GOP: Still Stuck in the (18)60s

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So the GOP candidates stage a debate on Martin Luther King day, and the candidates and audience gang up on Juan Williams for bringing up, you know, the race thing. Newt wowed the crowd by implying that African Americans are parasites who need to learn how to work.

At Balloon Juice, Dennis G. responds with this:

Yeah, pretty much sums up how I feel. On the plus side, I do believe they all managed to refrain from telling watermelon jokes, at least on camera.

Gingrich made some remark about “Only elites despise earning money,” which I thought were brave words from someone who gets paid handsomely for being a phony intellectual blowhard. Nice work if you can get it.

Gingrich also scored with the crowd by attacking Ron Paul —

Newt Gingrich said that equating terrorist leaders to Chinese dissidents that might come to America – as Paul did to illustrate his point – was a false analogy. …

…”South Carolina in the Revolutionary War had a young 13-year old named Andrew Jackson who was sabered by a British officer and wore a scar his whole life. Andrew Jackson had a pretty clear cut about America’s enemies: kill them,” Gingrich said.

Let us pause to remember that Newt managed to avoid being drafted during the Vietnam era and has never served in the military.

13 thoughts on “GOP: Still Stuck in the (18)60s”

  1. Let’s not forget that Barack Obama never served, either.

    Let’s also not forget that it was the Republican Party which refused to let Democrats split off into another country where slavery was acceptable.

    • Let’s not forget that Barack Obama never served, either.

      The President is not the one thumping his chest and evoking the ghost of Andrew Jackson. This is what’s called “hypocrisy,” son. Also “chickenhawkism.”

      Let’s also not forget that it was the Republican Party which refused to let Democrats split off into another country where slavery was acceptable.

      The Republican Party gave up the rights to ownership of Lincoln’s mantle in the mid 20th century. When the Democratic convention in 1948 adopted a platform that called for equal rights — including voting rights — for African Americans, southern Democrats like Strom Thurmond stormed out in protest. Thurmond and many other segregationist Democrats eventually switched parties to the Republicans, which at that point had stopped even pretending to be anything but hostile to racial equality.

      Particularly in the 1960s, the Republican Party moved more and more away from civil rights and in favor of segregation and opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. First Barry Goldwater and then Richard Nixon adopted a “southern strategy” of wooing white racist voters away from the Democrats by running on racist dog-whistles. This trend continued with Ronald Reagan, who ran against “welfare queens” driving Cadillacs. By this time, most of the white racist South had switched allegiance from the Democratic to the Republican party. Blacks, many of whom had migrated north, began to vote for Democrats.

      So it is the height of ignorance, not to mention chutzpah, to insinuate that Republicans are somehow inoculated from charges of racism by claimng it is the “party of Lincoln.” The GOP hasn’t been the “party of Lincoln” for at least 50 years.

      See also:

      Firstly, party labels mean little when applied retroactively beyond the last thirty to forty years, a period in which both of the two major American parties completed some important positional shifts that began in the early twentieth century on many ideological and policy issues. These political transitions within the parties (transitions which, a friend crucially and correctly points out, are never fully completed, and rarely occur wholesale in diametric opposition across party lines) were notable across the political spectrum, but particularly—and most relevant to our purposes here—along racial and socio-economic frontiers. Though it’s true that the Republican Party of the post-Civil War United States was the party of liberal advocacy (indeed, even radical in the sense of the “Radical Reconstruction” of the 1860s and ‘70s South), one doubts that Republicans of that era would find much in common with today’s GOP that has gone to such extreme lengths to suspend and dismantle the promising victories toward social and economic equality that the civil rights movement achieved. (This is, after all the, the party that brought us, among other things: hyper-incarceration of the nonwhite poor; the revocation of improved-opportunity efforts such as affirmative action and minority-owned business set-asides; taxation plans that robbed American cities of their economic base; and the exacerbation of the American wealth gap, with those at the lowest rung of the economic ladder sacrificed at the neoliberal altar.)

