Grand Guignol Old Party

The modern Republican Party is the bastard child of Barry Goldwater. Goldwater mellowed in his old age, and looks sage-like (as would a rock), in comparison to Bush II, but when it counted he was on the wrong side of history, standing firm against civil and voting rights for African Americans. He lost big in 1964, but the true believers, a crowd that used to be known as the “lunatic fringe” (redneck racists, know-nothings, Bible-thumping fundamentalists, McCarthyites, Birchers, etc.) vowed revenge, and ended up capturing the party from its liberal internationalist business grandees. Sort of capturing it, for of course the party is still the flagship of oligarchy and plutocracy, the old Money Power; culturally, however, it is the arm of white resentment and reaction. The white counter-revolution is profoundly ironic because it is aligned now with the very capitalist powers which immiserates it. Nixon brilliantly worked to realign the Neo-Confederacy from its long allegiance to the Democrats (because, in a nice transference, it was the Republicans who had ended slavery). Reagan triumphed with a self-styled “movement” of mostly ethnic and Catholic ex-working class, who swallowed the pap of god, guns, and guts as they were deindustrialized and down-sized by the masters they rushed to serve, and suburban bourgeois afraid of falling into the widening gap created by their bosses. An unending supply of enemies (commies, hippies, darkies, femnazis, queers, raghead terrorists, and, this year’s model, back for a return engagement, “illegals”) has always been available to focus the anger and rage.

But Republican power, which is essentially authoritarian and plutocratic, is obviously a minority taste. In addition to the very successful flimflam, it’s predicated on the suppression and disenfranchisement of voters. It’s little wonder their convention is a horror show: their platform is medieval; their candidate is desperate to masquerade as something other than the standard bearer of the disasters of laissez-faire oligarchy; their vice presidential candidate is essentially Dan Quayle in drag, red meat for the American Taliban who work tirelessly to put the plutocrats in command.