Southern Culture Warriors On The Skids

Matt Osborne explores the GOP "50-State Southern Strategy" as a source of short-term victory for the GOP and longer-term potential disaster for America.

There is no more Manichean human activity than war. There are only ever two sides, and the issue is total; so are suspicion and righteousness. Victories are counted in miles of territory or cities or body counts. In the most deceptive turn of all, winning battles can lead a society to think superior willpower or character or piety has been the difference when the reality is quite material. Thus the weight of Republican and right-wing rhetoric has become militant in part because it is such a natural fit for faith-based politics.

And in fact, one can easily argue the Republican Party behaves in a militant fashion. The tea party has succeeded in resurrecting the ardor of conservatives and bringing them en masse under the GOP banner; ‘conservative Democrats’ are a nearly-extinct species. Leadership squabbles among Republicans are short, and Republican legislators have developed lockstep habits in voting. Mitch McConnell runs his Senate minority with an iron hand. John Boehner has indicated he will use earmarks to bring Republicans under control. To be sure, Jim DeMint and Michele Bachmann aim to replace them or at least bring them further to the right (and use the language of war doing so); they want to lead the leaders, but in the end they will follow. Yes, the tea party doesn’t like earmarks — but they’ll be back next election, and behaving worse than ever. Head-stomping will seem quaint in 2012.

And what of the propaganda filling the airwaves and internet? What of Pamela Geller’s midsummer crusade against a mosque-that-wasn’t-a-mosque? What of two New Black Panthers blown up into a marauding army of Obama goons? What of spurious accusations of vote fraud? What of the smearing and defunding of ACORN? What of Darrell Issa’s promises to investigate the White House? They are part and parcel of the strategy of “no” and obstructed appointments: there will be no progress, there will be no advance. WE are the ones under attack.

Conservatives understand these things inherently. At the Huntsville appearance of the Tea Party Express bus tour in April of 2010, the attitude was exemplified by a sign that read: if we lose our FREEDOM here there is no place to escape. This is the last stand on Earth. Those are the stakes: total destruction or victory.

The famed Bushian binary worldview -- us or them, right or wrong, conservative or liberal, red or blue -- has itself become the means to an end.  It's a self-perpetuating super-cynical nightmare scenario, the famed "One Percent Solution" of Dick Cheney writ large.  If there's a chance that compromise with America's changing demographic means giving up power, then it cannot be allowed to happen.

Millions of Americans have become the enemy.  And the war itself is playing out on a daily basis.  Do read the article, Matt lays it out in stark and powerful detail, and the more people who read it, the more people will understand what's really going on out there.