      In the hundred-odd year interregnum between the Radical Republicans and the New Right, Republican politics in regard to racial and economic justice shifted dramatically: gone was the avowed interest in aid to the underprivileged, replaced by a free-market (il)logic rooted in a devastating, neoliberal ethic of “bootstrap” agency and opportunity. At its most extreme, this shift was exemplified in the political career of Strom Thurmond, who moved from Democrat to Dixiecrat to Republican as party ideologies in reference to civil rights and an equitable social contract changed. (It was largely the adoption of a civil rights plank by the Democratic Party in the prelude to the 1948 presidential election that spurred Thurmond to rescind his party membership.) Indeed, it was often in direct pandering to racist ideologies that party politics were formed, most notably evidenced by Richard Nixon’s racially-coded “Southern Strategy” in his efforts to win the presidency. Thus appears a picture of a Republican Party molding itself—and being carefully and discriminatively shaped by public and party-leader opinion—in an increasingly regressive fashion in terms of race and racism as the twentieth century wore on.

      You really ought to read the whole thing, although I doubt you will. But IMO if there were a God, every time some GOP know-nothing chirps about the Party of Lincoln, He’d reach out and smack them, hard.

  2. There is a great difference in being of a certain age and there being a war conducted when you are age-eligible for active service… Sorry but Noot’s claim that his stepfather being active military does not constitute military service FOR Noot, only for the stepfather.

    By my lights it’s Noot who needs to learn about work — like being a warehouse worker or short-order cook, wait staffer or counter person in a fast-food place.

  3. I’ll say this for the seemingly endless stream of GOP debates this year – they sure are giving the American people a chance to see what a bunch of hateful, mean-spirited, lying people these folks are, with candidates whose ambitions far outweigh their abilities and whose supporters are a ravenous atavistic mob.

    A bunch of rich white folks and one black performance artist, fighting with each other to see who can be the most nasty, anti-gay, economically confused, war-mongering anti-science bigot of them all and be given the nod to rule their tribe and fight the Big Bad Obama. Ick.

    I have to think a bunch of fence-sitters will vote for Obama just as an alternative to whoever emerges from this long season of “Fever-swamp Idol”.

  4. Teach: Yes, Obama did not serve in the military. He also, while in office, ended a long failed war and won a short successful one. (And killed Global Enemy Number One.)

    As for the Republican party’s honorable far past, now repudiated; how would the present Republican party regard the first Republican president?

  5. “GOP Still Stuck in the 1860s” – sort of a dog-bites-man story, with Wm Teach providing a sidebar on both how you have to get beyond surface appearances (in this case party labels), and how wingnuts are wingnuts because they are disinclined to do so.

  6. I think every one is off by a century.

    Republicans are more for the 1760’s than the 1860’s.

    There were no restrictions on bringing in new slaves.

    Few, or at least, fewer, abolitionists.

    And you had Kings, and Queens, and Dukes, and other royalty and aristocracy you could bow down to – you know: “Job Creators.”

  7. Teach’s alternate reality strikes again. Although I guess someone born in August 1961 could have served in the Gulf War. But the question remains… why?

    Not even remotely the same as avoiding the draft in the 1960s, but then false equivalences are Teach’s only skill.

  8. Ah, Sherman. In addition to burning Columbia, SC he also settled blacks who aided his army as it passed through Georgia and the Carolinas in SC on 40 acres and gave them a mule. Kind of fitting for MLK Day. Maybe he should come back again.

  9. Spectacles like last night’s neo-Confederate party GOP debate almost convince me that the greatest tragedy of American history is that General Sherman didn’t have thermonuclear weapons.

  10. Tom,
    The least he could have done was “Carthage” the South, and generously salt whatever earth was left after he burned it to the ground.

  12. Faux historian Newt named the wrong Jackson. It was Stonewall Jackson that said “Let’s kill them”. And he was referring to killing American soldiers fighting for the country he was betraying in the Civil War.

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