How Sleazy Christian Con Artists Took Over the GOP

[struggle4progress]

32. It's a sloppy analysis. What happened is that the GOP became more and more reliant

on modern advertising tricks to ensure it would win

This began when Nixon first decided to hire professional ad-men to design his campaign. Part of the game was to target new demographics for the GOP to activate. In Nixon's case that meant an appeal to Southern racists who willingly fled the Democratic party of the once-solid South, angered by the Federal-level successes of the anti-Jim-Crow movement

Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign with a coded bow to the racists, by traveling to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were infamously murdered in 1964, and giving a speech on "states rights" -- the old language of the Confederacy, which had later been taken up anew by the segregationists. But Reagan also began reaching out to the right wing religious fundamentalists, as a demographic that could help the GOP win

The negativism of the GOP under Gingrich's leadership also reflects an advertising technique. The ad-men do not want the potential customer happy and comfortable when the sales pitch begins, as then there is no motive to buy: what is desired, instead, is a potential customer who is somewhat anxious and unhappy, because the pitch can then be framed as "a cure for your troubles." The GOP tried harder and harder to make America jittery and nervous, rendering it more likely to buy the pitch for the GOP brand

By the time of Bush II, Rove had carried this combination of modern advertising outreach and careful bean-counting to an extreme: the GOP purchased and analyzed extraordinary amounts of detailed personal information to help them target and motivate potential GOP voters in a fine-grained way based on individual data. They also increasingly reached out to the rightwing fringes, hoping to engage them once again in politics on the GOP side. And the fringes brought with them a rhetoric that produced anxiety, which was useful for selling the GOP to the public

The old-style business Republicans were not at all innocent in this regard: independent of their social or religious beliefs, they supported and funded such outreach as part of a strategy for winning elections

The problem, of course, is that the GOP thus alienated more and more of its centrist support in the process. The party figured it could do so safely, since it seemed a net gain if they lost only one centrist for every two or three disaffected xtremists brought from the fringes into the GOP fold. But the increasing extremism of party loyalists began to fuel centrist flight. Today the GOP has much less centrist support than it once did, and the extremists are much more visible and vocal

An important thing to recognize is that the bizarre GOP coalition does not represent a natural coalition, formed by interest groups with similar material interests coming together to work for a common goal: it was deliberately and cynically forged by advertising methods, bringing together fringe groups to vote in support of the GOP. It is not a stable coalition, and as it unravels the GOP has resorted to vote-suppression to attempt to maintain control

Another important thing to recognize is that one cannot persuade ideologues, whose world-views are separated from reality: it is simply impossible to engage in meaningful dialogue with the diehards, whether they be laissez-faire anti-government libertarians, Christian dominionists, neo-Confederate racist secessionists, atheist Randian objectivists, corporate authoritarians, anti-feminists, or whatever. And the worst of the diehards will never hear anything except what they want to hear -- so they will always rationalize contradictions in statements from candidates whom they believe might hold their views. The game, as always, is in the center -- which is to say, the game consists of redefining the center, reconstructing the center, and holding the center

I myself do not particularly like the Christian rightwing. I regard the Christian rightwing as potentially dangerous, and as decidedly culpable in the deterioration of modern US politics, but it is certainly not the only player here, and in many respects it is not really in control of this process. The Christian rightwing has easy access to many butts sitting in pews, and that gives it some clout, but many of those butts are probably reachable by outsiders, if approached properly. To simply blame the Christian rightwing requires that we overlook important features of our current political pathology