Fighting Back

I don't mean to be a Rachel Maddow echo machine here, but she continues to make the most cogent and direct case for a particular big picture politics: the domestic Shock Doctrine and its ultimate goal, which is to keep Republicans in power indefinitely by crippling the ability of anyone--Democrats first of all--to successfully oppose them.  She outlined one aspect of this long-term strategy on Wednesday: bleed the unions of the money they would give to Democrats, and the corporate controllers of the GOPers are in forever.   

It seems to me to be a strategy so carefully planned and ready to go after the November elections, coordinated over a number of states as well as in the U.S. House, that it must have been developed and waiting to go, with just a few people empowered to decide to put it into motion.  I'll take a wild guess and say that would be the corporate bosses like the Koch brothers who are financing the Rabid Right tea party soldiers and the ghost organizations that dispense the money to fuel it.  Look at the tactics: flooding all these state governments with these extremist proposals to send the opposition into frenzied disarray, and get enough of the proposals enacted into law--the domestic political equivalent of Shock & Awe.  It's very unlikely those tactics arose spontaneously and coincidentally.  This was planned and coordinated, and not by Michael Steele or John Banal.  Talk about the political sideshow.  It's pretty much all sideshow--everybody from Glenn Beck to Donald Trump-- all distraction, and it's been working.

But not completely.  Beck is on the way out was Wednesday's news, but perhaps the more telling event is the apparent victory of  JoAnne Kloppenburg for supreme court judge in Wisconsin.  Her opponent, a Republican tool and injudicious backer of Governor Imperial Walker, was 30 points ahead a couple of months ago, in a usually ignored judicial election.  Walker's kill the unions law inspired unions to work for Kloppenburg but even with their support, she was outspent two to one.  But she still won, however narrowly.  Update 4/7: The apparent discovery of an entire town's uncounted votes has apparently changed the outcome.  This may well be legitimate.  But this is the swing vote on the court that decides whether Boss Imperial Walker's laws are legal according to the Wisconsin constitution.


This is a good sign, especially if it provides hope and motivation for continuing the fight in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere.  In Wisconsin, the next step is the recall of Rabid Right legislators, and the election of Democrats.  But then the Walker law has to be repealed (if the courts haven't struck it down by then.)  That's the real Endgame.  And we're a long way from that in time, so the battle is also against the usual attention span.

This election result (plus the overwhelming victory of a Democrat in Milwaukee who won Walker's vacated job) and the polls in various states may even provide a little jostle to John Banal and the Voldemort Brigade in DC before they jump off the cliff of shutting down the government.  On that I do think Howard Fineman is right--if it happens, tea partiers are going to celebrate, and if they do, GOPers may well pay a big electoral price.

As for the long-term strategy, you might wonder why now?  It's a high stakes gamble, after all.  I think it's because the long-term demographics aren't good for GOPers.  It is increasingly an old southern white people's party, serving the interests of old white billionaires.  For awhile the party played with attracting the upwardly mobile young of any race or ethnicity, especially Latinos, the fastest-growing category, but they are too invested now in racism on a number of fronts, especially as galvanized by their almost helpless response to the first black President.  They're not going to hold onto power by getting the most votes.  They have to tilt the playing field structurally, and use whatever other means to keep others from getting momentum.  If they relegate the Dems to a few years cleaning up their worst messes every once in awhile, that works for them.  It took FDR 12 years to reverse the worst of the past and start moving forward.  Those 12 years had effects that lasted through the 1970s.  Why, corporations and supremely wealthy people actually paid taxes in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations!  Can't have that.