11.07.12
The Two Countries
Morning after snapshot of country vote analysis by the Los Angeles Times.
Mitt Romney and the Republican Party bet on the New Confederacy and lost in an electoral college landslide.
In the process, they played on the basest feeling, loathing, rallying the middle-aged white voter against everyone else. The result is that everyone in the world can’t help but see the US as two countries, one that’s old fearful, motivated only by lies and anger, and one ready to try to deal with the present.
Blog reader Christopher Hechl, from Germany, posted a comment yesterday, one deserving more attention:
Your country has been polarized and an incredible amount of arms [are] in private hands.
These two facts alone are enough to do everything one can to deescalate.
In my opinion the quote “elections don’t change anything, otherwise they’d be forbidden??? holds true.
The US is reigned by capitalism and Obama’s reelection doesn’t change that.
You yourself have on this blog never even mentioned, that other parties exist in your country, probably for fear that democrat voters are more likely to think about their choice and thus would weaken Obama’s chances.
But a two party system imho doesn’t offer a real choice if it exists for a longer period of time. Even less so if it gets trampled on:
I think Taibbi is right, when he thinks about conciliation rather than fighting it to the grave. Especially when you remind yourself, that you would have to fight against intellectually challenged white supremacists who live in selfmade bunkers.
Indeed, Christopher Hechl has a point. I never mentioned any third party runs. Roseanne Barr, the famous tv sitcom actress, was on the ballot in Pasadena. And so was Jill Stein of the Green Party.
And much earlier in the year an organization funded by centrist hedge fund managers called Americans Elect tried to mount a third party campaign. Americans Elect was ignored, I believe rightly so, being more of the same rich man’s business. And Jill Stein of the Green Party had a hard time getting the mainstream media to cover her even when she was getting arrested as a publicity stunt.
The truth is third party runs have been rendered impossible. And it’s because of money.
Everyone has noticed the plutocrats funneled hundreds of millions into the extreme right’s campaign in an attempt to remove Barack Obama. They didn’t choose to start a new party. They bought one off the shelf, the Tea Party, in a concerted campaign that started prior to the 2010 election.
Paul Krugman explained it this morning:
There are many lists now circulating of the biggest winners and losers from the election; oddly, however, none of the lists I’ve seen mentions just how bad this result is for Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe.
The story, as you may recall, is that the financial industry — having brought both itself and the rest of the world to the edge of disaster — was bailed out by taxpayers. Yet far from being grateful, top financial types were furious at Obama for occasionally hinting that some of them might have misbehaved a bit. And investment bankers — who normally lean Democratic — went overwhelmingly to the other side, pouring cash into Mitt Romney’s coffers in the no doubt correct expectation that a Romney administration would dismantle financial reform and treat their wealth with the adulation they believe to be their birthright.
But Romney lost and Obama won. The limits of their power have been cruelly exposed, and the reelected president now owes them nothing.
There was also a lot of air time wasted last night on how the country must be stitched back together.
It can’t. Those who call for it, like Tom Brokaw, seemingly whenever he was on camera on NBC last night, have brains not fit for cheap canned dog food. The map at the LA Times shows it very plainly.
The New Confederacy bet won all the votes in the south and in the big wasteland states with very small populations. That’s the angry white man, what this blog calls the Psychopath Vote. And it lost everywhere else, in the cities where polyglot America lives.
One sees it in California. It looks like two states. One that doesn’t count, in the interior. And the other California, the one Republicans like to mock, where most of us live, near and on the coast.
Even San Diego county went for the president. The military, it looks to me, trusted him more to steer the country right than the always war drum beating xenophobe anti-Muslim hawks.
Look close along the mighty river bordered by the bright red states — Mississippi. Arkansas and Louisiana. It’s all blue. That’s where the Americans the bigots hate live.
They live in the big blue strip along the southern border of Texas and it shows everybody that eventually, sometime in the future — maybe not anytime soon, the Republicans — even in Texas — will be finished.
That’s the present and the future coming.
Oysters take an irritant, sand, and turn it into something wonderful — pearls. That won’t happen in the United States. There won’t be anything good that transforms out of the vast expanse of irritant fighting mad red. It will just get less so. The inexorable long march of time will dispose of the modern GOP.
The election won’t correct anything. The Republicans will persist in going after all their imagined enemies, denying science, trying to impose control on the reproductive rights of women, jamming up everything where they can, damning gay people and loudly proclaiming how they are the makers and everyone else, swine. Many of them have already proclaimed the election an historic world tragedy.
The parasites won! The election result only confirms this ugly paranoid belief — the Democratic strategy is to make as many people as possible a government dependent, a moocher, and in so doing cultivate a voting base that outnumbers the “producers.”
It’s a horrible slur to regard over half the country as nothing. But it’s their encapsulated delusion and nothing can change it.
It’s strength is its rage at the other. At Pine View Farm, Frank put it this way:
Expect more of the same from the Republicans. Love is transitory. Hate is forever.
