Musings on Right Wing Delusions, Hallucinations, and Misuse of History

There are a lot of things about the contemporary American right, which has its origins in the wacko elite and popular Christian conspirary theories, many of them involving Jews, since Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire rather than in anti-Enlightenment conservatism, that are intriguing. One of the things about the radical right I find most interesting is the concerted use by some of the Republican faithful of the Dixiecrats to tar and feather, in an act of deflection, the Democratic Party with the stain of racism.

Such a populist strategy, while certainly demagogically effective with respect to the faithful, is, of course, ahistorical not to mention bizarre. While it is true that the Dixiecrats, the Southern Democrats that dominated the American South, was one of the fractions of the Democratic Party between 1877 and the 1980s and it is true that most Dixiecrats, including its moderate faction, was tied to Jim Crow, it is not true that the contemporary Democratic Party has, as one of its fractions, the Dixiecrats. The Democrats who dominate Austin, Dallas, and El Paso, Texas are not contemporary Dixiecrats. Rather they are an embodiment of the Democratic Party that emerged in the wake of Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson, Northern Democrats, and moderate and liberal Republicans passing the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Those actions, as LBJ told Bill Moyers it would, crippled the Democratic Party in the South where Dixiecrats reacted angilly to the civil rights activism of the Democratic Party and transformed the Democratic Party as a result into a party of Blacks, educated Whites, Hispanics, and Asians.

The Dixiecrats, of course, did not disappear nor were they raptured. Where they went was to the Republican Party, a party that became the heir of the Dixiecrats and the John Birchers after the mid-1970s. The shift from Dixiecrat to Republican took several forms. The shift geographically from Dixiecrats to DixieBirchPublicans was political and was stimulated by Democrat President Harry Truman integration of the military and LBJ and his allies passing of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in 1964 and 1965 respectively. It was political and demographic. Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, for instance, who ran against Truman because of his desegregation of the military, became a Republican in the wake of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. It was cultural. Republicans came, thanks to their recognition of the effectiveness of Dixiecrat George Wallace's rhetoric in the Midwest and even the Northeast, to adopt the discourse of Dixie populist ragoholism. Republican President Richard Nixon and Republican strategist Kevin Phillips referred to the Republican adoption of Southern states rights discourse (the Dixiecrats meant by this, of course, keep your hands off our Jim Crow) and the rhetoric of White anger at busing and affirmative action, as their Southern strategy, their strategy to take Dixie for the Republicans. Between the 1970s and today the Republicans engaged in a kind of cult like ideological cleansing and purification that cleansed moderate and liberal Republicans, Republicans in name only, from the party and the Dixiecrat and Bircher factions became dominant within it. The shift was also geographical as evidenced by the shift between the late 1960s and the 1990s of Dixie and Dixie's Whites, including its evangelical Whites, into the Republican camp. Many in the West, particularly the Intermountain West with its legacy of anti-Chinese racism likewise found a comfortable home in the dixified and birchified Republican Party. Blacks, of course, well those Blacks who were allowed to vote, increasingly switched from the Republican Party (the party at one time of Lincoln, Reconstruction, Radical Republicans, and occupation of the South) to the Democratic Party after the 1920s.

I want to end this brief post with some musings on cults in politics. The ideologically driven cleansing of the Republican Party of "RINOs" (as the Dixiepublicans and Birchipublicans called them) post-Richard Nixon points up the similarities between the contemporary right wing populist Republican Party and all sorts of inherently reactionary purifying religious sects and cults and all manner of political cults including the Cult of Hitler, the Cult of Stalin, the Cult of Pol Pot. All of these political cults, including the Cult of the Orange One or Tangholio, of course, were and are ideologically driven purification cults that had and have at their heart populist anti-intellectualism.