TFG: Tom Nichols, yeah, I'm going there
These Fucking Guys: They seems shocked that their vaunted, SERIOUS party has become infested with Nazi's. I swear, they are some dumb fuckers for all their degrees and shit.
In the world of Neo-Cons, the foreign policy first, aggressive America posture assholes, there is this belief that they are really "conservative" because they advocate the use of American power to advance the cause of democracy to all the huddled masses of the world.
They were (and are) the cheerleaders to things like our adventurism in Iraq, and they are the ones that reprise the Beach Boys song with the "Bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran" because they feel that we should waste our soldier's blood, and our nations treasure to bring fragile (at best) democracy to places that really didn't want it to begin with.
And amongst this crowd, Tom Nichols is a vaunted figure. He is a scholar, having studied the Soviets in the 70's and 80's, and advised on strategy and tactics during the latter part of the cold war. He taught at the War College. I will admit he is one smart dude. But this isn't about that. No, this is about his final realization that his cozy home, The Republican Party, is full of Nazis. He penned this long article in The Atlantic about how the Republicans have a "Nazi" problem.
Tom Nichols
Gifted link, natch.
This was published a few days ago, I saw it and ignored it (because, duh, what the fuck did you think? And Tom, surely this isn't a huge revelation.)
Yesterday, I found time to actually tuck into this, and hoo-boy, what a wad of self indulgent fuckery, and willful self-delusion.
The trigger for Mr. Nichols' awakening? The imagery:
Over the past few months, during his agency’s chaotic crackdowns in Chicago and Minneapolis, the U.S. Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino has worn an unusual uniform: a wide-lapel greatcoat with brass buttons and stars along one sleeve. It looks like it was taken right off the shoulders of a Wehrmacht officer in the 1930s. Bovino’s choice of garment is more than tough-guy cosplay (German media noted the aesthetic immediately). The coat symbolizes a trend: The Republicans, it seems, have a bit of a Nazi problem.
And yes, this is in your face. But where the fuck were you Tom? Has it really taken until now and this level of blatent-ness to finally realize that he's been drinking in a nazi bar?[1]
He continues:
As a former Republican, I’m aware that the American conservative movement has spent generations fighting off intrusions from the far right, including the John Birchers and the Ku Klux Klan.
This is the "yeah, I know there has always been a fringe, but that was controlled" argument. You hear this often from the Chamber of Commerce or Country Club (aka. WSJ reading) Republicans, the "Yeah, we have them, but we can control them, and frankly, we need their votes or we would never be able to get our glorious tax cutz".
He then is surprised, I mean totally SHOCKED at how quickly in the 21st century that Nazism found a home in his beloved "Republican Party":
In 1991, President George H. W. Bush repudiated the former Klan leader David Duke, who was running as a Republican to be Louisiana’s governor. Today, Trump and his party haven’t bothered to even pretend to be appalled by the degenerates gathering under the GOP aegis.
Then, he heads off to a long and winding road, a soulful trip down his own personal journey:
When I first joined the GOP, in 1979, the party around me did not seem hospitable to Nazis. A liberal Black Republican, Edward Brooke, had just finished two terms as our junior senator from Massachusetts; the liberal Republicans Lowell Weicker and John Chafee represented Connecticut and Rhode Island, respectively. In college, I worked in the Massachusetts state House for our hometown representative, a young and principled working-class Democrat (my GOP membership was not a disqualifier; imagine that). I got to know Republican legislators on Beacon Hill because they were close friends with my Democratic boss. Party affiliations were about political disagreements among Americans, not markers of antithetical worldviews.
Ah, there it is, I am not racist, and the people I associate with and caucus with aren't because we have Black friends.
I swear to God that canard really needs to be taken out back and given the Old Yeller treatment:
Because it is so fucking tired and predictable. It is like the buffoon who says "I'm not racist, but ..." and then goes full throated racist. No dog whistles there man.
He then fast-forwards to 1990, and some early signs that the racist and retromingent shitbirds were beginning to taint the purity of Republicans:
The country and the GOP were in the hands of Bush, the ultimate moderate, but extremists were making inroads to power. The populist demagogue Pat Buchanan, crusading against modernity and multiculturalism, challenged Bush in 1992 and garnered 23 percent of the Republican-primary vote. Bush, in turn, gave him the stage at the Republican National Convention in Houston. Buchanan’s speech, which envisioned a “religious war” for the country, shocked many Americans.
Now, if you've read on the slide of the Republican party, the party of Lincoln and emancipation, to what it is today, you have no doubt heard about the fuckery of Pat Buchanan. He started in politics as a speechwriter for Nixon, and was part of the implementation of the "Southern Strategy". Anyhow, if you read the outstanding books by Rick Perlstein, you will see plenty of what brought Robertson into the forefront.
Then he goes to the favorite focal point of blame for the current crop of Never Trump ex-Republicans: Newton Gingrich:
A few years later, Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia carried Buchanan’s culture war into the House speakership. For Gingrich, politics was solely about winning; his scorched-earth approach treated opponents as enemies and compromise as treason. He wanted votes, and wasn’t concerned about who was animated by his viciousness.
Ah yes, it would be convenient to be able to point at Newt, and the Contract on America as the epigenisis of the alt-right, and the nazification of the Republican party (and the wider "conservative" movement. But that dog won't hunt.
