Nobody made George H. W. Bush hire Lee Atwater. Nobody held a gun on the family in the compound at Kennebunkport and demanded that he not disavow the Willie Horton ad. Nobody insisted that he go out swinging against “Ozone Man” or blanket-pardon the Iran-Contra conspirators. So if the man who managed to get four different aircraft shot out from under him in the Second World War wants to understand how he’s been reduced to voting for the wife of the man who beat him a quarter-century ago, one place to start looking might be in the mirror.
There seems to be a cottage industry these days in blaming the rise of Trump on liberals in general or Obama in particular. Oooh, we were mean to the rednecks so they are getting revenge. Ooooh, those nasty snippy late night talk show hosts made flyover country feel awful so Trump is the inevitable response. Ooooh, ooooh, ooooh.
Miss me with that shit.
Kevin Phillips crafted the Southern Strategy in 1968. Lee Atwater built the entire Bush campaign on it in 1988. Newt Gingrich made it the motivating principle of the GOP in 1993. The complete rejection of policy, of principle, of anything other than blind loyalty to one chosen leader and hang the ideological consistency of it all, was long since in place even before Bush’s mental-defective monkey loin-fruit luck-boxed his way into the White House and did such a shit job that the Republican brand was tarnished enough for a one-term African-American Senator to break through. You want to find the origins of all these antique hayseeds screaming for Trump? Try four years ago when Mitt Romney flip-flopped on nearly his entire political career to endorse Bushism. Try eight years ago when Sarah Palin jerked the wheel on John McCain’s campaign and went full-on George-Wallace-in-a-girdle. Try most of the first decade of the century, when it was suddenly okay to burn Dixie Chicks records and even-the-liberal-MSNBC had to yank Phil Donahue off the air for being insufficiently war-hungry.
As I mentioned before, Trump has to be laundered and normalized for the GOP to continue to function – but he also has to have plausible deniability as a fluke, so that he can be tossed on the heap of candidates whose loss came from insufficient fealty to an imaginary conservative ideal that can never fail, only be failed. Anything to obscure the fact that the same consistent Southern big-mule-and-white-yeoman ideology runs all the way back in an unbroken line from Trump to Romney to Tom DeLay to Karl Rove to “a card carrying member of the ACLU” to the very same hackneyed phraseology of the American Independent Party candidate in 1968. It’s the same campaign, the same ideas, the same targets. My mistake was in believing 2012 was really the last call for the Old Ones – maybe it was their last chance to win, but if they can’t have a victory, they’ll burn the country down behind them on their way to the grave.
If we allow it.
What are you prepared to do?