today, in 2011—read Intelligence Report, an award-winning periodical published by the famous nemesis of the Klu Klux Klan, Morris Dees and The Southern Poverty Law Center.

When Barack Obama became a presidential candidate, an explosive resurgence of Klan successors cast a sudden burden of revolutionary proportions on the Secret Service, the FBI, and on state and local police departments. According to SPLC’s latest ”Hate Map,” more than one thousand fast growing groups of armed racist militias—221 named “Klu Klux Klan;” 170, “Neo-Nazi;” 136, “White Nationalist;” another 136, “Racist Skinhead;” and 42 “Neo-Confederate.” An additional 824 violently anti-government hate groups call themselves “Patriots” or “Sovereign Citizen” organizations; and, yes, with the same blind irony, 26 of them are called “Christian Identity.”

These armed insurgencies now threaten, not only in the south, as northerners might think, but in all but two of the States of the Union. For example, there are 8 hate groups in Wisconsin, 24 in Indiana, 32 in Ohio and 22 in Arizona. Their sordid criminal activities make “Watergate” look like a girl scout sleep over. Check out SPLC’s names and addressees in your own state and neighborhood.

In the course of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, racial epithets became commonplace at political rallies. The GOP, the Party of Lincoln, and its Presidential candidate denied responsibility, and I have every reason to believe them.

My fellow southerner, Carlos Dews, distinguished author and Chairman of the Department of English Literature at John Cabot University in Rome, explained in the December 2009 issue of Aspenia, an Italian journal, reprinted in the Philadelphia Inquirer, how racists in the United States have learned one lesson since the 1960s: They cannot express their racism directly. In public, they must veil their racial hatred behind policy differences. “But I know what they mean when they say they ‘want their country back.’ They want it back safely in the exclusive hands of people exactly like themselves.”

But we live in a country of excitingly different kinds of people from every corner of the earth; of every shape, size, sex, age, appearance, language, and color; of an endless variety of religious, social, political persuasions and affiliations; all kinds of tastes, talents, interests, and skills; some smart and thoughtful; others stupid and unthinking; some healthy and whole, others sick, lame and disabled; strong and weak; rich and poor.

Absolutists here and in other parts of the world think such a diverse country as ours is ungovernable absent a strong, coercive state that disdains both the truth and the rights of its people.

I’ll take this up next in my continuing series on

“The Poisonous Fruit of the Republican Party's 'Southern Strategy' as it Moves North,”

or, “I’m not prejudiced, but. . . .”

photo credit: flickr Bob Jagendorf

Happy New Year!

First, to my family and friends; also,

The new 112^th Congress of the United States convening in January,

John Boehner, the new Speaker of the House of Representatives,

Nancy Pelosi, former Speaker of the House, now House Minority Leader,

John Lewis, Congressman from the Fifth Georgia District in Atlanta,

Harry Reid, Majority Leader of the Senate,

President Barack Obama,

Vice President Joseph Biden, and

Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State.

The 111^th Congress successfully addressed and passed, over obstinate opposition, more desperately needed, controversial legislation than any other Congress since the 89th when voter rights legislation passed in the 1960s!

I hope the 112^th is inspired by the 111^th example to do as well or better, and that new members, including Republicans and their Speaker, John Boehner, will help the nation weather its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

My Cousin Kathleen, focused on other issues, didn’t like the emphasis in my “Taming the Borrowing Beast” blog on the fact that, "The last time the United States operated on balanced budgets. . .was during the Democratic Administration of President Clinton." In reply, my “Nation Becoming A Dysfunctional Family” blog described election feuding over divisive issues that avoid government “addiction to irresponsible credit expansion during the last forty years...

“We are a marvelously diverse and contentious country of many shapes, sizes, colors, races, religions and sexual orientations. We're a nation of immigrants from every corner of the earth; a miniature United Nations of people live on every city block and small town. Our family mirrors our country, every bit as diverse and very contentious. . . . We have married people from many distant lands. These differences make life exciting and interesting; but there are times when we have to put them aside; now is such a time.

“The answer is not to avoid discussing our differences—as if this were possible— — but in remembering the law of love that holds our disputatious family together.

“Your Father, Kathleen, as you know so well, was talented in keeping . . . rhetoric in bounds with humor. Other members of our clan share this gift. That's why no one, whatever their cultural roots, wants to miss one of our family parties.