He goes on to point out that two candidates (who lost, BIGLY I add) were "decent" men, Senator John McCain, and Mitt(ens) Romney, really tried to hold back the deluge. But if we hadn't elected Obama, and if the Tea Party and the Birthers hadn't had so much traction, and if Trump hadn't used that wedge to lever his way into office, we would be a much more rational place.
Ah, what a bunch of ...
If only they had realized the folly:
Soon after McCain’s loss to Obama, the Tea Party movement barreled into American politics. I was among those appalled by the Tea Partiers’ juvenile public behavior and anti-government nihilism; others believed they represented a new grassroots movement and the future of the party. In the end, their revolt against government bailouts soured into a giant yawp of anger at the first Black president.
Again, I will posit that this is a cynical reading, that there was a chance that this hard fork into indecency and just bat-shit crazy proto nazi behaviour was cuckoo on all levels. "If only we had listened to our better selves.."
Grrrr.
He then goes on to talk about a soul searching session (a series I suspect) let by the Lincoln Project's Stuart Stevens to determine where it all went wrong:
I asked Stevens to tell me when and where the GOP went wrong, and whether the devolution into a haven for Nazis was inevitable.
For Stevens, racism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. White voters were alienated by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the violence around the 1968 Democratic primaries. As Black voters deserted Republicans, the segregationist George Wallace proved with his ’68 presidential run that white southerners were up for grabs. Richard Nixon made a cunning and cynical calculation to sweep up those disaffected white voters, using appeals to “law and order” to stoke racial anxiety. By the 1970s, the GOP was the de facto white party in the United States.
For the record, Mr. Stevens is clear eyed, and apologetic at his part in this trajectory.
Nichols then goes on to admit that while Nixon and Reagan were clearly racist (presumably because of their age and the era they grew up in) but that they didn't lead that way.
And that gets me to why Tom Nichols is This Fucking Guy.
He pretends that Reagan didn't govern as a racist.
The man that kicked off his successful campaign at Philadelphia Mississippi, the center of a bloody civil rights era murder was not an accident. His coding of "State's Rights" was more than a wink to the segregationalist south, his "welfare queens" schtick, and much more were blaring foghorns to the racists, and white supremecists. You know, the proto-nazis.
No, Tom prefers to swaddle himself in the comfortable cotton wool and pretend that the extreme parts of his coalition were really unable to hold sway.
Well, if that's the case, why the fuck didn't the party excise them like one would a cancerous tumor?
Oh, it's because you would then return to the long dark after the New Deal where Republicans were mostly irrelevant, and they had to adopt popular positions like the liberals to win any elections? You, like all your fucking "intellectual" kinfolk tolerated and welcomed those extremists because the truth is, without them, and their votes, you would not have had presidents Reagan, HW Bush, and Bush.
President Johnson, a real son of a bitch in real life, fought for the civil rights laws, to right the wrongs of the post civil war segregation and persecution of Black Americans, and he knew that it would cost the Democrats the support of the south for a generation. And he did it anyway, because it was the right thing to do.
Republicans welcomed those disaffected racist fuckers, and tried to control them. And now, the civil rights protections are being eroded faster than anyone ever thought possible (thanks to that fucker, Chief Justice John Roberts), and we are amidst a Trumpian MAGA dynasty, and these fucking guys think that they might be able to regain some control of the monster they created.
It is too fucking late.
I will leave it with this last pull-quote:
What can Americans do in the face of moral rot in a major political party? The only short-term answers are shaming, shunning, and mockery—and punishment at the polls. Decent citizens must ostracize those among them who toy with Hitlerism. Americans—especially journalists—should resist becoming inured to fascist rhetoric. No one should rely on euphemisms about “extreme” comments or “fiery” speeches. Call it what it is: Nazi-like behavior.
I will repeat my line from above: It is too fucking late. And apparently, any Republican who has even a scintilla of shame left in their body has departed to "spend time with their family".
My fear is that because of the Electoral College, and the self sorting of ideological groups, that there will never be sufficient drubbings in elections to put this fuckery to bed.
And even if there was, it would take many cycles of humiliation (and those are 4 year cycles). I struggle to believe that will ever happen. Because, while Nichols may finally realize he's been in a Nazi bar after all these years, there are enough nazis and nazi-adjacent Americans that will continue to feed and nurture this cancer for a long time.
Sadly, this is who we are.
Ok, I lied, his last 'graph is fitting to end on:
The Republicans have a Nazi problem, yes. But this means that the United States also has a Nazi problem. The responsibility for defeating it in the 21st century falls, as it did in the 20th, to everyone—of any party or creed—who still believes in the American idea.
Now, he's saying it is all of our responsibility to fix it. Ok, yeah, but admit that it was your accommodation of these racist fucks that got us here. It would have been much less work had their Sainted Ronnie not explicitly court them, and the Republican elites had not tried to harness their energy in the pursuit of power. Alas, this isn't Pottery Barn, they broke it, but we all gotta fix it. And it sure feels like we are losing the fight at the moment.
1 - an oblique reference. If you are at a dinner party with 10 other people who are not Nazi's, and a Nazi sits down. Unless all of you get up and leave, you are all Nazi's. Paraphrasing, but I have heard that told many many times.
