Cartoonist Thomas Nast first made the animal symbols popular in 1870 when he drew an elephant for the GOP, being frightened by a donkey (Democrats) wearing a lion’s skin.
Note to Substack folks: I will be taking weekends off from now on - it’s Spring and time to indulge in my bee-keeping and gardening. In future, I will also be asking people to consider a paying subscription to help support the bees; paying subscribers will be able to post comments in each article. Hope this is agreeable! Thanks for reading…
A Republican by-election seat in Alabama has just fallen to the Democrats for the first time in a decade – a landslide for the Democrats in a deep-red Republican zone. The 25 percentage point spread is an unmistakeable signal that the current Republican base of support for those old-time KKK values is about to be wiped out across the nation.
Women’s rights are beating Republican white privilege.
Marilyn Lands’ win came just as the state supreme court ruled that people can be sued for causing the death of embryos during a standard In Virto Fertilization process. She has made reproductive freedom a key part of her message.
The election had only a 2% turn-out, but it shows a statistical effect. It also shows social motivation. One other point to bring out: the Huntsville area has a high percentage of educated people and federal government employees, but even if we give a discount to the vote margin based on these factors, it is still an omen of disaster for the Republicans.
Not to sound tedious, but I have been saying this since the US Supreme Court – Donald Trump’s court of people-who-lied-when-they-were-asked-whether-they-had-an-opinion-on-reproductive-rights during their appointment proceedings – overturned Roe back in June 2022. Roe will be THE issue of November 2024. It has claimed Republican victims whenever an election has been held.
Repro rights have now entered the lexicon of the mainstream media, though I suspect it has not really penetrated its soul.
And only one aspect of the win is being reported: the upswing for the Democrats. What does it say for the ‘bottom rung’ of the political ladder: the Republican position?
As popularity for a cause diminishes, the more reasonable people leave it first. This amplifies the extremism of the remaining ‘purists’. Today, support is dropping for all right-wing newsletters and channels, so they push even harder to obtain a share of the ‘core’ believers. And Trump is a core - a cult, in fact.
What exactly is the Republican political plan as November approaches? They are behind Biden in almost every one-on-one poll, they don’t have a positive platform to work from, and their funds are drying up.
They appear to be absolutely oblivious to the unpopularity of their position.
Republican internal polling in Alabama showed that their candidate was on course for a comfortable 10-point win. Remember the “red wave” that was supposed to hit the Dems in the 2022 midterms?
This kind of error is important as an illustration of the future direction of the Republican party.
This is because the Republicans have boiled their support down to the essence - to the dregs of dixie, where the white privilege lies.
This has happened before.
And a book called “A Fever In The Heartland”, by Timothy Egan, describes what will happen next.
He takes us back to the years after the Civil War, when former Confederate general Bedford Forest raised a tide of newborn rebels — 40,000 Klansmen in Tennessee, a half million throughout the South, in every province of the former Confederacy – to be “a protective, political, military organization.”
In this original Klan, nightriders wore white sheets to made people think they were ghosts: the souls of those who’d died for a republic of slaveholders who had returned from their graves. During rampages, they often displayed skeletal hands from beneath their robes, rattled chains, or removed fake heads. A conical top made the wearer look much taller.
One thing they did not do, was burn crosses. That was not invented until the 1920’s revival.
They were free to farm and bank and own property, and eventually free to vote and hold office.
The Klan formally disbanded under an order from Forrest. He burned all records.
There the Klan would lie, for decades, until it revived under goading from novelists and propagandists. D.W. Griffiths, son of a Confederate colonel, was a filmmaker who produced “Birth Of a Nation” describing the injustice in the crushing of the South. In his film, the Klan saves the South from a Negro take-over. One in four Americans saw it within the first two years of its release, the most ever for a picture without sound.
Then a demographic shift happened, similar to the one today: immigration, urbanization, and the migrations of African Americans from the South to the North. The Klan feared that the nation was in danger. From 1890 to 1914, more than 16 million immigrants arrived in the United States. Most were Catholics from Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Poland. Some 10 percent were Jewish. The Klan described the influx of immigrants as a “menace” that threatened “true Americanism.”
Sounds like Trump today.
By 1925 one white man in every three wore the white sheets of the new Ku Klux Klan. In the golden age of fraternal organizations, the Klan was the largest and most powerful of the secret societies among American men — bigger by far than the Odd Fellows, the Elks, or the Freemasons, and vastly greater in number than the original Klan born in violence just after the Civil War.
