The GOP's Strategy To Embrace Racism

Once upon a time the South was a solid Democratic block of votes. Many of those segregationist senators that Joe Biden recently talked about were in fact Democrats. Republicans just didn't get elected from there. And then things changed. The civil rights movement, the voting rights Act, the trailing impact of demographic change from the great migration, and broader cultural changes, including the rise of feminism, all provided an opportunity for Republicans in the South to exploit racial, social and cultural divides.

Today we are living with arguably the apogee that effort.

These divisions have been part of every national election since LBJ vs. Goldwater in 1964 and with each cycle, the divide grows larger. This long effort is the subject of a new work by Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields,  The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics.

My conversation with Angie Maxwell & Todd Shields:

How the Right Lost Its Mind

There have been seminal moment in American history when our political parties have realigned. Political parties which, even our founders were suspicious of. But perhaps none of those periods have been as fraught with peril as that which we face today.

Millions of words have been written about the current state of our politics, our country and of our civic discourse, and about the anger that abounds. Every publication, every cable channels, every journalist who covers politics, and many that don’t, have opined on how we got to this fractured state of America.

There are as many theories as there are journalists, pundits, professors and consultants. Yet if you listen to or read all of them, there is at least one thread that connects them over and over and over again. The rise and power of conservative talk radio and the anger that it has captured and fueled. The Economist said last year, that, “to understand the Republican race, get in a car, turn on the radio and drive.”

Few understand all of this better than long time conservative talk radio host, and now MSNBC contributor Charlie Sykes. He takes us through the history in his book How the Right Lost Its Mind. 

My conversation with Charlie Sykes:

How Did Republicans Get So Mean?

Think about how crazy our politics has become. Representatives from poor and lower middle class districts want to eliminate labor unions, lower the minimum wage, take away health care, privatize social security and eliminate the social safety net. Even public education is under siege.

The president admits that the GOP health care bill is mean and Karen Handel, the newest member of congress from Georgia’s 6th district says that “people have no right to a livable wage.”

This was not always the Republican party. So how did this transformation happen? Some argue that it’s all about the social issues issues. That it's things like abortion, race, LGBTQ rights and religion that has gotten people to vote counter to their economic self interests. That’s the What’s the Matter with Kansas construct. But it’s not entirely true.

There has been a very deliberate plan to undermine liberal democracy, the economy, the constitution and the very role of government. This is about more than just the one-percent wanting to pay less taxes. There is a more fundamental, much more sinister and deliberate aspect to all of this.  That is the story that Nancy MacLean tells in Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America.

My conversation on WhoWhatWhy.org with Nancy MacLean:

The GOP end game

This year's GOP primary race, perhaps more than others, does not exist in a vacuum. When Barry Goldwater accepted the GOP nomination in the SF Cow Palace in 1964, he spoke of extremism in the defense liberty and eschewed moderation. Ever since that moment, so called conservatives have been falling all over themselves trying to live up to those words. Words that had very little to do with the true conservatism of Edmund Burke or Michael Oakeshott and words that were later called into question by Goldwater himself.

But the attempt to elevate their mythology, as Ted Cruz is trying to do, particularly in a rapidly evolving world, may be the final nail in the Republican coffin

This is the context of E.J. Dionne’s insightful new book Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism From Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond.

My conversation with E.J. Dionne:

What does the GOP do now?

After its loss in the Presidential election of 2012 the Republican Party felt it needed to do its own after action report. In the end, it was determined that all was basically ok and that the party only needed to broaden its tent and do a little better with Hispanic voters. Enter Jeb Bush.

How did that work out?  Not so well!   What we are seeing today is a total repudiation of a Republican establishment that for 40 years has held onto many of its voters with cultural, racial and religious issues, while delivering nothing of economic value.  For the GOP, today the chickens have come home to roost and we understand exactly "what’s the matter with Kansas."

Covering all of this and telling the story from those first days after the 2012 election is BuzzFeed's McKay Coppins in his new book The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party's Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House.

My conversation with McKay Coppins:

David Frum, the thinking conservative

In a time when Republicans have become nothing more than a regional party, devoid of ideas and vision, there seems to be only two conservatives engaged in original thought and who truly understand what conservative rather than theocratic principles are all about.  One is Andrew Sullivan and the other is David Frum.  Frum's interview in The Economist is instructive.  I can't agree with much of what he says, but it's nice to know there is a thinking opposition and that we can still debate ideas and not religion.  Money quote:

Today's Republican party is too beholden to factions generally. No social conservative has ever done the party as much harm as those Republicans who kept insisting against the facts that the Bush economy was "the greatest story never told". The greatest problem Republicans faced in 2006 and 2008 was not Iraq but the stagnation in personal incomes since 2000—and yet we refused even to acknowledge the fact, never mind rethink policy to deal with it.

At the same time, we have evidence (like this Muhlenberg College survey of the half-million plus Pennsylvania Republicans who reaffiliated as Democrats between 2004 and 2008) that a perception of our party as excessively religious and sectarian is doing us tremendous harm.