17breezes wrote:82_28 wrote:What's dangerous and what's easy about it 17Breezes? I thought it was a well thought out piece to ponder courtesy of Mr. Riddler.
Well yeah it's a good piece but it boils down to, as far too many critiques do here and out there, to that whole unwashed mob sheeple who aren't thinking the "proper," thoughts bullshit.
The racist dogwhistle especially is what attracts the numbers to the rallies.
How simple is that? How dangerous is that? How pathetic is that?
(a) Not at all simple.
(b) Not at all dangerous.
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(c) Not at all pathetic.
***
Also, the post isn't about a "whole unwashed mob of sheeple." As JackR makes perfectly clear, his subjects' claims of populism are both overstated and self-bestowed:
These are "the people," and they want their country back from the Socialist Muslim Obama.
Instead, it's about a very vocal, well-defined, but modestly sized segment of the electorate that wrongly purports -- and possibly believes itself -- to be speaking for the country as a whole. Which is exactly how JackR explicitly defines it, in the course of identifying it, accurately, as:
the ideologically committed Republican base[.]
Further, he isn't criticizing its improper thoughts. He's criticizing its racism. Primarily, anyway.
More specifically, he's criticizing its leadership for using racist dogwhistles and its membership for responding to them, which is not only a real-world campaign tactic with a very long, very well-known history that's manifestly attested to both by Rand Paul's spuriously justified opposition to the Civil Rights Act, as expressed in the OP, and also by his core constituency's public, unalloyed, and frequently expressed agreement with it.
For example, to hew as close to the topic as possible:
Paul's stance is "very reasonable, and quite close to the Libertarian position," a spokesman for the Libertarian Party told TPMmuckraker.
"If some private business discriminates we think that's unfortunate, but we don't think the government should get involved in banning it," said the spokesman, Wes Benedict. "That's just a negative that we have to tolerate in a free society."
Walter Block, a libertarian professor of economics at Loyola University, and a senior fellow with the libertarian Ludwig Von Mises Institute, went further. "I think anyone who doesn't believe that isn't a libertarian," he said, calling Paul's comment "a very mainstream libertarianism."
"I'm delighted that Rand Paul said that," an enthusiastic Block added. "I think it's magnificent. I didn't realize that he was that good."
(
Link)
I mean, granted, the post doesn't cite chapter and verse on the entire 60-plus-year history of racism as the unifying factor that attracted and bound together the various coalitions that presently form the ideologically committed base of the contemporary Republican Party. Or on the frequent use of crypto-racism as a campaign tactic by right-of-center politicians. (From both sides of the aisle, it must be said, although they're mostly Republicans.) In that regard, it strictly confines itself to capsule-summary recapitulation of the last decade or so.
But I'd say that was commendably on-topic, not overly general. And it certainly doesn't mean that there isn't demonstrably such a history, btw. Because there really, really is.
Which doesn't mean that every single registered Republican is even a little bit racist on an individual level. And I'm neither saying nor suggesting that it does. It just means that on an institutional level, the national party has to keep its platform racist enough to retain its core constituency, although how publicly and/or how actively varies according to circumstance. Seriously. You can look it up.
Maybe you just read the post too quickly.
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*** I mean "as a statement," in case that's not clear. Because the phenomenon described by those statements is very dangerous. And it could plausibly be characterized as pathetic, too, although I personally wouldn't call it that, I don't think.
