GOP = Tea Party = White Racism

Whatever level of coyness or enthusiasm prevails from moment to moment in the treatment by elected Republicans and high-placed Republican organizational muckety-mucks of the various fascist fulminators of the white-racist christian-talibanist greedhead-gunnut-antigument Tea Party Movement, the embrace by minority leader Mitch McConnell and other "mainstream" Republicans of the palpably racist wingnut-enthusiasm-du-jour that would repeal language in the 14th Amendment's already-qualified assignment of American citizenship to people born in the United States is of a piece with the "Birthers" who cannot bring themselves to accept the legitimacy of our native born President Obama because of the foreignness of one of his parents, to be generous, or simply because he is black, to be blunt.

The Republican Party explicitly depended on the white-racist Southern Strategy to maintain its hold on American politics in the decades in the aftermath of the great but still incomplete accomplishments of the mid-century Civil Rights era and now, as the efficacy of that Southern Strategy is blunted in the face of the changing attitudes and changing demographics of post-segregation America, they speak with the hysteria of a white-racist minority panicked at the prospect of the loss of their unearned privileges -- all the while ignoring their own gain in a more equitable and diverse world of peaceful peers -- seeking to turn back the clock by any means necessary, to dis-invent a nation of immigrants, to dis-invent civil rights, even to dis-invent Emancipation. (What, after all, is the championing of a permanent precariat of informal-illegal laborers but a neo-feudalist re-institutionalization of slavery grounded yet again on white-racism?)

I have no illusion about the gains the GOP might make in the short-term of this mid-term election with a flood of corporate dollars and the vestiges of generations of still-intact party apparatus to wield (I haven't fallen for the doomsaying either, tho', by the way, I happen to think Democrats will maintain, if slimly, their Congressional majorities), but the tide has turned on the reactionary GOP, they have remained out of touch with secular multicultural America too long, they have remained in denial about the planetary vantage of networked-politics and environmental problems too long. The consummation of the Movement Conservative era of the GOP inaugurated in the Administrations of frowny-faced Nixon and smiley-faced Reagan in the catastrophe of the killer clown Administration of George W. Bush is past -- the last chance to install successfully the authoritarian regime entailed by their assumptions was lost with the Democratic gains of 2006. (And those who would protest that their mythology can't accommodate a racist Reagan even if they'll concede a Nixonian one, if anything the symbolism of the "silent majority" -- that would, after all, morph soon enough into Reagan's "moral majority," neither of them actual majorities, by the way, but, hey -- was if anything more subtle in its racism than Reagan's oafish signals via "welfare queens" and "strapping young bucks" abusing food stamps and championing of "states rights" in Mississippi and shout-outs to Bob Jones University.) The next actually-important election in these terms will be the election of Barack Obama to his second term in 2012, when we will see whether or not the palpable self-marginalization of the tattered racist-christianist-anti-government Movement Conservative coalition will subside into its final silence with a whimpering whine or in a hideous hail of bullets to the horror of us all.