Tragically, hate is a huge motivator. “The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who,” wrote Kevin Phillips, the political analyst who died last week.
I did not know Phillips well. We appeared together on various panels and forums over the years, so I heard a lot of his views about political strategy. I’m reluctant to speak ill of someone recently deceased, but it is important to understand Phillips’s legacy.
His 1969 book, “The Emerging Republican Majority,” was for many decades the GOP’s blueprint for how to win over white voters unhappy with the Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights in the 1960s.
Phillips urged Republicans to link white voters’ racial anxieties to issues such as crime, federal spending, and voting rights, and make racially coded appeals such as “law and order.”
It worked — helping to produce Richard M. Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972, Reagan’s in 1980 (aided by Reagan’s condemnation of “welfare queens”), George W. Bush’s 1988 victory (remember “Willie Horton”?), and GOP majorities for decades.
Phillips’s politics of hate was the predicate for Trump’s politics of resentment and fear — Trump’s dehumanizing of immigrants and Muslims, use of antisemitic tropes, denigrating “globalists,” “coastal elites,” and the “deep state” bureaucrats, and attacking the mainstream media as “enemies of the people” and Democrats as “socialists.”
Hatred of others can be bone-deep and bred in. The Republicans realized that they could tap into the well of hatred that propelled politicians such as Lester Maddox, Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, Lester Maddox, and Woodrow Wilson into office. Jesse Helms rode that horse every day of his political life.
The Republicans keep shifting targets from women (led by noted Quisling Phyllis Schafley) to Blacks, then gays then immigrants and now transgendered people. Their party leader has based his entire political career on hatred and racism, something he learned from both his biological father and his intellectual father.
They do this, of course, because hate sells. Telling people that their politicas of soaking the poor and the middle class in order to benefit the rich will result in gutting Social Security, having shittier roads and throwing away any hope of retaining a technological leadership in the world wouldn't make for much of platform, so they disguise that with hate.
It's not the party of Lincoln anymore, or the party of Eisenhower. It's not even the party of Hoover. It's the party of Nixon and the party of Trump. And Trump has transformed his political party into a cult of personality,
The GOP is a hate group. Are you a member?
I like didn't like it when Ford pardoned Nixon. That was the time to set the example and now the example has returned in the form of a Hitler.
ReplyDeletePoland just threw out their right wing government. Erdogan just removed his objections to Sweden in Nato so my bet a Hypermind is golden again.
https://predict.hypermind.com/hypermind/app.html#rewards
The Republican party's policies weren't getting enough votes to keep them in power (The money train)so they had to do something.
ReplyDeleteThey realized just like so many before since the dawn of civilization(?) that suspicion, fear and also hate keeps them in charge.
Like Ug-mug in his clan's cave made sure he was the leader by claiming only he could protect them from the Saber Tooth tiger but also from the Muk-luk clan who were in the cave across the valley who were taking all the best mammoths,the best roots and were planning to take all their women.
The more things change the more they stay the same.