If you don't know what "Harold...call me" signified in 2006, ask your older sibling.
20 years ago, the Republican party was every bit as racist as they are today. Leadership just hid it better and, with the assistance of the legacy media, managed to get away with it. Along with all the other poisonous tools in the GOP toolbox -- Conservative fundamentalism, xenophobia, homophobia, anti-choice, anti-civil rights and so on -- racism won elections for terrible people with terrible ideas. Or, to put it more clearly, without all the hate and paranoia that Conservative media kept whipping up on the Right, not only could Republicans never win another election, there was a decent chance in some places they'd fall to third place behind a Green candidate, or a Libertarian candidate, or an out-and-proud racist.
See, the Republican party was and is every bit a coalition party -- a "Big Tent" party -- as the Democrats, but the Republican coalition is made up of the worst people in America, held together by a common, generalized hatred of the government (except when they run it), a whole assload of whiny grievances, and anything that smacks of "the Left". And "the Left" is anyone Hate Radio and Fox News tells them is "the Left" on any given day.
That mob of bigots and imbeciles is what Republicans seeking higher office have to work with, which is why they spent huge amounts of cash hiring scumbags like Rick Wilson. To do the filthy job of appealing to the mob by proxy so as not to get their hands dirty. And the key to this shell game was to keep the bigots and imbeciles corralled within the Fox News/Hate Radio ecosystem (and never let them within a mile of the legacy media) while trotting the candidate out on safe spaces like Meet the Press or Face the Nation where they could mouth all the usual platitudes and never get any push-back.
In 2006, the problems began when the streams got crossed, because back then it was still possible for Democrats to run on calling out Republican racism and corruption when it broke into the open --
-- and have that put the Republican candidate on the back foot for the rest of the campaign.
That, and this... (VoteVets ad):
Democrats could run on being unabashedly in favor of medical science:
In Purple-but-trending-Red-fast Montana, Democrat Jon Tester could squeak out a narrow victory over incumbent Republican Senator Conrad Burns by a margin of 0.87%, or 3,562 votes out of 406,505 cast. Tester ran as "that neighbor you trust even if your politics are different" and was aided by the wider "Blue Wave" trend across the country.
Then along came Barack Obama, and the bigots and imbeciles were no longer content to sit in the cheap seats, hoping that whatever mug the party bosses offered them would make good on all the promises that Hate Radio was making.
They kicked down the doors and came storming out into the public square, and the reaction from the legacy media was to squeeze their eyes shut even harder and pretend that none of this was what it very much was.
First, they rolled out their oldest and most reliable deflection tactic: Both Sides Do It. What follows are from the July 25, 2010 Meet the Press transcript, interspersed with some remarks of my own made at the time.
DAVID BROOKS: So we were trained in a certain way. A different sort of media, squabble culture, has come up on the left and the right, which, which decides their--they build audience by destroying other people. They don't know anything about policy, they don't care about government, they just want that squabble.
See! See! The Right AND the Left do it!
The Right AND the Left “don't know anything about policy". The Right AND the Left
“don't care about government”.
Not one statistic.
Not one correlation.
Not one fact.
Not one blurry security camera video of what might have been the shadow cast by a fact.
Not one artist's sketch of what some witnesses believe a fact might look like.
Not one of fact's neighbors telling the evening news that "Fact was kind of a loner who kept pretty much to himself."
Nothing.
To his credit, E.J. Dionne tried hard to push back:
DIONNE: Look, there is a concerted conservative campaign on part of the movement, a minority of the movement…to use race to split people. Glenn Beck says Obama has a "deep-seated hatred for white people." J. Christian Adams, a Republican activist pushing this new Black Panthers story, says the Obama Justice Department is motivated by a "lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law." Now, there are people playing with this racial politics out there. I am not saying, the NAACP certainly isn't saying that this is the whole conservative movement…or most of the conservative movement or most of the tea party. But it's a part of this strategy, and people should condemn it.
Got that? Dionne shows up with actual, representative quotes from real Conservative leaders with real media and electoral power.
So how will that clear, well-documented and devastating argument be rebutted by America's Most Reasonable of Conservatives? He who took the trouble to enunciate “If Your Mother Says She Loves You, Check it Out” as his Golden Journalistic Rule just moments ago?
Exactly how you'd think:
BROOKS: There are liberals who call conservatives racist as a matter of tactics, too.
Really? Who? Name some. Quote some.
Nothing. Just...both sides.
Then comes deflector tactic number two: the anecdotal and highly-suspect "eyewitness account".
BROOKS: Listen, I was out jogging. You wouldn't know it to look at me. I was out jogging in the mall. I was at a tea party rally, tea party rally. Also there was a group called the back--Black Family Reunion, celebration of African-American culture. I watched these two groups intermingle, sitting at the same table, eating, watching concerts together. Among most of those people there was a fantastic atmosphere of just getting along on a, on a warm Sunday afternoon.
Got that? David Fucking Brooks -- easily the most ubiquitous "Reasonable" Conservative spokesman in America -- absolutely will not touch that question [of racism in Republican politics] with a 10-foot Gallup Poll. Instead, he airily asserts that, somehow, Glenn Beck and J. Christian Adams don’t methodically play on the fear, racism and paranoia of millions of Pig People for personal and partisan gain...because he saw some people getting along on the Mall in D.C. once.
Thus ends our brief excursion to 2010 and the wild lengths the legacy media was willing to go to to pretend the GOP was something which it very much was not.
So what changed? Meet the Press is still garbage. Brooks and his dozens of imitators are still overpaid hacks peddling Both Sides claptrap. Hate Radio and Fox News are still what they always were. So what changed?
What changed was the Republican party's approach to the concept of "shame".
Conservatism was built on an ethos of never, ever apologizing for anything. As I've mentioned many times on this blog, on the Right, the only acceptable way to admit you were wrong is to cop to not being conservative enough. Republican policies that go horrendously awry are never the problem -- the problem is always that they weren't implemented aggressively enough. Remember, Conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed.
And inevitably, this Conservative culture of ignorant, belligerent certitude ran smack into Republican policies and rhetoric for which any decent human being should feel ashamed. So, faced with a choice between chucking the policies and the hateful, racist rhetoric, or cauterizing their conscience and killing any sense of shame...the base, in their millions, chose the latter.
They had already been thoroughly humiliated when their fanatical allegiance to George W. Bush very publicly blew up in their faces. Pile on top of that the intolerable existence of a Black Democrat in the White House and they were ready to follow any demagogue, no matter how shitty and corrupt he may be, to the ends of the Earth as long as he promised them they would not only never again have to be ashamed of the cowardly racist morons that they were, but under his regime, their bigotry and stupidity would be celebrated so hard that the Liberal tears would never end.
And that is how +70 million Americans came to finally, happily divest themselves of the virtues that make for a decent human being.
And since that was their choice -- and we believe in personal choice -- in doing so they have relieved us of any obligation to treat them as decent human beings.
They have worked hard over the course of many decades to make themselves contemptible.
The least we can do is honor their decision by treating them with contempt.
