L
Leela
Guest
Hi All,
There are those among us who want nothing more than to keep Americans arguing about homosexuals and atheists. Fanning the flames of such cultural differences serves the power-broker’s interest of keeping our eyes off the ball. While we are distracted, the plutocrats are continuing to consolidate their power, wealth, and control of the world’s resources.
There is a long history of deliberately drumming up antipathy between groups representing potential threats to the oligarchs in America. As Howard Zinn explained in A People’s History of the United States, manufacturing or at least feeding racism was necessary to prevent rebellion against the aristocracy by keeping the poorer whites and white servants from allying with the black slaves and to keep black slaves from allying with the native Americans. I am convinced that there is something of that sort going on today with regard to homosexuality, immigration, and religion. I don’t think right-wing political strategists care a bit about conservative Christian morality. They aren’t particularly racist or homophobic either. Their interest in pandering to the undereducated rural religious is due to some significant negative statistical correlations between education and religion, wealth and religion, and population density and religion. Poorer, more rurally located, and less educated Americans aren’t likely to see laissez faire economics as addressing their needs because of the fact that it just doesn’t. Since Republicans can’t successfully argue that they are better able than the Democrats to help improve economic situation of the poor (unless they happen to be willing to wait for the crumbs to “trickle down”), it is necessary for Republicans to play on and inflame cultural divisions to attract poor rural white voters especially in Southern states.
When the Republican, urban, manufacturing North won the Civil War and became rich, the rich took over the Republican party. FDR ran as a Democrat to ally himself with the poor. He was able to exploit the fact that the South would not vote Republican because the humiliation of the Civil War was still too vivid. The Republicans needed a way to overcome Southern enmity for the North heldover from the Civil War and to gain the votes of white Southerners. They found it. The Nixon campaign formulated what was called “The Southern Strategy” of covertly harnessing unconscious and overt racial bigotry and using explicit religious rhetorical grandstanding.
Carl Rove was not as much of a revolutionary in his campaign strategizing as people tend to think he is. The term “Southern Strategy” was popularized in a 1970 New York Times article based on an interview with Nixon political strategist Kevin Phillips. “Most voters, [Phillips] had found, still voted on the basis of ethnic and cultural enmities that could be graphed, predicted, and exploited.” In explaining why “Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act,” Phillips said:
“The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”
None of this means that Phillips or Nixon were themselves racist any more than the right wing power-brokers of today are especially pious, but they were cynical and power hungry enough to exploit Southern racism for political ends using a “dog-whistle” approach for conveying a controversial message while retaining plausible deniability. For example, the term “states rights” was code for posing as anti-integrationsists without being overtly anti-integration. Today it is code for overturning Roe v. Wade. George W. Bush was able to successfully employ a similar tactic in using key religious phrases and code words that would perk up the ears of his evangelical supporters without having to own potentially embarrassing commitments to specific religious beliefs and opposition to abortion rights since they may fly over the heads of non-evangelicals.
I think much discussion about religion is distorted and needlessly inflammatory on both sides. I don’t blame it on the religious; I blame it on the corporatists who are simply taking advantage of the religious with a well-oiled right-wing propaganda echo-machine. The more heat they can generate through talk radio and Fox News, the easier it is for the kleptocrats to steal our money while we’re looking in the other direction. Today the militant atheists are unwittingly feeding into the “Southernization” of politics–right wing attempts to exploit cultural enmities to get voters to vote against their own economic interests. We are being duped just as the evangelicals are. I’m not generally much of a conspiracy theorist, and I have no evidence to offer that the there is some secret cabal working to keep the religion debate a heated one. I’m not actually imagining a smoke filled room where a dozen silver-haired men secretly pull all the strings; however, whether or not there is something deliberate like the Southern Strategy going on today, there are people who are benefitting from a politics of enmity who probably don’t care a lick about homosexuals and atheists or religion, and it ain’t us. Such people have a strong interest in painting efforts to get fair treatment in the workplace as “godless” socialism even if they have no other thoughts about God.
