Republican Primaries: The Voyage from Eisenhower to Trump

"Oppressed beneath the weight of their own corruption and of military violence, they for a long while preserved the sentiments, or at least the ideas of their free-born ancestors."  Edward Gibbon, "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"

I think people are making a mistake if they treat the Republican primaries as serious politics. They obviously aren't, but at the same time it seems to me that they are a more than serious symptom of levels of unhappiness, frustration and confusion among the citizenry that border and frequently cross the border of collective insanity.

Under Richard Nixon's guidance the Republican party executed the "Southern Strategy" and took know-nothing, racist-populist America to its bosom and began to win majorities sufficient to implement policies that have led that same voter base of know-nothing, racist-populist Americans to even greater degradation.

Now the Republicans are trapped in a nut house of their own creation.

Just as an exercise of political science fiction, try to imagine Dwight D. Eisenhower in the midst of these Republican primaries, try to imagine him on Fox news. 

Impossible, right?

When I was a boy the Republicans that lived around me were mostly pallid, though vigorous, high church Episcopalians, solid, smug types who struggled mightily with golf and sedately clipped stock coupons. As to the younger ones, crew cuts and white bucks, energetically embalmed in stifling, Pat Booney squareness come immediately to mind.

I cannot think of a better bellwether of America's malaise then that of the party of the formerly priggish, self-contented, self-righteous, self-satisfied, conventional and sensible becoming the party of the paranoiac, the exasperated and the kooky

A century from now, the years between Eisenhower's and today's Republican party will seem a brief interlude and I'm sure that Chinese historians will puzzle over the swift deterioration of America and its institutions in that time frame.

I am neither Chinese nor a historian and I am puzzled as hell. I was a kid when Ike was president and I am an old man now... Blessed with an extremely good memory, I have trouble associating the America I was born into and the America that withers before my eyes today, as if it were being struck down by a wasting disease.

I would think it important to separate this new "conservatism" from the traditional variety. Remember the American vice is to use language to hide meaning. 

One of the most disturbing things about America is the incoherence of American language, the endless euphemism-laden double talk. American terminology is confusing and perhaps the confusion is deliberate.

For example, everywhere but in the USA, “red” is the color of the left, but in America, the term, “red state”, means one that is right-wing and “blue”, which is a color that in most countries is associated with the right, to ultra-right, in the US is used to label what Americans call “liberal”, which in the USA means the left, but which everywhere else is used to label the economic right-wing… These examples are just the tip of a semantic iceberg.

This brings us to the word, “conservative”.

The new conservative is, in plain English, in fact, a neo-fascist and the personality traits we observe on the American right these days are those of a fascist.

What is the difference?

If a person is born into a well to do, stable family, where the parents respect and perhaps even love each other and treat the child kindly and his/her exposure to traditional religion is benign. He/she is likely to accept the family’s traditions and values unquestioningly.

From that point his/her attitude will be one of prudence, of not spoiling  (for him/her and his/her family) a good thing… and his/her attitude toward the less fortunate than himself/herself may even be benevolent and paternalistic and be expressed in contributions to charity and other good works.

What we are seeing in the Republicans now, has little or nothing to do with that kind of conservatism. We are looking at exasperated, paranoiac, xenophobic, racist nastiness, in short a fascistic mentality of crippled personalities in reaction to changing mores and a failing economy.

All the unhappiness and frustration are searching for moral absolutes. Moral absolutes are what allow people to kill each other... if only in their imagination. All this hateful speech and dippy ideas are pregnant with death, they are about to give birth to a monster, but the Republicans are only the midwives... They are helpless in the face of the spirits they have invoked from the country's inner darkness. It is that darkness not any individual like Trump that should worry us, something very, very nasty is cooking in it. DS

What has the Republican Party come to? - III

David Seaton's News Links

Observing the pantagruelian expense and listening to and reading about the nauseating, sociopathic babble of the seemingly endless Republican primaries in the United States; people all over the world are questioning the democratic process and wondering if China's authoritarian system might be superior.

In my opinion, this is not a problem of systems, democracy is not an end in itself, it is simply a means to an end. The object in democracy is the same as in any system, be it an authoritarian or even a totalitarian, tyrannical regime: governance.

Democracy, by allowing a fuller expression of the people who practice it, logically expresses more faithfully the nature of that people then any other system possibly could. If the society practicing democracy is decadent and corrupt, so their democratic expression will reflect that decadence and corruption.

In the United States, quoting today's The Guardian, 

"Almost one third of Americans, according to a recent poll, have read Atlas Shrugged, and it now sells hundreds of thousands of copies every year."

The financial crisis we are suffering now, worldwide, is simply the result of a faithful following over decades of the psychopathic philosophy of Ayn Rand by the United States of America, which happens to be the world's most powerful country... The disaster that follows cannot be laid at the feet of democracy... just like with computers, in democracy GIGO applies: "garbage in, garbage out".

