• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

The Digital Dispatch

From NOEBIE.net

  • Home
  • About
  • Facebook
  • Flickr
  • IG
  • YouTube
  • Kirtan
  • Tarot
  • Spirit

GOP

Trumpism and Democracy

Brian K. Noe · March 2, 2016 ·

Boston University Professor of History Andrew J. Bacevich writes about what Trumpism means for Democracy.

If Trump secures the Republican nomination, now an increasingly imaginable prospect, the party is likely to implode. Whatever rump organization survives will have forfeited any remaining claim to represent principled conservatism.

None of this will matter to Trump, however. He is no conservative and Trumpism requires no party. Even if some new institutional alternative to conventional liberalism eventually emerges, the two-party system that has long defined the landscape of American politics will be gone for good.

Should Trump or a Trump mini-me ultimately succeed in capturing the presidency, a possibility that can no longer be dismissed out of hand, the effects will be even more profound. In all but name, the United States will cease to be a constitutional republic. Once President Trump inevitably declares that he alone expresses the popular will, Americans will find that they have traded the rule of law for a version of caudillismo. Trump’s Washington could come to resemble Buenos Aires in the days of Juan Perón, with Melania a suitably glamorous stand-in for Evita, and plebiscites suitably glamorous stand-ins for elections.

Read the entire essay: Don’t Cry for Me, America | Common Dreams | Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community

Filed Under: Curated Links Tagged With: 2016 Elections, Donald Trump, Elections, Fascism, GOP, Republicans, Trump, Trumpism, U.S. Elections

Hate Groups On The Rise

Brian K. Noe · February 19, 2016 ·

2015-hate-map-splc

The number of extremist groups operating in the United States grew in 2015 according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s annual census of hate groups and other extremist organizations.

Much of this growth can be attributed to the shameful bigoted rhetoric of Donald Trump and other candidates within the GOP. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the Republican party has become one of the leading national advocates for hatred.

Read More: SPLC’s Intelligence Report: Amid Year of Lethal Violence, Extremist Groups Expanded Ranks in 2015 | Southern Poverty Law Center

Click here to download the full report in PDF format.

splc-ir-spring-2016

Filed Under: News Tagged With: America, Donald Trump, GOP, Hate Groups, Hatred, Racism, Republicans, Right Wing, SPLC

Turnaround Means Go Backwards

Brian K. Noe · April 22, 2015 ·

According to a study by Illinois Economic Policy Institute and University of Illinois, if the six counties surrounding Chicago passed right to work laws, “The economy would shrink by 1.3 billion, state and local tax revenues would be reduced by $80 million… racial and gender inequality would both increase, and the number of workplace injuries and fatalities would rise.”

Read More: A Response to Governor Rauner’s Flawed “Turnaround Agenda” by David Madsen (Presented to The Naperville City Council on April 21st, 2015).

Filed Under: Curated Links Tagged With: Economics, Economy, GOP, Illinois, Jobs, Naperville, Rauner, Right to Work for Less, Turnaround Agenda

Obamacare and the Southern Strategy

Brian K. Noe · October 2, 2013 ·

I happened to run across a video from a late night TV show where they went into the street to interview people about the new health care law. They asked a simple question. “Which do you think is better, Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act?” Not realizing that the former is merely a nickname for the latter, the majority of those interviewed disliked Obamacare and liked the Affordable Care Act. When asked why, the interviewees expressed a laundry list of reasons, at the top of which seemed to be something about free choice.

This video may seem like it was a stunt, rigged for maximum comedy value, but polling in recent months has suggested that a large chunk of the U.S. electorate favors the policies set forth in the Affordable Care Act when they aren’t identified as Obamacare, but the same large chunk opposes the law when it is given that name. The ridiculous justifications people in the video made for their preference of ACA over Obamacare is fairly reflective of broad sentiment throughout the land.

How can this be? How is it that so many Americans can express such strongly felt opposition to a thing that they actually favor? This question has puzzled me since I first heard of the polling results awhile back. In pondering it, I believe that I may have identified not only what is at its root, but what is at the root of much of the acrimony in our politics today.

For nearly fifty years now, beginning with the Presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater in 1964, the GOP has pursued a strategy that exploits racial hatred and fear. Here’s how President Nixon’s political strategist Kevin Phillips described the “Southern Strategy” during an interview with the New York Times in 1970.

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that…but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. 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.

This strategy of racial polarization was successful in realigning our nation’s electoral politics, and it placed race at the center of the Republican Party’s agenda for the decades that have followed. In 1980, Lee Atwater (who was an adviser to Presidents Reagan and Bush, and chaired the Republican National Committee from 1989 to 1991) explained politics in the South like this.

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

Whether coded or more direct, the thrust of the strategy is to portray government (and particularly the federal government) as an entity that takes something away from hardworking (white) people who have “played by the rules and earned everything they have” in order to give it to undeserving, lazy, promiscuous (not white) people. Here’s a quote from President Reagan during his first run for President in 1976 where he describes a mythical “welfare queen.” He places her on the South Side of Chicago, a thinly veiled code to let his audience know her color.

