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Thursday, Jul 16, 2015 12:32 PM UTC
Right-wing racist whack-a-mole: Confederate flag comes down, Donald Trump pops up
Take down the rebel flag and then Trump's anti-immigration flag goes up. Such hatred is the GOP's only strategy
Topics: Donald Trump, Elections 2016, confederate flag, Editor's Picks, Immigration, Race, Jan Brewer, Lindsay Graham, Barry Goldwater, American History, News, Politics News
Suddenly, with a single flap of the Angel of History’s wings, America has experienced a shuddering change: the American swastika has finally become toxic—a liberation that last month seemed so impossible that we’d forgotten to bother to think about it.
One doesn’t waste energy worrying over the fact that America controls over 700 military bases in 63 countries and maintains a military presence in 156; or that Israel has staged a civilian-slaughtering war approximately every other year since 2006; or that in America there is no constitutionally guaranteed right to vote or that unregulated pyramid schemes fleece Middle Americans out of $10 to $20 billion a year or that a private organization runs our presidential debates, sponsored by the same corporations that underwrite Democratic conventions … on and on and on: permanent annoyances.
Like the Confederate flag.
People Can Change?
While ignorant or insensate bitter-enders will continue to screech, there’s no going back: This thing is toxic even to Republican backbenchers. You could see that on Capitol Hill last week: late Wednesday night, Republicans sedulously repealed a Democratic amendment banning this flag of treason against the U.S. government from U.S. cemeteries. Dozens of Democrats then stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the House floor to all but accuse their colleagues across the aisle of evil. (Imagine the impossibility of them doing the same on, say, gun control.) The Republicans, embarrassed, backtracked—and the amendment’s sponsor, Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) issued a statement disclaiming responsibility, blaming his leadership instead. (Wedge issue!)
Or watch the awe-inspiring speech of the Republican South Carolina state representative who burst into tears, begging her party-mates to finally come to their senses: “I have heard enough about heritage. I have a heritage. I am a life-long South Carolinian. I am a descendant of Jefferson Davis, okay? But that does not matter!”
So, progress, right? The Republican Party, or at least more of it than we ever would have dreamed, abandoning yesteryear’s bigotry, proving that progress is possible: people can change.
Right?
Baked into the Reactionary Cake
Not so fast. Let’s not forget the juxtaposition: at almost precisely the same moment, Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign with the immortal words: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best … They’re sending people that have lots of problems. And they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” And, immediately, Trump shot to the top of the Republican charts—with a bullet: he’s now the most popular candidate among GOP likely voters, four points ahead of Jeb Bush.
There’s an enormous amount to learn in this juxtaposition about how conservatism works at its deepest levels. It drives liberals crazy when conservatives dress themselves in the clothes of the great social-justice movements of the past: when they avow that were he alive now Martin Luther King would be a Republican, when they compare their crusades to force pregnant women to give birth to Mahatma Gandhi’s March to the Sea. This is not a new development; indeed, it’s baked into the reactionary cake.
Conservatives understand that the direction of human history is not on their side—that, other things equal, civilization does tend toward more inclusion, more emancipation, more liberalism. That is the great source of their anger. And that, too, is the source of the compulsion to dress reaction in the raiment of liberation. Politically, it is the only way.
Public Profession, Private Confession
There is, however, another parallel right-wing drive, the “other” side of reaction’s Möbius strip—the same side, really. It emerges, for instance, in phrases like Barry Goldwater’s campaign slogan: “In Your Heart You Know He’s Right.” Or “Silent Majority”: Richard Nixon’s phrase, deployed in a November 1969 speech two weeks after the largest antiwar demonstration in human history, the National Moratorium Day, when approximately 2 million Americans from all walks of life, in cities and small towns alike, took the day off from work or school to protest the Vietnam War. They express a core conservative contention: that there are certain things that a vast majority of Americans know to be true, even if propriety—or the liberal thought police, what Nixon called by implication the silencing minority—do not allow them to say.
(And the skill and determination deployed by conservatives in convincing each other that the vast majority of Americans—and all “real” Americans—believe what they do is bottomless. The Gallup poll? As Phyllis Schlafly explained in 1964, they ask “a lot of questions of a very few people” until they “come up with answers that [please] the New York kingmakers.”)
This particular understanding of the gap between public profession and private confession is one of the five or six things most fundamental to conservative thought. The spectacle of Republicans lowering a flag could not be more public. The act of a Republican anonymously telling a pollster what she really believes about the candidate with the guts to call Mexicans what they “really” are, which is barely-human vermin, is not so public. Significantly, one of two polls that finds Trump ahead by four points was staged by YouGov, which does its polling online, without requiring respondents to talk to another, possibly judgmental, human being—about as private as a political act could be.
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