Their goal was to rule from sea to sea, north to south, anchored in the White House. The governor of Georgia, Clifford Walker, told a Klan rally in 1924 that the United States should “build a wall of steel, a wall as high as heaven” against immigrants.
And if the flaming crosses that covered America in 1925 had not been extinguished by the shock of their leader’s sexual depravity, the Klan’s plan might have worked.
Today there is a striking parallel with the MAGA movement, whose leader is facing a life sentence for crimes against America.
Both the Klan and MAGA were led by a lying, bigoted extremist; both relied on hard religion; both used media to stoke hatred; both subverted the law; both used shock troops to cower the opposition.
And both came within a whisker of turning America into a nightmare state.
Klan parade in Washington, 1926.
They hated things different from themselves.
They would get a high school instructor fired for teaching a class in jazz dancing. They prohibited the teaching of evolution. The Klan backed a new law in Tennessee that made it a crime for a public school teacher to explain “any theory that denies the story of Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible.” The fear was that if evolution were accepted , it would imply that all people had a common origin.
They emerged into national politics as champions of the Republicans. The KKK’s voter restrictions in the South drove Black voter turn-out down from half of eligible voters who cast a ballot in the 1924 presidential election, to a few percent.
Their leader, David Curtis "Steve" Stephenson, had an unsightly passion.
He liked to rape women.
He bit them severely as he raped them.
When he was drunk, he enjoyed inflicting pain.
One woman, Madge Oberholtzer, was injured so viciously it appeared as if she had been "chewed by a cannibal." She took poison to end her life.
The poison took days to work, during which time she wrote down her experience.
Her testimony clinched the verdict against the rapist: jail, for life.
He claimed repeatedly that he was being framed; he was the victim of a “snare and a hoax and a witch-hunt.” Sounds familiar.
Though it aroused passion at the time, as soon as he was convicted, the KKK deflated.
Until recently.
Today’s Republican party has reverted to the mantle of white privilege.
Long before Republicans nominated Donald Trump for president, let alone before Trump refused to acknowledge electoral defeat, the congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein declared that the party had become “an insurgent outlier” that rejected “facts, evidence and science” and didn’t accept the legitimacy of political opposition.
What was this new K.K.K./MAGA movement about? Linda Gordon’s “The Second Coming of the K.K.K.: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition,” portrays a “politics of resentment” driven by the backlash of white, rural and small-town Americans against a changing nation. The K.K.K. hated immigrants and “urban elites”; it was characterized by “suspicion of science” and “a larger anti-intellectualism.”
Republican members of Congress repeat the racist perspective by upholding America as a white ethno-state. Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul A. Gosar have been set to launch an “America First Caucus” to promote “Anglo-Saxon political traditions” and stem immigration.
The attack on the Capitol itself was about more than just stopping the “steal” of the 2020 election. By attempting to reinstate Donald Trump as President, the purpose of the attack was, in the minds of the insurrectionists, to ensure the continuity of the white race and to reclaim the U.S. as a white ethno-state.
Klan newspapers like The Crusader, one of the white supremacist group’s most prominent publications, published a lengthy endorsement and defense of Trump’s message on the front page of its current issue under the headline: “Make America Great Again.”
Trump reified the notion that the U.S. is a land of white people, by white people, and for white people. His recurring campaign slogan of “Make America Great Again” was not a mere phrase, but a call to arms, encapsulating the ethos of his vision for the nation.
And because G.O.P. extremism is fed by resentment against the very things that truly make America great — our diversity, our tolerance for difference — it cannot be appeased or compromised with. It can only be defeated.
The problem for Republicans today is that with this as their keystone belief, their only future position is even further to the right.
Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) refers to today’s Republicans as “Team Extreme”.
Republicans who prefer to create constructive public policies are being pushed out by political performers.
As the Washington Post notes: “Every time a reliable Republican ally of leadership retires, the door opens for someone to mount an insurgent campaign that has little to do with legislation and a lot to do with theatrical promises of kicking down doors in Congress.”
The party now has dozens of representatives who come from safe seats and will dramatically and irresponsibly oppose must-pass bills to get attention from conservative media sites for their ideological passion.
That has left their conference virtually ungovernable, regularly relying on a vast number of Democrats to bail out House Speaker Mike Johnson.
