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The verdict is apparently in: if Fox News will
replace its current heraldic theme music with a mariachi band, and Sean Hannity puts on a sombrero for his nightly broadcast
prayer circle, then the Republican Party will
once again rule the
land...
...Not - in the immortal
word of Borat Sagdiyev.
The so-called Grand
Old Party now faces a fugue of recrimination
that could end in its demise. The party marginalized itself by becoming an alliance of corporate
oligarchs with poorly-educated Southern suburban white trash religious fanatics, both using each other
to browbeat the nation into
transforming itself into kleptocratic theocracy. There are no more people of good will and intelligence left in that camp, and a blame-fest between its two remaining
factions can only lead to
a death struggle.
The beginning of the
end really came with the death of William F. Buckley in
2008. Buckley labored for years
to keep the John Birch
Society and its agents out of the GOP's leadership circles. For those of you unacquainted with this organization, it was a group that coalesced during the early 1950s anti-communist crusade of
Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. The Birchers named
themselves after an
obscure American soldier and Baptist
missionary executed by
the Red Army in China during the final months of
World War Two. The group was founded and funded by Robert Welch, a Boston candy manufacturer (Junior Mints, Sugar Daddy) tormented by conspiracy fantasies. Another founding board member was Fred Koch, father of the billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, who
have become the latter-day
sugar daddies of the
Republican Party.
The Birchers retailed
all kinds of ideological
nonsense that made them
the butt of ridicule during
the Camelot days of John F. Kennedy and the heady Civil Rights years of his successor Lyndon B. Johnson. (Bob Dylan wrote a song about them in 1962: "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues.") Everything
perceived to be a threat in a changing society was sold by the Birchers as a communist plot - water fluoridation,
de-segregation, even, by
a kind of tortured logic, the US strategy in the
Vietnam War. Since a Democratic president and congress passed the civil rights legislation of 1964-5,
the traditionally Democratic
"solid South" revolted
almost overnight and eventually turned solidly Republican. (It was also good for business.)
Something else was going on in Dixieland from the late 1950s on. The region boomed economically, partly from luring
northern industry down with cheap labor, and partly because so many large military bases were located there - hence the hyperbolic, militant patriotism of a region that had lately
staged a violent insurrection against
the national government. The region
also went through an explosion of air-conditioned
suburban sprawl because the southern states were geographically huge and the climate was unbearable half the year. The sprawl industry itself generated vast fortunes and widespread prosperity in a part of the country that
had been a depressed
agricultural backwater since
the Civil War.
Consequently, a population of poor, ignorant
crackers crawled out of the mud
and dust to find themselves wealthy car dealers
and strip-mall magnates
in barely one turn of a generation. The transition being
so abrupt, their cracker
culture of xenophobia, "primitive"
religion, and romance with violence came through intact. They were the perfect client group
for a political party that
styled itself
"conservative," as in maintaining the old timey ways.
Toward the end of the 20th century,
as the old northern
states' economies withered,
and Yankee culture lost both
footing and meaning, and poor
white folks all over America looked
with envy on the glitz of country music and Nascar,
and gravitated toward the
Dixieland culture of belligerent, aggressive suburbanization, religiosity, and militarism.
This cartoon of the old timey
ways swept the "flyover" precincts of the
nation. Along in the baggage compartment
was all the old John Birch Society cargo of quasi-supernatural
ideology that appealed so deeply
to people perplexed by the mystifying
operations of reality. That perplexity
was supposedly resolved in a Bush II White
House aide famously stating,
"We make our own reality." The results of the 2012 election now conclusively demonstrate the shortcomings of
that world-view.
And so the news last
week was that a different version of America outvoted the John Birch Dixiecrat coalition by roughly two million ballots. Meaning, of course, that there are still a lot of dangerous morons out there, but also that the times they are yet a'changin' again. I am personally glad that Mr. Romney lost because he came across to me as a dangerously hollow, not very smart, pre-cooked personality marinated in cant
and opportunism. I'm not so delirious either about the victor, Mr.
Obama, though he seems a more reliable character in contrast to his vanquished opponent. I think we can rely
on him to not prosecute any misconduct in banking for another four years. But, at least, he's not trying to turn the country into one big prayer circle.
He's surely in for a rough ride in the
four years ahead. There is a sickening, heavy sense of foreboding about the seemingly endless financial melodrama. It leads to the bewildering
fork in the road at which the split paths lead to two different ways of going broke: savage deflation or turbo-inflation. Either
way, you're toast. The gross interventions and arrant accounting fraud that pervade global finance, both in government and in private banking, can only lead to perversity and dysfunction in
the operations of money that
we depend on to remain civilized.
If America were able to look in a mirror now, it would
see an image of a sclerotic
society, physically run
down, strikingly ugly,
and sordid in its
cultural programing. It would
see an armature for daily
life - the drive-in Utopia - with
very poor prospects for
the future. I don't know if Mr. Obama can get this
nation engaged in the great
tasks that we have been avoiding for so long: purging corporate money from politics, preparing for post-petroleum reality minus the fantasy
that we can just live inside our smart phones, and downscaling and re-localizing economic life. Much of that
agenda would seem contrary to the common
expectation that Mr. Obama wants
ever more government
intervention in the economy. The past four years he has seemingly done everything possible to
support the status quo - leading
a few observers to brand him
as a "conservative" - and he still acts like
a hostage of the too-big-to-fail banks.
I'm not convinced that he'll act
decisively for the right things
in the right way on anything.
At least he won't be running for office again and can act perhaps more freely as he will. Anyway, I subscribe to the sentiment that
it was a good thing for the nation to re-elect
a leader of mixed-race, to show that
we mean it about who is allowed to succeed here.
I spent a lot of
time in Dixieland this fall.
I can report that its era of hyper-prosperity is on the wane. The boom is pretty much over, except for some deceptive last twitchings over
in Texas and in the Northern Virginia beltway counties where lobbyists spawn. The failure of the
Republican Party this year
marks the end of the economic ascendency
of the South. Now they will have to contend with the imminent failure of their suburban way of life and all its comfortable trappings. I've predicted for many years that
the process would drive them batshit crazy. When I was in North Carolina in October, I got the odd impression that I was in a giant car dealership masquerading as a
state. That's just not going to work anymore. But it remains to be seen whether anything will work in any quarter
of this big old country.
One interesting thing is shaping
up: a beard-growing contest between Paul Krugman and Ben Bernanke to see who can
end up looking most like Rutherford B. Hayes.
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