Exclusive: With the U.S. government shutdown and a threatened credit default, Tea Party Republicans are testing out a new system of national governance in which they get their way – or else. But is this the beginning of a new Jim Crow era of imposed white supremacy or just the white man’s last tantrum, asks Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
American pundits are missing the bigger point about the Republican shutdown of the U.S. government and the GOP’s threatened default on America’s credit. The real question is not what policy concessions the Tea Partiers may extract, but rather can a determined right-wing white minority ensure continuation of white supremacy in the United States?
For years, political scientists have been talking about how the demographic changes in the United States are inexorably leading to a Democratic majority, with Hispanics and Asian-Americans joining African-Americans and liberal urban whites to erode the political domains of white conservatives and white racists.
Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Indiana.
But those predictions have always assumed a consistent commitment to the democratic principle of one person, one vote – and a readiness of Republicans to operate within the traditional standards of democratic governance. But what should now be crystal clear is that those assumptions are faulty.
Instead of accepting the emergence of this more diverse and multi-cultural America, the Right – through the Tea Party-controlled Republicans – has decided to alter the constitutional framework of the United States to guarantee the perpetuation of white supremacy and the acceptance of right-wing policies.
In effect, we are seeing the implementation of a principle enunciated by conservative thinker William F. Buckley in 1957: “The white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically.” Except now the Buckley rule is being applied nationally.
A Nationwide Strategy
This reality is hard to deny even though much of the U.S. political elite remains in denial. But the truth is apparent in a host of anti-democratic moves that have emanated from the lily-white Tea Party and that have been implemented by the predominantly white Republican Party at both the state and federal levels.
It’s there in the nationwide campaign to impose “ballot security” by requiring photo IDs for voting to cure the virtually non-existent problem of in-person voting fraud. The well-documented result of requiring photo IDs will be to reduce the number of urban minority voters who are less likely to have driver’s licenses and other approved identification.
It’s there in the reduction of voting hours, which — when combined with disproportionately fewer (and less efficient) voting booths in poor and minority areas — guarantees long lines and further skews the political power to wealthier white areas. In the pivotal election of 2000, we saw how this combination of factors in Florida suppressed the vote for Al Gore and handed the White House to the national vote loser George W. Bush.
It’s there in the sophisticated gerrymandering that Republican statehouses have applied to congressional districts around the country by lumping minorities and other Democratic voters together in one deformed district so other districts have comfortable Republican majorities.
This gerrymandering – now aided by computer models to remove any guesswork – played an important role in maintaining the current Republican “majority” in the House of Representatives even though congressional Republicans lost the national popular vote in 2012 by about 1½ million votes.
Congressional Tactics
The Right’s anti-democratic strategy is there, too, in the endless use of Republican filibusters in the U.S. Senate. Because of compromises made at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, some of this anti-democratic bias was built into the system (from a deal to assure the small states that they would not be overwhelmed by the large states under the Constitution, which concentrated power in the federal government).
Except for that long-ago compromise, there is no logical reason why the 240,000 registered voters in Wyoming should have the same number of senators as the 18 million registered voters in California. (Or why the 400,000 registered voters in the District of Columbia should have none.)
However, this violation of democracy’s one-person, one-vote principle is exacerbated in the U.S. Senate when Republicans filibuster even minor bills and demand that Democrats muster 60 votes in the 100-seat Senate to proceed. That means that a handful of lightly populated states can block legislative action favored by large majorities of the American people, such as requiring background checks on gun-show purchasers.
Republicans also have found endless excuses to deny congressional voting rights to Washington DC residents. You can probably guess what color skin many DC citizens have and what political party they favor.
The New Jim Crow
If you step back and take a look at this ugly landscape, what you will see is something akin to a new Jim Crow system, a sickening reprise of what happened the last time white supremacists saw their political and cultural dominance threatened in the years after the Civil War.
In the late 1860s and 1870s, the two parties were on the opposite sides of the racial-equality issue. Then, the Republicans pressed for a reconstruction of the South to assure civil rights for blacks. However, the Democrats, the old party of slavery, acted to frustrate, sabotage and ultimately defeat those efforts.
What the United States then got was nearly a century of racial segregation across large swaths of the country although most egregious in the South. It was not until the 1960s when the Democratic Party of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson broke with the old traditions of collaborating with the Old Confederacy. These new Democrats instead supported civil rights legislation pushed by Martin Luther King Jr. and other advocates for racial equality.