Best,
Leela
There are those among us who want nothing more than to keep Americans arguing about homosexuals and atheists. Fanning the flames of such cultural differences serves the power-broker’s interest of keeping our eyes off the ball. While we are distracted, the plutocrats are continuing to consolidate their power, wealth, and control of the world’s resources.
There is a long history of deliberately drumming up antipathy between groups representing potential threats to the oligarchs in America. As Howard Zinn explained in A People’s History of the United States, manufacturing or at least feeding racism was necessary to prevent rebellion against the aristocracy by keeping the poorer whites and white servants from allying with the black slaves and to keep black slaves from allying with the native Americans. I am convinced that there is something of that sort going on today with regard to homosexuality, immigration, and religion. I don’t think right-wing political strategists care a bit about conservative Christian morality. They aren’t particularly racist or homophobic either. Their interest in pandering to the undereducated rural religious is due to some significant negative statistical correlations between education and religion, wealth and religion, and population density and religion. Poorer, more rurally located, and less educated Americans aren’t likely to see laissez faire economics as addressing their needs because of the fact that it just doesn’t. Since Republicans can’t successfully argue that they are better able than the Democrats to help improve economic situation of the poor (unless they happen to be willing to wait for the crumbs to “trickle down”), it is necessary for Republicans to play on and inflame cultural divisions to attract poor rural white voters especially in Southern states.
When the Republican, urban, manufacturing North won the Civil War and became rich, the rich took over the Republican party. FDR ran as a Democrat to ally himself with the poor. He was able to exploit the fact that the South would not vote Republican because the humiliation of the Civil War was still too vivid. The Republicans needed a way to overcome Southern enmity for the North heldover from the Civil War and to gain the votes of white Southerners. They found it. The Nixon campaign formulated what was called “The Southern Strategy” of covertly harnessing unconscious and overt racial bigotry and using explicit religious rhetorical grandstanding.
Carl Rove was not as much of a revolutionary in his campaign strategizing as people tend to think he is. The term “Southern Strategy” was popularized in a 1970 New York Times article based on an interview with Nixon political strategist Kevin Phillips. “Most voters, [Phillips] had found, still voted on the basis of ethnic and cultural enmities that could be graphed, predicted, and exploited.” In explaining why “Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act,” Phillips said:
“The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”
None of this means that Phillips or Nixon were themselves racist any more than the right wing power-brokers of today are especially pious, but they were cynical and power hungry enough to exploit Southern racism for political ends using a “dog-whistle” approach for conveying a controversial message while retaining plausible deniability. For example, the term “states rights” was code for posing as anti-integrationsists without being overtly anti-integration. Today it is code for overturning Roe v. Wade. George W. Bush was able to successfully employ a similar tactic in using key religious phrases and code words that would perk up the ears of his evangelical supporters without having to own potentially embarrassing commitments to specific religious beliefs and opposition to abortion rights since they may fly over the heads of non-evangelicals.
I think much discussion about religion is distorted and needlessly inflammatory on both sides. I don’t blame it on the religious; I blame it on the corporatists who are simply taking advantage of the religious with a well-oiled right-wing propaganda echo-machine. The more heat they can generate through talk radio and Fox News, the easier it is for the kleptocrats to steal our money while we’re looking in the other direction. Today the militant atheists are unwittingly feeding into the “Southernization” of politics–right wing attempts to exploit cultural enmities to get voters to vote against their own economic interests. We are being duped just as the evangelicals are. I’m not generally much of a conspiracy theorist, and I have no evidence to offer that the there is some secret cabal working to keep the religion debate a heated one. I’m not actually imagining a smoke filled room where a dozen silver-haired men secretly pull all the strings; however, whether or not there is something deliberate like the Southern Strategy going on today, there are people who are benefitting from a politics of enmity who probably don’t care a lick about homosexuals and atheists or religion, and it ain’t us. Such people have a strong interest in painting efforts to get fair treatment in the workplace as “godless” socialism even if they have no other thoughts about God.
Best,
Leela