“For a long time, right-wingers — and some pundits — have peddled the notion that the ‘real America,’ all that really counted, was the land of non-urban white people … Gods, guns, and gays didn’t swing voters into supporting corporate interests; instead, human dignity for women swung votes the other way,” wrote Krugman in a similar vein.
I called it Guns, Booze & Jesus. And it’s a nasty, mean hard rock tune, unlikely to get that generous spirit of Norman Vincent Peale-ism swelling in the breast of the listener. But that’s exactly how what lost last night is.
The New Confederacy was stillborn. Not for lack of trying, though. Mitt Romney and the billionaires made the cynical and loathsome decision to polish white animosity to the sharpest serrated edge that could be managed in a long presidential campaign. Sure, that animus was always there. However, they made it everything, turning it into the biggest, baddest, most damaging brand they could. And they came up short.
Even at the bitter end, Mitt Romney still wasn’t able to be magnanimous in defeat. He emphasized he and his wife would pray for the Obama administration and the country. They would pray for all of us. In the extremist Republican lexicon, you are prayed for because you are thought flawed, unclean, a sinner who may fall. The quality of faith is most insincere.
Decency and the forward look was triumphant. However, the rancid toothpaste won’t be going back in the tube. It’s what we have now.
Frank said,
November 8, 2012 at 7:29 am
I am continually amused by those who think a third party, or even s fourth or fifth parties, is somehow a solution.
It betrays an unfamiliarity with American political history. When we have had successful third parties on the national level (the last one was the Republican Party in the 1850s), they have succeeded by co-opting and replacing one of the two major parties. (One could argue that the Dixiecrats and George Wallace’s American Independent Party did this to the Republicans, but it’s debatable–the Republicans welcomed them in with Nixon’s odious Southern strategy.
A third party coexisting with the two major parties–ain’t gonna happen so long as we have a presidential, rather than a parliamentary system.
George Smith said,
November 8, 2012 at 8:19 am
Coincidentally, I’ve been re-reading Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail about the Democratic Party’s nomination of McGovern and the catastrophic loss to Nixon. George Wallace plays a significant part in it as he ran as a Democrat until he was shot. And he was very set up as a spoiler because a populist vote in the south gave him big percentages. He won Florida, hurt the Democratic machine’s favorite — Ed Muskie, and showed the McGovern people there was a dissatisfaction to be tapped.
Excerpts from the book, interviews with those “Democrats” who voted for Wallace are exactly like what you hear coming from the GOP now two days after the election.
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“We might get out country back,” said the construction man, a Wallace voting Democrat in Maryland. “I feel like I lost it. I been lost in it all this time.”
“I been lost, too,” said a gas station operator. “I’ve been trying to find someone I can understand to vote for. This is one of the happiest days of my life.” [Wallace had just won the Maryland primary in a landslide -after- he was shot.]
“One thing puzzling the press is why there weren’t more Wallace stickers on cars,” the auto-dealer told me. “It’s fear. Fear of retaliation from blacks. Of getting bricks thrown at your car….”
Everyone in the room was drunk on victory and quite sure George Wallace was going to win the nomination. Every so often they would cheerfully scoff at a TV commentator who attributed the Wallace victory to a “sympathy vote.”
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These voters all flipped and the South become solidly Republican. But there sentiment was the same as that of the modern Republican Party. Heck, it was their children who voted for Romney and all the other crazy bigots on Tuesday. And this is just another example of how repellent the Romney/GOP strategy was. Forty years later, working the entrenched bigot vote, amplifying it, the fear of the black and brown men, the gays, etc., thinking they could offset the numbers that were no longer in their favor.
They look at the maps today and still refuse to see it. They see the great swathes of geographically big states in the heartland — all bright red — and think they still have something. They won’t acknowledge it doesn’t matter shit what they think in Kansas or the Dakotas or Oklahoma and Nebraska (or the interior of California) anymore. Those little lonely-looking clusters of blue counties, often in seas of red — where all the urban centers are — that’s where the future is. They are deceived by the vision. What happened reinforces their mania. They see only that the moochers, the parasites, the welfare leeches in the dirty cities, turned out to put their socialist leader who is stamping out “freedom” back in place. They actually voted to destroy “freedom!” The outrage!
It sticks in their craws that the rest of us in the crowded places voted to specifically be rid of them and re-elect the right man.
Frank said,
November 9, 2012 at 11:37 am
There was a letter to the editor in today’s local rag that speaks to the next Republican thing: instead on one person one vote, one county one vote.
http://hamptonroads.com/2012/11/change-process
It is noteworthy that much of the red area on the map in your post, outside of the South, is desert and prairie. The red is places, not people.
George Smith said,
November 9, 2012 at 1:03 pm
Indeed, which is why they would come up with a new subterfuge substituting their places for where the people are. Good luck with it GOP. LA County is not Riverside Country. They are definitely not created equal.
The magnitude of their delusion grows only greater and more self-reinforcing. Reading the rest of the comments in the letters section — dreadfully familiar. It hasn’t even taken a day to get back to normal.