Making a Confederacy of Dunces

Jonathon Swift understood the power of stupid

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/VRWC/dunces.htm
5/15/07

The other day, Paul Krugman wrote a column called “Don’t Blame Bush.” Drastically boiled down and rendered into varnish, his point was that while Putsch may look and sound like a demented moron, it wasn’t entirely his fault, because the whole fershluggeneh GOP was demented. The eleven lawn jockeys at the Faux/GOP debate promised nothing but More of the Same (with the exception of Ron Paul, who the GOP wants to ban from future debates). Krugman pointed to the candidates’ debate as an example, in which 10 of the 11 candidates applauded the gulag at Guatanamo. (Guiliani even said he would “double” it, leading an ecstatic Jon Stewart to shout, “He landed the double Guantanamo! No one’s ever done that before!”). Stewart watched the debate and saw the same thing that Krugman apparently did: that some or all of the eleven clones standing there must have forgotten to pay their brain bills or something, because they all sounded like drooling idiots.

This all came out on the same day that Al Gore’s new book, “The Assault on Reason” came out. It deals with the ignorance and stupidity – often willful – that has become so prevalent in US politics. Gore’s book reminds us all that the powers of viciousness and stupidity overcame the will of the American people in 2000, and installed a man who can’t even read a book, let alone write one. Gore also notes that far too many people are complacently happy to be led by people who think evolution is a secular hoax, or that scientists have a political agenda but that politicians don’t.

Having GOP candidates sound like drooling idiots isn’t exactly new. They wouldn’t be where they are today if they didn’t sound like drooling idiots. Look at the White House. Would Present Occupant be there if he hadn’t managed to convince a lot of drooling idiots that he was the kind of guy they would like to sit down and have a beer with? Nothing at all like that guy Gore, with his correct English and ability to name the capitals of foreign countries like Canada and New Mexico!

So we got a president that the drooling idiots feel at home with, and unsurprisingly, it turns out that he really is a drooling idiot.

But, as Krugman says, “Don’t Blame Bush.” It wasn’t his idea to form a confederacy of dunces. Nor is he the reason the GOP is still trying to lead a confederacy of dunces.

The root cause goes back to the aftermath of the 1964 presidential election. The Republicans were keenly aware that their policies that favored bosses over workers, whites over blacks, wealthy over working class, and Wall Street over Main Street were, of necessity, unpopular, and that in an honest democracy, they were doomed to be the minority party forever.

But there were an awful lot of disgruntled people running loose in America. They tended to be poor, uneducated, and white. They were the segregationists, simmering over the injustice of black children attending school with white children. They were the non-union workers who resented the higher wages and job security union workers enjoyed. They were low-end workers, willing to believe that if they were loyal to the wealthy, they would be rewarded. They were the foot-washing southern Christians, angry about what they saw as libertine licentiousness and paganism.

I’m sure, back in the 60s and 70s, there were people in the GOP who looked at these people, people who coalesced around banners of ignorance and resentment, and realized that the GOP was playing with fire. But since these were still comparatively rational party operatives, they probably also realized that these bitter and marginal groups could be easily neutralized simply by setting them against one another.

The details of how, beginning with Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” the GOP pandered to the haters, the dispossessed, the religious nuts and the sellouts are well known.

It isn’t the first time a party has set out to cultivate a base from the vilest instincts of people. The Know Nothings pandered to racism and xenophobia. The antebellum Democrats pandered to slavers, and clear up into the Sixties, Democrats in the south ran on segregationist, anti-black issues. George Wallace, defeated in his first race when he ran as a liberal, vowed that “nobody is going to out-nigger me again.” After that he ran as a virulent racist, and won every time until someone shot him.

But a curious thing happened on the way to a majority party that got a boost from a bunch of docile, easily manipulated blocs; the blocs formed a confederacy, coalesced into an organized force, and took over the GOP.

The result was on show at the debate this week. Along with the double Guantanamos from skunks who advocate torture in order to get votes, and one after another condemning what among more normal people are known as constitutional rights and freedoms, there were three prepared to throw evolution out of the schools because it wasn’t god-ordained science.

The main problem the people now leading the GOP is, in a way, the opposite of their predecessors. The predecessors were trying to motivate an apathetic and apolitical set of blocs, some of whom (fundamentalist Christians) believed voting was a waste of time and even a little improper.

The leaders who arose from those same ranks face a different challenge. Their followers are still stone ignorant, pig-stupid, and proud of it, but now they want to be entertained as well. They’ve learned that politics can be a good excuse to pound one’s chest and yell “boo-yah!” and howl for the deaths of America’s enemies – who are whoever their leaders say they are.

But the big problem with showmanship is that in order to keep your audience engaged, each act has to be bigger and more exciting than the last. Once, being against communism would do it. Now that’s considered tame and old hat. Then being against Iran would do it. Then it was necessary to declare war on the French. Similarly, they went from “stop coddling criminals” to “tough on crime” to “torture anyone who could be a threat.” They went from “cut taxes” to “eliminate taxes,” with no mention of how this could be paid for. They went from “allow prayer in school” to “stop teaching anything that disagrees with the looniest religious doctrine we can find.”

At this point, the GOP has no recourse. They need to keep stroking these groups, knowing it’s political suicide but also knowing that they’ve irrevocably lost the mainstream for a generation or more. The only thing that can save them is a quick big implosion in the next election, hopefully before the scandals consume all of them.

So when you see the once-respectable John McCain advocating torture, or Guilliani talking about a “double Guantanamo,” or some of the really weird ones agreeing that abortion should be treated as murder, you know where it came from.

But it was fun watching that fatuous idiot Newt Gingrich orating at Liberty University today. Understand that the opportunistic and hypocritical Newt probably isn’t any more religious than I am. He was there to sing the praises, at commencement, of Lib-Ewe’s vulgar and buffoonish but now-quite-dead founder, Jerry Falwell. He did quite a good job of it, and I’m sure in quite a few southern trailer parks, people too stupid to understand what causes rain were dabbing their eyes and wondering why they hadn’t noticed what a fine, upstanding young boy that Newt was.

And if it was just about anyone other than Newt, the commencement speaker would have spent 45 minutes after the speech just washing his hands.