Last night was the big Dem debate…..and it was what I expected….total crap! If you are looking for more than that….buy a newspaper!
After the Civil Rights thing the Dems lost the South to the Repubs……ever since those days the GOP has used a wide variety of dog whistle slogans and campaigns to be sure that the South stays in their column……with each election the covert bigotry gets worse and worse…..the people change but the song remains the same.
How the Republican party’s dog-whistle appeal to racism, refined by Richard Nixon and perfected by Ronald Reagan, led inexorably to Donald Trump
Source: American crossroads: Reagan, Trump and the devil down south | US news | The Guardian
All this rhetoric smacks of racist overtones…..whether intentional or not……and this type of thinking plays well….especially in the South….please NO one tell me I am wrong….all you have to do is take a trip South and see for yourself……regardless of what you think….reality will surprise you.
Maybe it would surprise some, but, as far as i can tell, racism, bigotry, and general assholiness has never changed at all, from the days we lived in caves. People have always found some excuse to justify their own fears and prejudices, whether it be religious, nationalist, skin color, or merely a different language. For the most part, people are stupid assholes, who have no real purpose in life other than to carry water from toilet to toilet…. In the South, though by no means only there, they seem to be proud of their asininity….
gigoid, the dubious
Perfect description….absolutely prefect…..chuq
“The Devil went down to Georgia. He was looking for some votes to steal.”
Like the famous Lee Atwater quote, racism had become so subtle & so code-worded, “you couldn’t say ‘nigger nigger nigger!’ anymore”. Yet racism remained so mainstream & so close to the surface that everybody still immediately got the references decades later. (See: “f*ck you n*gger”) It was so top-of-mind, you could even get into shit totally by accident. (ie Ross Perot’s “your people” comment) But now, thanks to Trump, you can make it as overt as you want. And, in the right context, it can work for you. Thanks to 40+ years of The Southern Strategy, you can finally say the word “nigger” again.
This is the inevitable outcome of Republicans courting the Redneck Vote combined with the growth in the South’s population that gave them more political & cultural power. That’s key. The Democrats abandoned them. But because the Republicans embraced them, “Southern values” were never fully repudiated and left to die a natural, shameful, death. They were just “put in the closest”. Rednecks were a secret society waiting for their numbers to grow to the point where they could “come out of the closet” and make a move in broad, un-coded, daylight.
The 90’s was probably the turning point. The Republicans could win by doing little more than winning The South. Even the Democrats went Redneck to counter it. For example, “Ending Blackfare -er- Welfare as we know it” and the 1994 Crime Bill (aka The “Lock Up The Niggas, Bill!” Bill) Unlike everybody in elected office (claims), I knew EXACTLY what it was all about at the time. It was about getting white votes by locking up black men. The rest was window dressing. And surprise! Something out of Washington worked exactly as planned!!! Millions of black men can’t vote no more, can’t get jobs no more and can’t get government housing no more.
Now throw into this mix the 21st century’s culture where there are NO cultural norms, no objective facts, no standards, no disincentive to being a stupid asshole. YOU are the centre of the universe and all that matters is what YOU think/want…no matter how stupid, illogical, fact-free….or racist. You want to bedazzle your face? Fine. You want to tattoo Hans Solo, or a Rebel Flag, on your forehead? Fine. You want to argue with the teacher for teaching slavery was bad when the Web-pipes says it wasn’t? Fine. You want to go into a black church and “send em straight to Heaven” by exercising your 2nd Amendment right to kill Negros? Fine! Sure, some people will hate you for it. But they’s just “haters”.
The ONLY good news here is that The Southern Strategy is a strategy that has finally peaked. How long till it’s abandoned? I’d say at least another decade, but it’s begun its Clausewitz-style retreat.
Blue Dog Dems….or Clinton lackeys…..was the answer in the South but then Obama is elected and the term Dem is a no-no….does not matter how conserv they were they were beat.
IO live in the South…it will take longer than you think….even if all the “Old Boys” die off there is enough hatred in the young to keep this going for a long time.
Oh, the HATRED will be there a VERY long time! More like centuries than decades.
I’m just talking about the Republicans abandoning The Southern Strategy as their dominant political strategy. The long-term racial demographics are slowly eating away at it’s underpinnings. That’s why you see so much Wall-fever. The Southern Strategy has peaked and everybody knows it. Unless America goes full “FEMA camp mode” for the darker-tinted crowd, Republicans can’t make this work for longer than a couple more decades. Stalingrad has come, but they’ll probably hold onto this doomed strategy right until their deaths, Operation Clausewitz style. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Clausewitz
Of course, if disenfranchisement of criminals (aka The Blacks) ever ended, or if the 50% who don’t bother to vote ever woke the fuck up,…it could disappear MUCH faster. But that ain’t happening. They’ve got too many important Apps to download to worry about trivial shit like this.
“I can’t register to vote today. Kanye ‘s new T-shirt just dropped. Gotta represent!”
The old “what if they gave an election and no one came” scenario, eh?
That’s as funny as it is sad. I’m pretty sure we’ll actually see a reasonable proximity of both that….and the original Yippie version (War) in our lifetimes.
America is already down to 50% of “eligible” voters voting. Like unemployment stats (ie only counts people looking for work), I suspect “eligible voters” is also a misleadingly positive number. (ie I expect disenfranchised criminals aren’t counted) Who knows how many adults living in America aren’t counted. I once heard a CBC radio interview with a guy estimating Bush vs Gore was something like a 15% tie.
The Republicans have wanted to reduce turnouts for decades. They know they’re pushing a product that only appeals to a minority of people and that their people are the most loyal voters. So, the fewer who show up, the better. (See: Negative advertising, voter ID, etc etc.) And with 3 of the most hated candidates EVER doing the best this election, 2016 promises to make a “great leap backwards” in voter satisfaction.
But to answer your “question”, if nobody showed up the system would carry on EXACTLY the way it does now. The non-voter is completely invisible to every process & every person in the electoral system. It doesn’t matter is the winner gets 90 million votes, or nine. As long as they finish first, they get 100% of the power. And once they’re in, “The People’s” influence is completely over. It’s good to know some things will never change. 😉
Meanwhile, we’re moving toward “a war without anybody showing up”. The MISC Industries have been working hard on increasingly automated & human-free weaponry for decades. In a decade or two, the only humans required….will be the targets! They’re already at the point where they’re starting to experiment with letting the machines pick the targets. Skynet anyone? Anyone? Anyone?
Skynet is a real possibility….and one that I feel is only a decadee or so away…