Reports: Joe Biden hires Irish band for inauguration

Hayne says:

If you’re speaking to me, please know I don’t vote as it is worthless as most people finally can see.

William Safford says:

V.Lind, the last four Presidential elections have ripped the scab off of a systemic infection in the U.S. polity.

There has been a tradition of wacko-bird conspiracy mongering in this country for as long as it has existed. For just one example, check out the Wikipedia article about the “No-Nothing Party” from the 1850s. They demonstrated their tribalism by gleefully denying facts together.

There has also been the original sin of slavery and white supremacy from colonial times. (And the near-extermination of Native Americans.)

It is an evil admixture.

The Republican Party is the inheritor of the former Dixiecrats: the white supremacist Southern faction formerly in the Democratic Party. They white supremacists had belonged to the Democratic Party since before the Civil War, and many of them were instigators of the Civil War.

These white supremacists started jumping ship from the Democratic Party en masse starting in the 1960s, after President Lyndon Johnson achieved the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights laws. These laws were technically passed with bipartisan support, but with almost unanimous opposition from the members of Congress from the former states of the treasonous and seditious Civil War Confederacy.

Up to this point, the Republican Party had been mainly a party of the upper-middle and upper classes, with power centers in the Northeast and Ohio. (The Democratic Party was primarily supportive of labor and unions.) The Republican Party had progressive and conservative factions.

Then-Republican-candidate Nixon first employed the “Southern Strategy” in 1968 to appeal to and attract these white supremacist Southern voters. He did a good enough job to win the Presidency.

With this influx of former Dixiecrats, the power center of the Republican Party shifted southward. These new leaders and power brokers brought into the party not only their white supremacy, but also their social conservatism and their fundamentalist Christian leanings. Even more so, they brought their dirty trick skills learned under American apartheid to preserve Jim Crow in the South against all decency, morality, and the Constitution.

The tide really started to turn with the election of President Reagan, who regularly employed dog whistles to appeal to these white supremacists, without outwardly pandering to them. (There is even a documentary about this on Showtime on cable in the U.S. I haven’t seen it yet.)

Now I’m arriving at addressing your point.

These white supremacists, and those with white supremacist and racist leanings, conscious or unconscious, viewed the 2008 election of President Obama with both dread and disgust. To them, a Black man was an illegitimate candidate for President. His election was therefore illegitimate. Therefore, there was something fundamentally corrupt about the election. Therefore, there must have been a conspiracy behind his election. This in part explains the rise of the so-called Tea Party movement.

The Republican leaders in the Senate, led by Majority Turtle “Moscow” Mitch McDonnell, vowed that the only goal of the Republicans in Congress was to make Obama a one-term President, by opposing everything he stood for.

Obamacare was originally a conservative plan, created by the arch-conservative think tank Heritage Foundation. It had its genesis in Republican opposition to President Clinton’s attempt to create universal health care in the U.S. in 1992. It was the Republican plan to compete with the Clinton plan.

Obama adopted it as his plan, at which point the very conservatives who created the plan opposed it.

They failed. Obama was reelected. Obamacare is the law of the land, at least for now.

However, the white supremacists came out of the shadows during his Presidency, culminating with the election of the single most unfit Presidential candidate in the history of the United States.

The Orange Enemy of the people beat a profoundly qualified woman. He did so by making those racist dog whistles into clarion calls.

For four years, he fed these conspiracy-minded followers, most of whom have a high school education or less, with lie after lie, and false conspiracy after false conspiracy.

Today, many of them are True Believers in his lies about the election. Of course, others are opportunists–they know it’s a lie, but they do not care; they just want their man reelected, damn the democracy.

There has been racism, bigotry, white supremacy, xenophobia, and more in this country for as long as it has existed. Our two original sins, are slavery, and the near-extermination of the Native Americans.

Today, it’s come to the forefront, in ways that we have not seen in a long time.

Where do you see a microcosm of this bigotry, this white supremacy, this no-nothingism, this xenophobia, this support of false conspiracies, this denialism of facts, this hatred?

Right here on Slipped Disc, posted to the comments section by many such people.

William Safford says:

You’re welcome, and you are correct that this rot long predates the election of President Obama. (I hope I’m not merely telling you what you already know. Also, these posts are for others to read and perhaps learn from them if they have an open mind.)