And with dozens of Republicans deciding to retire from relatively safe seats this summer, the upcoming primaries will decide whether Republicans can get more functional.
If they cannot, I foresee the overturn of the remnants of the Republican party after a huge loss in November.
As Marilyn Lands showed, there are no ‘safe’ Republican seats.
The “white privilege’ foundation has been steadily shrinking. It is only large enough now to form a splinter group of strange people for kids to gawk at. “Who’s that driving down the street in the truck with the flags, Daddy?” “Nothing son – pay them no never-mind.”
The world has moved on.
Except for the Republicans.
When Mitch McConnell announced his retirement he also announced his endorsement of Donald Trump.
Yes, this is an act of self-serving cowardice, and it is also a sign of how bereft of political foresight the Republicans are today. He had practically destroyed American democracy by his court-stacking and obstruction of justice. Now he once again shows where the Republicans are headed: right into the embrace of a man who sells bibles to keep himself out of jail.
“It’s my favorite book,” says Donald about the “God Bless The USA Bible”.
It’s lucky we’re not blending religion and politics.
Trump is releasing the bibles with Lee Greenwood, the country music star who wrote “God Bless The USA”. He is so religious he has been married four times. Overshot even Trump on that one.
With even McConnell kneeling before Trump, the party is free to veer as far to the right as white privilege wants to go.
What will make Trump and the KKK-publicans happy?
This is where Donald is going:
· More glorification of violence like he threatened in Minneapolis when the crowds rioted after George Floyd was killed. We can expect military control over civilian justice.
· More right-wing Supreme Court justices to drive diversity farther away from America’s core values.
· The roll-back of environmental rules.
· Sexism that demeans women and assumes that their place is behind their men.
· Family-centric corruption with his relatives in charge of lucrative posts.
· A continuing tribute to fellow authoritarians like Putin.
· Relentless fabrication against the plain evidence of all the facts.
· A horror-show of incompetence and denialism if another outbreak like Covid ravages the country; remember the ‘inject Javax’ idea?
· More support of global right-wing causes; Richard Grenell, the former acting director of national intelligence under Trump, has already met with a variety of far-right leaders around the world since leaving the White House.
· Racist attacks on people of color and jeering at people with handicaps.
· More tax cuts for the rich, combined with renewed efforts to end the Affordable Care Act.
· And finally, the cancellation of justice that imprisoned the rioters who tried to steal a presidential election.
This is what the Republican platform will look like as November draws near…this is where it falls off the table as far as the backing of most Americans is concerned.
And they are completely unable to see this; to realize that there is a very different America on the march.
They will lose so badly in November that the next round of “conspiracy theory” will be horrific.
Of course, Donald will be behind bars then…so there’s that.
I would certainly discourage anyone from tormenting Trump by starting rumors that Lee Greenwood is having an affair with Milania. Just in case you were thinking of it.
But it does beg the question: what comes after this election? If the right wing finally flushes down after this last charge, what will be the next ‘opposition’ party?
Will it be a revived party of fiscal restraint?
Or one of hard-left politics, with social values on the agenda against a tradition of support for rich companies? Will the current Democratic Party become the party of the Right?
It’s going to be a time of great passions and core values.
I’m personally leaning towards a more social-oriented platform, because that is what global economies have been edging towards in the last decades…but anything is possible.
Technology, meaning AI and machine assembly, could come out of left field (as it were) and completely disrupt our work patterns and ownership meaning.
I wish I had a fast-forward button…
I know we will get there, but I’m tired of the drama. Perhaps you are as well.
However, drama is how we learn. Some of us, anyway. As long as you are not a Republican…
Reminds me of a couple of my favorite quotes:
"They [Republican party officials] are finding out that it’s not so easy to get divorced when you’ve given up your identity, pride, and morality in a marriage of convenience." – Dan Rather
“Democrats need to settle on a message about what they’re for. Then they need to be ruthless when it comes to going after Republicans. Democrats play chess. Republicans eat the pieces. It’s not the same game." – Reed Galen
“If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.” - President Dwight D. Eisenhower
Hopefully, your prognosis on the 2024 election results will prove to be correct. The possibility that the democrats turn to the right, which presumes that America’s corporate and banking interests turn their support towards the democrats, is disconcerting. But, as you point out, anything can happen in a world where the republicans have self-converted into the party of racism, Putinism and xenophobia.