The Crazy Base Won’t Let the Republican Party Change
The Crazy Base Won’t Let the Republican Party Change
Bob Cesca, Host of The Bob & Chez Show, Media Producer
Posted: 12/06/2012 3:28 pm
In the wake of the election, there’s no doubt the Republican Party is capable of making some adjustments to rebrand itself. If nothing else, the party has demonstrated its proclivity for sloganeering and marketing and there are plenty of ways it can adjust its messaging. But it’s obvious to anyone paying attention that the base simply won’t allow the party to change in any meaningful way.
The base is deeply encased within the twisted, alternate-reality looking glass that the GOP has been constructing throughout the last three decades: a realm of anger, racial resentment, distrust of government, hatred of immigrants and violently anti-choice misogynists and demagogues. The party has deliberately incited these tendencies via the conservative entertainment complex, as David Frum called it on Morning Joe — AM talk radio, Fox News Channel and the like — and augmented it with the generous contributions of wealthy financiers who bankroll everything from astroturf campaigns to the bulk-purchasing of every book-length screed by Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck.
The problem this creates, of course, is that the Republican Party has been consumed by misinformed idiots with no substantial connection to the real world, and the first post-election PPP poll only serves to amplify this conclusion.
First, the good news. Fifty-six percent of Republican voters aren’t really interested in seceding from the United States.
Wait. Isn’t that kind of low given the seriousness of topic?
The bumper-sticker party of “these colors don’t run” — the party that practically branded the notion of American patriotism during the previous decade — is only around half-sure that it doesn’t want to totally abandon the United States it heretofore claimed to love so much. The other half is split between still making up its mind on secession and totally wanting to secede right away.
As I’ve written before, we can only regard this as fair-weather patriotism.
——> Continued
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/the-crazy-base-wont-let-t_b_2251945.html
I always find it funny in an ironic sort of way that the “party of Lincoln” is now the party of secession and concentrated in the southern states. How did that happen? Simple, Nixon and his strategists, seeing an opening to use against the Democrats over the passing of the Civil Rights Acts, courted the so called “Dixie-Crats” (in favor of white supremacy and Jim Crow laws) in the Democratic party to vote for the GOP. Over time these Dixie-crats took over the GOP party, like a cuckoo-bird invading the nest and kicked out the GOP moderates.
I have always advocated that we stop calling the Republican party “The Republican Party/GOP” and start calling it what it has actually become, the Dixie-can party.