However, opportunistic Republicans, such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, saw an opening to flip the electoral map by snaking away the South’s resentful white racists from the Democrats and locking them into the Republican Party. The maneuver – cloaked in coded messages about states’ rights and hostility toward the federal government – proved astoundingly successful.
Still, the white supremacists faced a politically existential problem. They were demographically fading from their historic dominance, steadily replaced in numbers by Hispanics, Asian-Americans and blacks as well as by younger whites who viewed racial bigotry as a disgusting residue from the age-old crimes of slavery and segregation.
Countering Demographics
So what to do? Right-wing billionaires helped by pouring in vast sums to create a powerful right-wing propaganda machine, an ideological media unparalleled in American history. The loud voices and angry words from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Rupert Murdoch whipped up white grievances, but – as the election and reelection of African-American Barack Obama showed – more was needed.
The votes of non-whites and the young needed to be suppressed via manipulated election rules; the use of scientific gerrymandering had to be expanded to further devalue Democratic votes; obstructionism in Congress had to become the rule, not the exception.
Finally, it became clear that a de facto transformation of the constitutional system was needed to prevent the rule of this emerging – and “undeserving” – majority. Thus, government by extortion became the ultimate solution. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “America’s Government by Extortion.”]
By using the Republican House and its gerrymandered “majority” to prevent votes on straightforward bills to pay for the government and raise the debt ceiling, the Tea Party is now testing whether the majority of the nation can be coerced into accepting the demands of a right-wing minority through threats of economic calamity.
Even some Republicans seem confused about their short-term goals. Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Indiana, declared, “we’re not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”
But the message that the Tea Party Republicans are delivering to the nation is that if the American people insist on electing Democratic presidents or enacting federal legislation to “promote the general Welfare,” the Tea Party will respond by making the economy scream. The economic dislocations from a credit default alone could be so severe that millions of people will be thrown out of work and out of their homes.
The implicit warning is that you will suffer that fate — you may be driven into poverty — if you don’t let whites continue to rule. Or as the urbane William Buckley put it, you must let whites “prevail, politically and culturally.”
An Unthinkable Idea?
For those Americans who recoil at this scenario – and think it must be unthinkable in the Twenty-First Century – they should remember their history. In the 1870s, racist whites – especially in the South but also in many parts of the North – refused to accept post-Civil War amendments that guaranteed equal rights and voting rights for blacks.
Through connivance and violence, the racist whites prevailed and it took nearly a century – and much more bloodshed – to reverse their victories. What America is witnessing today is the next phase of that war for white supremacy. Well-meaning people should not be too cavalier about the outcome.
The Tea Party-induced government shutdown and the upcoming extortion demands over the debt ceiling may indeed turn out to be the white man’s last tantrum – but this extremist strategy of mayhem and extortion could also be the inauguration of a grim new era of Jim Crow.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.
Right on Robert!!
LMFAO What a load of chit…Robert, I cannot believe I wasted 5 mins of my life on this.
Clearly your well versed in far fetched speculative fantasy..
Which part of the HISTORY he recounted struck you as “far fetched speculative fantasy”?
Sadly accurate.
To whatever extent we really know what the original “Tea Party” group action was about, this current lot sure gives it a bad name. They make me wish this place was still British: bad food, bad teeth, Thatcher, BNP, Bucks Fizz, Muslim clerics, and all that.
Muslim clerics?…….Huh????
All of this is true, but WHY do the people of the USA continue to allow this complete lack of representation? Gerrymandering should not be likely if partisan officials are kept from this task. Those arranging boundaries must not be the political partisans but specified public servants. The US system of partisan changes of alleged public sector workers every time there is an election makes good choices almost impossible. Why would Supreme Court JUDGES, for example, be chosen by a POTUS rather than by their peers,(eg for competence, of all things?) Why are judges in other jurisdictions voted for on Party lines, not for their competence or fairness? Adding to this the financial input by lobbies and corporations, how can anyone as an individual voter, be represented by someone with his/her interests at heart?
Ergo, the U.S. as we now know it.
Well, as someone once famously said; “Democracy is the worst of all governmental systems except every other one.”
adolph hitler
Actually, that quote is from Hitler’s nemesis, Winston Churchill
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/364.html
Why do you have to say “white man”?
I’m a white man and I had nothing to do with this.
