More A Cultural Argument

What Glenn Greenwald said:

Independently, the right-wing movement in this country has used as its principal rhetorical tactic over the last two decades the claim that they represent the "normal, mainstream Americans," while liberals are the subversive freaks on the coasts, hopelessly out of touch with mainstream American values. Hence, few things are more damaging to their political brand than for it to be acknowledged that on the most critical political issue of the decade -- Iraq -- they are about as isolated and fringe as a political movement can be. That is why they will deny whatever facts one presents, no matter how clear and compelling, which demonstrate just how repudiated their views are by the "normal, nonideological Americans" (h/t David Brooks).
Those facts squarely contradict the central politcal argument they have been making for two decades now, at least (which is really more a cultural argument than political argument). They now stand revealed as the fringe, out-of-the-mainstream movement, and they will do anything -- including just outright denying the clearest empirical data -- in order to prevent a recognition of that fact.

What I think is important here is Greenwald's point that what the Republicans have been doing for the past twenty years or so is making a cultural argument rather than a political argument. All of their political arguments are bogus and are generally shown to be bogus and are often admitted by the Republicans themselves to be bogus. I was reminded of this by the recent legal problems of David Stockman, who famously admitted that Reagan's "trickle-down" theory, whereby taxcuts for the rich were purported to trickle down to the poor, was all just blige designed to get the morons in middle America to go along with tax cuts for the rich. It happens over and over like that.

They're not really the "law-n-order" crowd as Nixon claimed; in fact, they cut Clinton's program that funded extra cops on the street and they've never met a corporate or regulatory scandal that they didn't want to sweep under the rug instead of prosecute, nor a terrorist whom they cared to actually, you know, prosecute and put in jail. And, Goddess knows, "rule of law" is a concept to which they are not merely indifferent, but actively hostile.

Even when they're in complete power, they don't criminalize abortion or living while being gay, because they know that, if they finally did those things, the rubes might start to wonder why their lives are still crap even though no more "babies" are being "killed" in "abortion mills" and even though gays are now afraid to exist.

They're not really the "fiscally conservative" party. They build pork-laden bridges to nowhere and can't keep track of all the money shipped off to Iraq. On pallets.

They're not really the "competent managers." After billions of dollars and a huge reorganization of government into the odiously-named Department of Homeland Security, they can't evacuate flood victims nor provide for those who manage to evacuate themselves.

One could go on and on. The point is that their political arguments are tripe and marketing, pasteboard mock-ups of that man behind the curtain. What they have, in fact, been making for two years is, as Greenwald notes, a cultural argument. And that cultural argument is ugly and it goes like this: The goddamn blacks and women and immigrants and Moslems are gonna come and take what's yours unless you help us to kill them. Don't you want a macho War President to deal with them? You know that you do.

It's time that we see them for what they are and begin to deal with what they really are, rather than what they say that they are. Because answering that cultural argument is what's finally helping the Democrats to whip the Republicans' asses.