It is the United States and its values that have been hollowed out and debased, not democracy. DS

What has the Republican Party come to? - II

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"Melancholy"
Domenico Feti

We are living in quite special times. The crisis in the system hasn’t been this evident to “everyman” since the 1930s. The United States is rather special in one respect in facing the crisis. The idea of personal responsibility for everything that happens to us, that you have cancer because you are not thinking “positively” and not because some corporation has poisoned the air or the water.

This means that instead of wanting to face the stagnant economy collectively and solve it by all pulling together… our culture wants everybody to “just suck it up” individually. This in turn means that we have millions of people who are angry (at themselves) and disappointed (with themselves). They have to unload this misery somewhere,  and this makes them a perfect target for the passing demagogue. We have seen a nearly endless stream of nut jobs auditioning for the role of commander of the miserable.

The Republicans, in search of some sort of non-country club majority, from which to protect their interests, have chosen to pander to this unhappiness… and many of the clearer heads among them already regret it. I doubt if even a major defeat would change this trend... only curing the unhappiness would and I wonder if any political party has it in its power to do that. DS

What has the Republican Party come to?

David Seaton's News Links

If Mitt Romney takes the nomination and then loses to Obama, the extremists who’ve taken over the party will surely say the problem was Romney’s lack of ideological purity.  Joe Nocera - New York Times

Here’s what I think may happen. Romney gets the nomination and is defeated. Republicans decide they are sick of nominating “moderates” and next time they go haywire. Then the party gets really crushed and sanity returns. David Brooks - New York Times

I think people are making a mistake if they treat the Republican primaries as serious politics. They obviously aren't, but at the same time it seems to me that they are a more than serious symptom of levels of unhappiness, frustration and confusion among the citizenry that border and frequently cross the border of collective insanity.

All the unhappiness and frustration are searching for moral absolutes. Moral absolutes are what allow people to kill each other... if only in their imagination. All this hateful speech and dippy ideas are pregnant with death, they could give birth to a monster, but the Republicans would only be the midwives... They are helpless in the face of the spirits they have invoked from the country's inner darkness. It is that darkness that should worry us, something very, very nasty is cooking in it. DS

The magnificent quest for Shinola

David Seaton's News Links

Shinola, take a whiff

Watching the antics of Romney, Santorum, Bachman, Paul, Cain and Perry and contemplating the mere possibility that someone who should only be handled with forceps like Newt Gingrich could now lead a party once led by Abraham Lincoln or Dwight Eisenhower, one gets the feeling that the spirit of the republic is a little like the Bruce Willis character in "The Sixth Sense", he's dead but doesn't know it yet and only one small boy seems to understand the situation... Perhaps the Occupy Wall Street movement is that "small boy".

In American-Speak someone of little understanding is said to be unable to distinguish between excrement and shoe polish, we say then that he or she "can't tell shit from Shinola".  It appears that in the Occupy Wall Street movement, a perhaps critical mass of Americans have taken it upon themselves to investigate the why and the how of the odor coming from the collective "shoe" and have set about to do something about it. Not a moment too soon if the race for the Republican presidential nomination is any sort of a leading olfactory indicator of the nation's mental health.

There is certainly a sense that something is terribly wrong, something mysterious, but I think it could be something quite simple, if intractable, that is afflicting the system. Like the Bruce Willis character, we really don't understand our true situation. In my opinion we are going through something similar to what the USSR went through only a little more than twenty years ago. Twenty years may seem a long time to someone under forty, but in historical terms it is nothing more than a blink of the eye. From the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 to the outbreak of World War Two in 1939 is only twenty years.

Absurd, you say, the two systems are totally different, like oil and water... I would say that the similarities are more interesting than the differences and that America has simply been more efficient than the USSR was in resisting the same acids that are eating away at its structures in much the same way as they did on the Soviet's.

Both the USSR and the USA have relied on huge government spending to propel their economies. The role of government funded research has been essential in almost every high tech area: computers, the Internet, aviation, etc, in all of them the input of the state has been paramount. Where the United States won hands down was in turning the sophisticated technology so expensively acquired into affordable consumer products and fomenting never-never credit to keep them affordable when salaries stagnated.

"What about freedom?", you say, to which I would reply that the social control of the Soviet system was extraordinarily brutal and primitive compared to our system of social control, which is infinitely more sophisticated than theirs was. I never lived in the Soviet Union and my experience of how a well-oiled dictatorship controls public opinion comes from having lived in Franco's Spain. Franco lasted forty years and the Soviets lasted seventy. Although the USSR was communist and Spain's regime was authoritarian/fascist, the similarities in maintaining control would be great.

Under Franco, all newspapers were of course owned by people approved of by the regime, however until very late into the dictatorship, all articles appearing them were previously censored before publication, after that any violation of the regime's standards could be punished by imprisonment and fines. There was only one television channel to begin with, later two, both state owned and censored, as were all books, stage plays and  films, which were previously dubbed into Spanish. There were private radio stations, but they all connected to the state radio for all their hourly news programs. Here is something that will give you an idea of how paranoiac such a regime can be: radio dispatched taxis came into use in the USA in the late 1940s, but they were still forbidden in Spain until well after the dictator's death, as they constituted an independent communication network outside state control. There is no way that the Franco regime could have ever tolerated the Internet, cell phones, SMS or social networks. 

