Friday rant: what you sowed edition [View all]

[n2doc]

By Tom Toles

Anybody feeling particularly sorry for the GOP “establishment” because their voters are being unruly? I put this in the “deal with the devil” department. You can put it wherever you like.

Let’s begin with the “Southern Strategy” from the Nixon era. This followed the landmark passage of civil rights legislation that put the nation where it should have been from the very beginning. The GOP saw an “opportunity” to flip the South from Democratic to Republican, by appealing to what, do you think? Yes, the Democratic party alienated a huge swath of its voters by, well, doing the right thing. And they paid a big price for it. And the GOP responded, how? By seeing an opportunity, not to bind up the nation’s wounds, but to perfect dog whistle politics and stoking, fueling, encouraging the politics of resentment. Resentment against the idea that we needed to become one nation with liberty and justice for all. Way to go.

Continue on with the pandering to a stripe of religious conservative with a weakness for theocracy, a stripe the GOP elite had no real love or use for except at the ballot box. Then top it off with taking a genuine conservative skepticism of large government and manipulating that into a total giveaway to a tiny fraction of extremely rich, and by golly, you’ve created yourself a real time bomb there. Tick tick.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/tom-toles/post/friday-rant-what-you-sowed-edition/2012/02/16/gIQACIy5HR_blog.html