As originally published October 3 in Delaware Liberal, by ProgressivePopulist. That is me. With permission.
Tom Hayden has a brilliant analysis of the stakes in the upcoming elections for Democrats and Progressives. He says:
“…The logic of voter turnout data all but guarantees right-wing Republican congressional victories in 2014 and a sealing of the divide of America into two countries for the foreseeable future. White House operatives privately acknowledge that GOP gerrymandering plus low turnout make 2014 a war to keep the Senate Democratic and show gains while losing the House. There are eight battleground Senate seats where Mitt Romney won the popular vote in 2012 and incumbent Democrats are either retiring or vulnerable to defeat.”
What the Republicans are doing with the current standoff is solidifying their base, in particular the tea party core currently in control of their party, neutering their leadership. How are they doing it? By inflaming the racists in their grassroots to motivate a white turnout. This government closure has nothing to do with Obamacare(ACA). It has everything to do with the racist perception that this black President’s signature legislation from his first term and perhaps full term is aimed to help the 15% of our citizenry without health insurance. And who do they think they are? Our fellow African American citizens and some Hispanics thrown in.
They don’t care about a United States of America. They care only about the birthright of their White America. You know, the people they claim built this country. Thus Hayden’s reference to two countries.
Hayden goes on to explain a counter strategy being worked by PDD’s and Democracy for America’s Howard Dean:
“Thanks to Howard Dean’s Democracy for America, campaign resources are being invested in Virginia’s legislative election this year, with Iowa, Pennsylvania and Michigan to follow. These potential wins could minimize losses in the long term attempt to salvage the 2010’s from a major Republican counter-attack on the Thirties, Sixties and the Obama era. Unfortunately, the failure already has been cemented by the reapportionment process. ”
He goes on to cite racism as one of the key drivers behind the right wing’s insane move to burn down the American house with financial collapse. Check Hayden out at his Peace And Justice Resource Center.
In a parallel analysis, Joan Walsh of Salon.com offers an historical review of from whence the Republican’s have come since the Nixon Southern Strategy. She says in her recent post on race baiting by the right: “On the day the Affordable Care Act takes effect, the U.S. government is shut down, and it may be permanently broken. You’ll read lots of explanations for the dysfunction, but the simple truth is this:” It’s the culmination of 50 years of evolving yet consistent Republican strategy to depict government as the enemy, an oppressor that works primarily as the protector of and provider for African-Americans, to the detriment of everyone else. The fact that everything came apart under our first African-American president wasn’t an accident, it was probably inevitable.”
I recommend you go to Salon.com for her full text. These two respected writers/activists have nailed it, if it wasn’t clear to you before. I know. Many of you, not wanting to believe the racism that motivates the current irrational Republican Party, tell me that they did this to Clinton too and he was white. But remember that he was called “the first Black President”. And his signature piece of legislation was welfare reform, perceived by right wingers as mainly serving African American’s, though factually incorrect. This was designed to appease the racists. It didn’t work too well as impeachment history will explain.
We know some, maybe many of the Congressional Republicans are neither stupid nor unaware of the consequences of their treasonous behavior in this manufactured crisis. There is nothing rational about racism and hate. It overwhelms otherwise reasonable people and infects and damages their perceptions and thought processes.
It is now quite obvious. This explains the completely irrational fabrication of the factual world many of us live in with huge Republican distortions of reality and insane drive to wreck the Obama Presidency, even if it means first wrecking the economy with default for the first time in our history. But, not so insane for those 30-50 teabaggers in Congress who know they live in gerrymandered districts assuring their reelection while all collapses around the rest of us.
There it is, fellow progressives. In plain and clear black and white terms.