I have but one concrete suggestion to Republicans in the 112^th Congress:

Prove that I am wrong in claiming that little if any job stimulus will flow from the billions in tax breaks you recently won in the 111^th Congress for your wealthiest patrons and the corporations they own and control. It’s not hard:

A. Persuade your patrons to stop hoarding their enormous cash reserves such as I describe in my “Hatching a Brand New Beast” blog;

B. Persuade your patrons to spend or invest their cash reserves and tax breaks like Warren Buffet, in new enterprises that will create jobs, instead of “safe” aging enterprises approaching the down side of their secular trend curve;

C. Persuade your patrons and the state governments they dominate to stop firing, start hiring and begin serving their constituents’ needs;

D. Persuade your patrons and the media they control to stop trashing on efforts to accomplish these things and those who advocate them, like George Soros;

E. If your patrons do these things they’ll make a lot of money, avoid a class war, and like themselves better.

photo credit: flickr, rkramer62

Nation Becoming A Dysfunctional Family

The most catastrophic depression since the 1930s is no time for a family feud.

Dear Cousin Kathleen:

I was delighted to hear from you even if only by way of a response to my recent blog, "Taming the Borrowing Beast," particularly, "The last time the United States operated on balanced budgets. . . was during the Democratic Administration of President Clinton." I was puzzled, however, at your stirring into this issue the claim that the Clinton administration "did more to promote and further abortion and overturn laws protecting the most innocent of our citizens: the unborn; so he's hardly a hero to me for balancing the budget. . . ."

However, if your question, "Which is the bigger evil?" is limited to right here and now, USA 2010 with eleven million unemployed and a deeply compromised economic future, I can answer that question with confidence.

The biggest evil is clear: It is family feuding over divisive issues that are not immediately focused on weathering the worst economic crisis the United States has faced since the Great Depression of the 1930s. We can't afford the luxury of arguing about anything else. Our foolishly happy addiction to irresponsible credit expansion during the last forty years leaves us, in the words of a repentant Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, with no more choices between "good" and "better," but only between "bad" and "worse."

We are a marvelously diverse and contentious country of many shapes, sizes, colors, races, religions and sexual orientations. We're a nation of immigrants from every corner of the earth; a miniature United Nations of people lives on every city block and in every small town. Our family mirrors our country, every bit as diverse and very contentious. Members of our family enjoy round the world friendships, and we have married people from many distant lands. These differences make life exciting and interesting; but there are times when we have to put them aside; now is such a time.

Our family's refusal to allow strong feelings about hot button religious, political and sexual issues to sunder friendships and family ties, can be a model for taming the current ugly, divisive style of political debate. Name-calling and exaggerated metaphors, like "murder" of the unborn, have led to the real murder of a live adult—in a church; and if we are upset by stoning sinners in Muslim nations, we might take notice of the new 'Scarlet Letters" we're pinning on some already deeply troubled women.

The answer is not to avoid discussing our differences—as if this were possible for our contentious Irish elements — but in remembering the law of love that holds our disputatious family together.

Your Father, Kathleen, as you know so well, was talented in keeping religious rhetoric in bounds with humor. Other members of our clan share this talent. That's why no one, whatever their cultural roots, wants to miss one of our family parties.

l remember Aunt Martha's greeting to a prospective in-law. Opening the door to him, Aunt Martha, then in her 90s said, "I've been told not to discuss religion or politics with you, so let's talk about sex," accompanying her words with a 90-year old's bump and grind. Our soon to be relative responded with an equally welcoming break-the-ice belly-laugh!

Just to show I haven't lost my contentious edge, I'd like to try to soften some of your certainties, Kathleen. Justice Blackmun, the principal author of the Supreme Court's opinion in Roe v. Wade, tried to resolve competing recent definitions of abortion with much older understandings. English Common Law (controlling in the United States in the absence of legislation, of which there was none until the nineteenth century) did not forbid intentionally terminating a pregnancy anytime before "quickening" (when the foetus can be felt to move).

Saint Augustine held that only God knows when a foetus becomes infused with a soul (i.e. when God breaths into human "nostrils the breath of life," that makes a human a "living being," Genesis 2:7). No human can know that until the devine "breath of life" is revealed when a live child is born. I remember when Catholic priests would refuse to baptise a foetus even to console a women who suffered a miscarriage.

I don't know when or how our current crop of clerics came to know what only God knows, but while clerical advice is entitled to respect; so too is one's own conscience. It is the ultimate human arbiter even when it disagrees with an infallible pope, or resists coercion by authorities burning heretics at the stake or denying health insurance to sinners.

photo credit: flickr, Brianna Lehman