THE GOP IS A NEO-CONFEDERATE PARTY NOW – DEVOURED BY THE SOUTH & THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT!

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Below are “excerpts” from the above-listed salon.com article of Nov. 4, 2015.

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When Lester Maddox was governor of Georgia in the late 1960s, he insisted that the problem with the state’s prisons was “the poor quality of its inmates.”

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Maddox was a Democrat and an ardent defender of the Apartheid South, not exactly an American statesman. Yet his defense of Georgia’s prison system turns out to be a perfect metaphor for today’s Republican Party, created when political consultant Kevin Phillips realized that Nixon’s 43.9 percent, added to George Wallace’s 13.5 percent of the popular vote in the 1968 election, was the beginning of a coalition that would ensure a permanent Republican majority in the South. (Phillips has spent the second half of his life atoning for and writing about his Southern Strategy.)

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To understand the posturing of the Republican candidates this year, you have to take into account the quality of the inmates––the Southern, conservative, anti-immigrant base that dominates the party Lincoln helped create to confront the nativism and anti-immigration politics of the Democrats and Know Nothings in the 1850s.

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The candidates––not their backers and constituency-group leaders––got most of the media attention at last month’s Values Voters Summit in Washington because they are the candidates––and because their pronouncements, which range from deeply disturbing to utterly risible, are newsworthy.

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When Ted Cruz implies that if elected, he will kill Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, that’s news. When Mike Huckabee promises to invoke the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to ban abortion with the stroke of a pen, because the unborn are fully fledged citizens of the United States (“None of your daughters and daughters-in-law called you up and said ‘Guess What? I’m going to have a blob of tissue.’”), that’s also news. As is Rick Santorum’s promise to pass a constitutional amendment defining marriage “as between a man and a woman.”

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As is, I suppose, Donald Trump’s truculent defense of Christmas. “I love Christmas. You go to stores now and you don’t see the word ‘Christmas.’ It says ‘Happy Holidays’ all over. I say ‘where’s Christmas?’ I tell my wife ‘don’t go to those stores!’ I want to see Christmas!”

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The inmates

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Where’s the market for political discourse of this caliber? It plays particularly with the constituency groups that make up today’s Republican Party.

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The Values Voters Summit is an annual production of the Family Research Council, Tony Perkins’s non-profit (and tax-exempt) foundation that for decades has been at the center of anti-abortion, anti-LGBT campaigns. During the presidential election cycle, its national and regional events are a magnet for candidates in pursuit of the Republican evangelical base. This year, roughly 2,500 attended the D.C. event.

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“You’ve been amazing! And to have such a fantastic room!” Donald Trump said as he wrapped up his 30-minute “speech.” The Don Rickles, Vegas-style sign-off was pitch-perfect for Trump, even if waving his Bible in the air as he closed seemed contrived, and even if he had no idea of the second bananas who opened and closed for him.

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Martyrdom is one powerful Christian theme, redemption another.

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The road goes on forever and this party never ends––at this event, at CPAC, at Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom gatherings, at hundreds of venues and before tens of thousands of activists across the country, where the religious right, the Tea Party right, and the American Conservative Union, et al. convene.

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Until it ends, the neo-Confederate, mostly white, Christian party that Kevin Phillips envisioned in 1968 continues as half of our republic’s two-party system.

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