Why don’t you say wealthy, hypocritical, racist, elitist white men instead?
it is an argument tactic of course. if u question dem-lib politics, u r a racist.
It is no coincidence that the percentage of pathologic homophobes in the tea party is he same as those in the general population who represent 80% or more of the most violent prison populations.
This is the same percent as social psychopaths with autistic personalities.
Such people feel little or no empathy for others and think of people as objects, the way religious fanatics believe they have dominion over all who are different in ethnicity, race, religion or gender. There is no sense of guilt or compassion for others.
The increase in such a population in a democratic government is natural when the vast majority cannot imagine that a small group who care nothing for the welfare of others act without conscience or remorse to gain authority for the purpose of control and domination.
these pathologic degenerates are no different than the suicide bombers among Muslim sects who interpret a faith of service as a belief in violent control.
Do not expect to deal with such mental defectives as if they had normal social feelings or desires.
I am wondering how this will play out; this side of the wealthy and the ignorant vs. people with perhaps less gold and more intelligence.
They hurled great wads of money around the last election to elect Mr. Whitebread Moroni Pants and it didn’t work. Obama won anyway, and vast sums were wasted, or at least shuttled from one right wing pocket to another.
So I am wondering; yes, there is a small group of ridiculously wealthy people willing to funnel nearly unlimited funds to convince American society to let them have their way.
Money couldn’t make that ungodly travesty of a human being, Mitt Romney and his absurd wife palatable. So it remains to be seen if these wealthy powermongers have the wealth required to convince us that pipelines and fracking and Arctic drilling are Good Things. I don’t think so. We know we need clean air, water and land to thrive. These people would deny us that, and compensate our loss with little bits of paper with pictures of dead presidents on them.
republicans need to do america a favor and DIE OFF ALREADY
Bologna! We’re not angry at all. We just don’t want to pay taxes and these Dumbocrats keep trying to make us pay taxes. So if we have to catch a few vote-fish with race bait, then so be it. Either way, no taxes. Write what you want but we don’t give two squirts about what color the poor are. This is about money. “This hyeah id a BIDNESS” and you 47%’er’s better recognize the bottom line and who is in charge in this scenario. Don’t you think the people in the poorest states know that we ride around in limo’s wearing thousand dollar suits all day long? Don’t you think they understand that every one of us except for Rubio is a Millionaire? They do, and therefore, if they are so racist, sexist, supremecist “ist” et al; that they will vote for us anyway, even when we hurt them the most, then that’s what they deserve. Why in the heck do you think we shut down the educational system in those states? Because the ignorant are easier to bait and they give up real easy, no problems there. We can keep the jails stocked to get close to the same labor rates we have always been paying, the government pays us nice “incentives” to be “job creators” and they subsidize our “employee payroll” on top of it all. Then our “employee’s” who are too dirt poor to “consume” anywhere else but with us, give us any money we were forced to pay them, right back. We write it off, hide it and ship it to the bank. Done deal. No Taxes. Sorry for telling you how it is but you forced me to let you in on the secret. We have been running a profitable enterprise for a long time and if we have to manipulate a bunch of people to get what we want then, oh well. We are rich, it’s great, wouldn’t trade it for the world. Be glad I didn’t make it because I would have harvested all your sorry butts by now. You see, you are not, “Boss”. We, Boss! Been like it, gonna be like it. Naw get off my porch fer I puts ya in yer place!!
-Mittens.
“G650 Bitches!”
if we have no taxes how do we pay for the troops (insert GOP sex fantasy here)
I can only loosely quote historian Michael Parenti here, but I’m sure anyone so motivated could find the video. Regarding conspiracy theories, he said people ask, “You mean these wealthy, powerful men sit around in rooms and plot how they’re going to manipulate the course of events?” He answers, the question, “Well, where else would they do it? Of course they sit around in rooms.”
You can agree with the thrust of this article, which I do. But keep in mind, that makes you a “conspiracy theorist”. After all, it means you believe that a bunch of rich white racists are conspiring to subvert democracy…which appears to be a valid conclusion. That notion warrants many conceptual corollaries most of us are willfully reluctant to consider.
I hate to say this but I told you all that this was a plot by some really nasty types to keep “you” down. Oh; and “Boooooooo Boooooooooo..”
-Theo.
So the response of rational human beings should be to indict several of these folks on charges of treason, yes? It does look as if this is what is being perpetrated on our government and our citizens. What say you?