Getting back to the Soviet Union I have read that you needed very high level permission to even have access to a photocopying machine.  A system of social control cannot operate successfully in an environment of free movement of information. 

This is where the USA has always been more sophisticated and effective, however, like the mysterious intruder in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death", you can run, but you can't hide and the same forces that brought down the Soviets and would have made Franco's regime impossible, have morphed under the combination of US military technology, hooked to an insatiable consumer society and are now even eating away at the American system.

As we observe in the political paralysis of today, the Founding Fathers of 18th century, WASP, America created a political structure that is not designed to reflect a society as complex and multicolored as contemporary America's has turned out to be. 

The centrifugal forces of a country as huge and diverse as America's have been kept more or less under control until recently by what Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann called, "the management of consent", that is to say the American science of public relations applied to forming public opinion. Heretofore "freedom of the press" required the money to buy a press in the first place, therefore the creation of opinion was in the safe hands of people with enough money to pay to play. The major newspapers, radio and TV networks and of course Hollywood all worked together naturally to manufacture a national opinion leading to political consensus.

Herein lies the importance of the OWS, with its 99% slogan... this is a self generating phenomenon, which has required minimal capital outlay to influence the opinion of millions of people, which is helping many millions to tell the shit from the Shinola. This is totally outside the control of those who have always manufactured consent until now. OWS is only the beginning, in a couple of years it will be looked back on tenderly like watching a home movie of a baby's first steps.

However "our" system has been reacting to this danger its own technology and marketing have produced -- again with much more sophistication than the USSR or Franco could have ever have mustered -- and under the cover of the war on terrorism, or the protection of intellectual property, is putting mechanisms in place that only await a "national emergency" to tug on our leash.

In short "shoe sniffing" is a fight that is never fully won, but never must be lost.

A toast to Shinola! DS

Raising Cain (Herman)

David Seaton's News Links

Herman Cain

"Don't blame Wall Street, don't blame the big banks, if you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself. It is not someone's fault if they succeeded, it is someone's fault if they failed," the ex-Godfather's Pizza CEO declared. New York Daily News

One day before a CNN Western Republican presidential debate, a new national survey indicates that Mitt Romney and Herman Cain are essentially tied for the lead in the race for the GOP nomination, with Rick Perry dropping to a distant third. CNN

Here is an easy prediction: at the very least, Herman Cain is going to be the coming Republican vice-presidential candidate... at the very least. That is what the polls show and barring any terrible gaff on his part from here to the convention, Herman Cain is bound to be on the ticket... He is as radically conservative as the flakiest Tea Party whacko and at the same time formidably focused, with proven administrative competence... This is not Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachman we are talking about; he is as different from them as Godzilla is from your girlfriend's pet iguana.

Herman Cain obviously presents a formidable problem for the Democrats and for progressives in general. The quote from the New York Daily News, will give you a clear idea of what we are up against. 

Only a very mean s.o.b. could tell  Wall Street's victims, "If you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself". 

He is suggesting that the millions of people who have lost their jobs and their homes through the shenanigans of people who Michael Moore aptly describes as, "sociopathic kleptomaniacs", should take on all the pain of their loss as a personal failure. This is like saying to a rape victim that she is responsible for being raped. This is callous, cruel, profoundly un-Christian (Cain is also a Baptist preacher) and the sort of traditional, tight-lipped, no-nothing, Babbittry  that arouses disgust and even livid hatred in most progressive Americans. 

On reading the phrase the first reaction is, "Herman Cain is a swine!"... But you better be careful, let's see what happened to John Stewart when he attacked Herman Cain.

You can imagine how much fun this could be for white conservatives. Here they have a rich African-American, who is telling poor African-Americans what white conservatives would love to tell them, basically, "fuck off and die".... and their African-American is not the exotic offspring of an absentee, Kenyan exchange student and a well off, white bread Kansan, raised in Hawaii, but a genuine descendent of slaves, from the red earth and piney woods of Georgia, son of a chauffeur who drove for the man not from Harvard, a "Morehouse Man". They are going to be able to taunt Democrats with "yah, yah, our enword is more enward than your enword".

As I say, in my opinion, barring some terrible scandal (sexual or financial, not saying nasty things about Mexicans) Herman Cain is either going to be the presidential or vice-presidential candidate of the Republican Party and he will be free to say all the nasty things that white conservatives think and wouldn't dare say in public and all the rednecks will be able to applaud and cheer without admitting to being racists.

If all this wasn't tragic, it would be hilarious.

What can the Democrats do to break the spell of Howard Cain.

Think outside the box! Just remember that "999" upside down is "666"... The Democrats could accuse Cain of being the Antichrist... it might work on some Republicans. (insert smiley face).  DS