You know more about American politics than I know about British politics. I learned a little bit as an undergrad, which included meeting and conversing with a shadow minister (I don’t remember who now, alas), whom I escorted around campus. He and I talked a lot about PR. I have picked up some more knowledge over the years, but not in depth.

The Orange Enemy of the People is as much a symptom of this rot, as he is the rot itself. After all, this racist con artist and grifter could not have become President without the votes of millions upon millions of like-minded bigots, and the tacit support of the Republican Party establishment.

Nor could he have ascended to power without the support of the right wing propaganda machines that masquerade as news organizations, led by Fox News and its Australian owner, Rupert Murdoch.

Starting back in the 1950s, conservative pundit William F. Buckley attempted to create an intellectual framework for American conservatism. Even though he was far from good on issues such as race relations (to give credit where due, he did improve somewhat later in life), he did recognize that this conservative movement had to sideline the right wing nut jobs such as the John Birch Society if it wanted to be taken seriously.

Buckley died some years ago. The nut jobs have taken over the Republican Party.

Re Reagan: on his watch, impeachable and prosecutable offenses were perpetrated, in the Iran-Contra scandal. Several members of his administration were convicted of crimes and jailed. Reagan and his VP, George H. W. Bush, escaped impeachment or prosecution due in part to the machinations of William Barr, who was Bush’s attorney general. After Bush was elected President, Barr recommended that Bush pardon several convicted felons from that scandal, which thereby served to protect Reagan and Bush.

Note that Barr is now the Orange One’s attorney general. Hmmmm….

Reagan was in many other ways a terrible president.

One example: just as the Orange One has done as little as he can to address the current pandemic, so too did Reagan ignore AIDS. Thousands of people died due to a lack of support of research into HIV and a denial of the importance of it. Since AIDS at first predominantly affected gay people, it was not deemed by Reagan and his cohorts worthy of attention. (I give the second President Bush credit for being far better about promulgating AIDS treatment than Reagan.)

A second example: Reagan’s promotion of supply-side economics–or, as the first Bush labeled it while campaigning against Reagan for the Republican nomination for President, “voodoo economics.”

Re President Clinton: I am still not 100% clear why he was hated with such a passion by so many right wingers. They did not hate all Democrats with the same vituperation. Part of the reason may be his outsider status. Another part may be his warm relations with Black and nonwhite people. He lived for a time as a child with his grandparents. “At a time when the southern United States was racially segregated, Clinton’s grandparents sold goods on credit to people of all races.” (Wikipedia) Clinton grew up in the last years of American legal apartheid.

I agree with your observation about the lack of quality of Republican Presidents since the first Bush: the second Bush was in way over his head, and the Orange One is unfit to be President.

Compare this with the quality of Democratic Presidents. Carter is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and had some training in submarine nuclear power plant operation. Clinton is a Rhodes scholar, and attended University College, Oxford. Obama “was the first black person to be president of the Harvard Law Review” (Wikipedia) at Harvard Law School, and was a law school professor.

Furthermore, look at the quality of candidates for the Republican Presidential nomination of the last several election cycles. They have ranged from somewhat competent but generally mediocre (Jeb Bush), to truly mediocre (most of the rest).

I also agree with you about American sexual hypocrisy. Think back to the Clinton impeachment. He was impeached essentially for having sex with an adult intern, as an excuse to get rid of him. Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich led the movement to impeach him. Gingrich was outed for having his own affairs. He resigned his seat after the House Republicans unexpectedly lost seats in the midterm Congressional election. “The Speaker-designate, Representative Bob Livingston, chosen by the Republican Party Conference to replace Gingrich as House Speaker, announced the end of his candidacy for Speaker and his resignation from Congress from the floor of the House after his own marital infidelity came to light….Many other prominent Republican members of Congress (including Dan Burton, Helen Chenoweth, and Henry Hyde, the chief House manager of Clinton’s trial in the Senate) had infidelities exposed about this time, all of whom voted for impeachment.” (Wikipedia)

Finally, Hastert became Speaker. Decades later, he was exposed as a pedophile who had sex with boys. Hmmmmm….

The American experiment in democracy is not yet over. However, this abominable President is testing it in a way that we have never seen before. This is the greatest internal threat that we have faced at least since the McCarthy era, and probably since the Civil War.

One more note. Senator McCarthy’s right hand man was a lawyer named Roy Cohn. Cohn’s last protégé was Donald Trump. Hmmmmm….