“She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.”

Or there is Senator Jesse Helms’ re-election bid in 1990, where he attacked his opponent for support of “racial quotas” using a television ad depicting a white person’s hands, crumpling up a letter notifying him that he was denied a job because he was white.

Even when race is not explicitly mentioned, it is rarely unclear who these “undeserving” recipients of the government’s largesse are.

Whether the issue is terrorism, public assistance, Affirmative Action or the Affordable Care Act, the message from the Republican party is always the same. White Americans (i.e., “real” Americans) are having their rights, their livelihoods, their health and their safety endangered by a government that is intent on favoring people of other races.

Now, consider, for a moment, how President Obama’s opponents have portrayed him – even prior to his election in 2008. Remember Jeremiah Wright? Remember the birth certificate shenanigans? The fist bump controversy? Secret Kenyan Muslim Socialist bogeyman…

From the beginning of his first term in office, the Republican party has called into question not only Obama’s policies, but the very legitimacy of his Presidency. They have cultivated a base that is preoccupied with race, and they are now bound to play to that base. Also, this is successful. One need look no further than the hysteria over “Obamacare” for an example.

Lest you accuse me of being a partisan “playing the race card” let me point out that I have been very critical of President Obama over these past few years. I did not vote for him in the last election, and have publicly denounced his policies (both domestic and foreign). I have not refrained from criticism of the Democrats at large either. As to the Affordable Care Act, I see it mainly as a law that was written by the lobbyists for big health care providers, insurance companies and pharmaceutical firms. In other words, I am not a fan.

Still, when I see people portraying their stand against Obamacare as the moral and historical equivalent of taking a stand against the Nazis as they came to power, I have to ask myself what could possibly inspire such insane hyperbole. If there’s a better explanation than race baiting, I’m sure that I don’t know what it is.

###

Here’s a link to the Jimmy Kimmel video Six of One mentioned above.

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: Affordable Care Act, GOP, Obama, Obamacare, Politics, Racism

Benghazi: The Real Scandal

Brian K. Noe · May 16, 2013 ·

Last week, I posted an update on Facebook noting that Congressional critics and the news media are fundamentally asking the wrong questions about Benghazi. Though it is obvious that the GOP’s focus on the “scandal” represents the worst sort of partisan opportunism – there is, I believe, another story here. It’s not a story about security at the compound, or the military response to the attacks, or what may have been said on television afterward. It’s a story about our government’s complicity to (and culpability for) the attacks themselves.

There is an excellent essay out today from Bill Van Auken that unpacks the situation in great detail.

In its intervention in Libya, Washington utilized Al Qaeda-linked fighters as a proxy ground force in the war to topple the secular regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, arming and advising them and using them to follow up the massive US-NATO bombing campaign. Christopher Stevens was very much the point man in this relationship, having carefully studied the Islamist opponents of Gaddafi before the launching of the war for regime-change. He was deployed in April 2011 to Benghazi, where he coordinated the arming, funding and training of the so-called rebels, elements previously denounced by the US as terrorists and, in some cases, abducted, imprisoned and tortured by the CIA.

So all of the reported “confusion” within the State Department and the Intelligence Community in the wake of the attacks is complete and utter nonsense, as is the portrayal of their interactions as simple bureaucratic interagency bickering. They knew from the very beginning what had happened – that their own assets were involved. The purpose of all the frantic scrambling and deception after the fact was to conceal our government’s relationships with their supposed Al-Qaeda terrorist enemies. There is simply no other way it all makes sense.

The circus sideshow being orchestrated by the GOP is not merely cynical political maneuvering. It misses the point. It helps to conceal from public view the true nature of the events at Benghazi, and ensures that there will be no discussion of the more serious and important issues involved.

READ MORE: Benghazi and the deepening crisis of the Obama administration – WSWS.

Filed Under: Commentary, Curated Links Tagged With: Democrats, Empire, GOP, Media, Politics, Terrorism, War

Full Text of 2012 GOP Platform

Brian K. Noe · August 28, 2012 ·

Here is the full text of the GOP Platform as approved today in Tampa. I urge you to read it carefully.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/104097929/Final-Language-GOP-Platform-2012

Filed Under: Other Content Tagged With: GOP, Politics

Primary Sidebar

FREE SPEECH PRACTICED HERE
Linking does not necessarily constitute endorsement.

Categories

  • Audio
  • Commentary
  • Curated Links
  • Essays
  • Events
  • Explaining Socialism to Kids
  • General
  • Interviews
  • Lest We Forget
  • Memes
  • Music
  • News
  • Notes From The Field
  • Other Content
  • Pictures
  • Podcasting
  • Poetry
  • Projects
  • Quotes
  • Reports
  • Resources
  • Video
  • What I'm Reading
NWU Logo
Member
National Writers Union

Copyright © 2025 · Daily Dish Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in