Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Last-Ditch Neo-Confederate Republican Nullification Strategies

Paul Rosenberg invites you to Meet the 12-Percent Solution in today's Salon:
What if there were a fourth branch of government that would allow the fans of “Duck Dynasty” to overturn Roe v. Wade, repeal Obamacare and pretty much nullify any federal law or Supreme Court decision they don’t like, based on the support of as little as 12 percent of the nation’s population? ... In tandem, the two blind spots have obscured the story of state-level conservative radicalization throughout the post-Vietnam era... The first [are] extensive state-level networks of Heritage-style free market think tanks (the State Policy Network) and Family Research Council-style social conservative think tanks (the Family Policy Councils). These have been instrumental in nourishing a culture of state-level right-wing activism that goes largely unnoticed by the national media... The second [are] ideas... presented as libertarian... “Since 2010, state legislators have introduced nearly 200 bills... challenging federal laws that they deem unconstitutional,” including anti-gun control bills in at least 38 states, and anti-Obamacare laws in at least 20 states. Such activism even “extends beyond the 50 state legislatures, spreading to county and local governments, including about 500 county sheriffs who have affirmed their commitment to ‘saying “no” to Obama gun control.’” Of course, nullification is unconstitutional. The text of Article VI is crystal clear... The stark disconnect between textual reality and the “constitutional” rhetoric of today’s Tea Party-era conservatism could hardly be clearer.
Yes, the Republican Party is now dependent on the desperate "energy" of a dying, shrinking Base of elderly rural straight white males who can be enjoined by fear-mongering and resentment-peddling into voting against their own best interests to support incumbent elites and is casting about for magical ways to prevail over swelling majorities in a diversiyfing, secularizing, planetizing American reality. They are failing and they will utterly fail. And they are drawing on neo-confederate intellectual resources that, at their most respectable, were invalidated by the chaotic dysfunction of the pre-constitutional Articles of Confederation period or, at their least respectable, were invalidated by the catastrophic slaughter of the American Civil War. These bad ideas have failed and they appeal to few and fewer anyway. We just need to make sure that in failing the failures don't get in the way of our successes, especially since climate change and resource descent are not operating on the timetable dictated by our usual incremental reformism and we need to be successful, like yesterday, to have a hope of being equal to our planetary problems.

4 comments:

jimf said...

> Yes, the Republican Party is now dependent on the desperate
> "energy" of a dying, shrinking Base of elderly rural straight
> white males who can be enjoined by fear-mongering and resentment-peddling
> into voting against their own best interests to support incumbent
> elites and is casting about for magical ways to prevail over
> swelling majorities in a diversiyfing, secularizing, planetizing
> American reality. They are failing and they will utterly fail. And
> they are drawing on neo-confederate intellectual resources. . .

What will the elite interests come up with to replace the "Southern
strategy"? The Transhumanist strategy? Perhaps Michael Anissimov's
"reactosphere" will give them a clue.

;->

Dale Carrico said...

Well, there has always been a second Southern Strategy -- involving the exploitation, via postcolonial financialization/developmentalism, of the global South by the global North, but the monopolar institutions of that postwar Washington Consensus are also in eclipse as neoliberal pieties are exposed and as planetary crises make new demands. The neglect of South America in news for US consumption is a key indicator of the anxiety over the failing of this second Southern Strategy. Nevertheless, I still think international shananigans are available to elite incumbents even as demographic realities in the US disable any populist coalition with plutocrats.

You know, I am far from thinking any stricto sensu post-property egalitarian communism has a future in the US or much of anywhere else -- even steeply progressive income (including capital gains income) and property and transaction taxes to provide the general income, healthcare, education, legal recourse for a legible scene of consent to the terms of everyday commerce together with a more comprehensive socialization of public and common goods to circumvent the structural violence of their unsustainable or inequitable administration would still leave room for considerable differences of class and culture which would surely open a space for more conventional conservative coalitions among elites and the traditionalists and the cautious who have temperamentally found such conservatives appealing the interests of which would impact public policy in ways that would still frustrate progressive democrats enough to keep us blogging.

As for Michael Anissimov, I am afraid his latest foray into an explicitly reactionary subbasement of the already ridiculous Robot Cult archipelago in a bid for a pond small enough to seem big in is a recipe for complete catastrophe I wouldn't wish on anyone, even a sparring partner of many years, even a bad faith sparring partner (I always said his futurism was reactionary in tone and by entailment, he always denied it, now look where he is).

jimf said...

> . . .a space for more conventional conservative coalitions among
> elites and the traditionalists and the cautious who have temperamentally
> found such conservatives appealing. . .

speaking of which, I've been rereading Susan Jacoby's _Never Say Die_,
and I came across the following remarkable aside (on p. 69, in Chapter 3,
"Boomer Beginnings and Age-Defying Denial"):

The author says "In 1970, with the recent memory of cities burning after
Martin Luther King's assassination, almost no one (with the interesting
exception of New York's liberal Republican senator Jacob Javits)
could see forty years down the road to President Barack Obama[*]"

She then provides the footnote:

[*] Actually, the year was 1958 when Javits predicted the election of
a black president by the year 2000. In a startlingly prescient essay
for _Esquire_ magazine, titled "Integration from the Top Down", Javits
asked, "What manner of man will this be, this possible Negro Presidential
candidate of 2000? Undoubtedly, he will be well-educated. He will be
well-travelled and have a keen grasp of his country's role in the world
and its relationships. He will be a dedicated internationalist with
working comprehension of the intricacies of foreign aid, technical
assistance and reciprocal trade. . . Assuredly, though, despite his
other characteristics, he will have developed the fortitude to
withstand the vicious smear attacks that came his way as he fought
to the top in government and politics. . . Those in the vanguard may
not expect to be the targets for scurrilous attacks, as the hate mongers,
in their last-ditch efforts, spew their verbal and written poison"


From a Republican. Amazing. (Of course, that party has somewhat
declined since then.)

Dale Carrico said...

Jacob Javits, a liberal lion in the Republican Party -- working class, too offended by Tammany corruption to join the Democratic Party, but partnered with Democrats to implement civil rights and Great Society programs. The Great Sort since 1965 definitely made Jesusland monolithically red while the urbanized coasts went monolithically blue. Too bad our faction-averse Founders pretended parties wouldn't emerge and wrote a Constitution for diverse coalitions rather than a more parliamentary model assigning responsibilities and blame more legibly for voters to judge the record by. If the presidential ticket included the Leader of the House and treated the vice-president as Senate majority leader this would probably be enough to disincentivize obstruction strategies by the minority (which has been a problem many times in our history -- the situation of Republican Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed and his elimination of the disappearing quorum as a de facto Democratic minority filibuster of progressive legislation is very instructive for those contemplating Reid's troubles with Republicans in our Senate), but of course, like intellectual masturbation about third parties daydreams of parliamentizing the Constitutional powers is a waste of time: the political fight to change the institutions to better solve problems would be a harder fight than actually fighting to solve the problems themselves even with the present dysfunctional institutions, hence the focus on institutions is almost always a functional distraction enabling the continuance of the problems in the form of expressing metaconcern about the context in which the problems flourish so that the problems flourish all the more. It seems to me intellectuals are especially prone to falling for tricks of this kind. Anyway, I'm rambling. It's an interesting topic though.