I’d say the ball is in Eric Holder’s court. Ergo, what should happen probably won’t. But that’s what it looks like to me as well.
Americans should pay less attention to race, and pay more attention to clasism, so working class & middle class unites, like in other multi-racial countries (Brazil, Argentina & others); so the racist groups will loose its grip over white working class. A white working class person has to understand, that he or she, has the same needs (job, education, health) as a black working class person.
For example, pictures of welfare recipient, are always black and latino persons. The pictures of welfare recipients should also show white people, bi-racial people, multi-racial people and asian people. Same with people in need of food stamp , medical, obama care, etc.
Same number of pictures of bi-racial, multi-racial, blacks, asians and white children, when showing a public school.
All of those, little detalils will help to build a more integrated and just society.
Argentina is a multi-racial country? Who are the largest minority…..ex Nazis?
I am foreing, so pardon for my English. (I am an Argentinean of Irish Ancestry, and it is not uncommon)
The problem with white America (Tea Party) is that they believe in certain myths, like for example, races are just skin deep, but when white America (Tea Party) when they refer to race, in a way, they seems to confuse race with species. In the rest of the world, there are only three main races, but white America (Tea Party), believe in the existence of several races.
White America (Tea Party), confuses socialism with marxism; so somebody have to let them know that affordable medicine will not take them to a communism system.
The best way to help White America (Tea Party), is to educate them. Liberal media, should start helping them to understand certain concepts, so they stop being afraid of others.
“Race” is a racist concept with no scientific validity. Increasingly, humans have multi-ethnic backgrounds and fall between the “races”.
The problem with white America (Tea Party) is that they believe in certain myths, like for example, races are just skin deep, but when white America (Tea Party) when they refer to race, in a way, they seems to confuse race with species. In the rest of the world, there are only three main races, but white America (Tea Party), believe in the existence of several races.
White America (Tea Party), confuses socialism with marxism; so somebody have to let them know that affordable medicine will not take them to a communism system.
The best way to help White America (Tea Party), is to educate them. Liberal media, should start helping them to understand certain concepts, so they stop being afraid of others.
Americans should pay less attention to race, and pay more attention to clasism, so working class & middle class unites, like in other multi-racial countries (Brazil, Argentina & others); so the racist groups will loose its grip over white working class. A white working class person has to understand, that he or she, has the same needs (job, education, health) as a black working class person.
For example, pictures of welfare recipient, are always of black and latino persons. The pictures of welfare recipients, should also show white people, bi-racial people, multi-racial people and asian people. Same thing with people in need of food stamp, medical, obama care, college credits, etc.
When showing pictures of public school, will be important to show the same number of pictures of bi-racial, multi-racial, blacks, asians and white children.
All of the above, may think unimportant details, but not, they are very important to make every body feel part of the same group. Those little detalils will help to build a more integrated and just society.
I am foreing, so pardon for my English. (I am an Argentinean of Irish Ancestry, which it is not uncommon)
Funny thing is….the political right seems to be moving in the opposite direction of popular culture. While “conservatives” are trying to “catapult the propaganda” for continued white dominance…the culture is picking up speed in the opposite direction. If you watch television these days, it’s almost guaranteed that you will see a few commercials featuring integrated families and racial harmony….and not just the ballyhooed Cheerios add. Apparently this is just aggravating the bunker mentality in the gerrymandered districts.
People keep calling this a “shutdown,” when actually what Republicans are doing is a SHAKEDOWN, a shakedown of the 99 percent by the 1 percent, a shakedown of our democratic process through extortion, blackmailing, hostage-taking and bribery by right-wingers on behalf of their racist corporate paymasters (like the Koch brothers).
All the article says about what is going on and why is true. However , there is an assumption here which history does not support. The assumption is that if minorities and youth etc were allowed to vote unfettered, then the democratic wishes of the people will be advanced. The conservative direction of the democrats, led by Obama, who is to the right of Nixon in most issues that matter, is a good example why people everywhere must question the efficacy of voting.
What is happening in this country is rule by the oligarchy. What must happen is rule by the people . That may take a revolution, that may take a third party. The democrats have made it clear that it will NOT happen under their watch.
Companion reading:
- “Better Off Without’Em” by Chuck Thompson
- “Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson
The reality is that the far right wing Republican radicals have been planning a take over of that party for decades. In that goal, they have been very successful. The themes of Liberty and Freedom are just a hoax. See http://bit.ly/1aZtEcM