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(Article changed on February 4, 2013 at 16:17)
by AllHatNoCattle.com
As Karl Rove's career crashes -- from discredited
dirty-trickster to failed super-fundraiser/strategy wizard and lastly mortified
TV pundit -- one clear narrative emerges: what made him famous is now unmaking
his party. Yearning for that golden age when the Dubya Dunciad reigned,
the right sanctifies Rove's schemes of glory: "if we can only tweak his
winning social wedges, national glory is ours again." Thus conservatism
embraces its minority status, doubling down on delusions of lost grandeur.
Bursting with the arrogance of all great con artists, Rove
once shared his life goal and rightwing wet dream: a "permanent Republican
majority." Often wrong but never in doubt, Dubya's master dirty-trickster
revealed a party's stunningly reverse logic. In fact, his broken propaganda
machine now sends the right off myriad cliffs, making Rovism the greatest
political boomerang of our age. All the money in the world won't save the
"party of stupid" when devolving into edgier, more divisive social wedges.
Division, the demise of Rove teaches, cuts both ways.
Yet unlike Rove's manipulations, offering a modicum of
surface plausibility, today's lesser lights mistake divisive wedge tactics for
neo-Biblical commandments. Just keep on trucking, they think, turning up the
volume: abortion transcends all political context when reduced to "murder of
the unborn," gays, minorities and immigrants don't merit first-class
citizenship, capitalism isn't an economic grab bag, but God's way to bless
wealth-producers and immigration reform is unAmerican "amnesty." And now, with
post-election fury, the violence of private firearms rears its ugly muzzle.
Hardly immune from his own outdated propaganda, Rove's
career failures track the descent of his tumbling party. Compounding his
well-deserved guilt by association with our worst president, Rove badly misread
the '08 election (and Obama), then last year hit bottom by squandering $300+
million with his reactionary PAC, crowned nicely with a public meltdown on FOX
election eve --- stubbornly assailing actual election results that offended his
own promises. In the meantime, his "party of stupid" kept its minority position
intact by lacing the following Rove wedge issues with poisonous extremism:
1) Self-defeating Abortion Absolutism. Though abortion commands unshakeable majority
support, the GOP drove this loser into the ground, igniting a full-scale
rampage against women's rights. No longer "pro-life" vs. "pro-choice," zealots
impugned abortion as "murder," forbidden even after rape and incest. Chatter
about "legitimate rape," every pregnancy a gift from God, proved how a few
buffoons poison a national slate. In short, the abortion donnybrook got waylaid
with egregious displays of ignorance about human procreation, thus assuring a
backlash of women voters. Overplaying bad wedges has reversed the long-term
aspects of debate, to wit: 1) women should have full rights to control their
own bodies (plus defy invasive violations); 2) government should not get
"between a pregnant woman and her doctor;" and 3) buffoonery about human
procreation produces a predictable backlash.
2) Insult Minorities, Devolve to Minority. Like Rove, Republicans still pander to old, white
voters by faking history: America is exceptional thanks to white people, as if
no other crowd mattered. Even such racist pitches, however, require far more
nuance than we saw in 2012, whether coded (the 47% of less "real Americans") or
overt (slurring Obama with Birtherism). Unwisely, Romney-Ryan took divisive
wedges to extremes by dividing America into first class citizens ("the makers")
and moochers ("the takers"), separated by income, class, and ethnicity.
What Romney did was domesticate Rove's nastiness about (often foreign)
minorities while ignoring blatant, demographic shifts of late. Tribal
divisiveness only works as a scalpel, per Rove, not a bludgeon, per today's
wingnuts. How can the "party of opportunity" and "upward mobility" undermine
its core position by reifying the discriminatory status quo? Who wins in a
"country of immigrants" by demonizing immigration, or denying citizens rightful
voting privileges, even implying support for a sitting president is somehow
unAmerican?
3) Gay Rights Ascendant. Though moderating its
attacks, today's GOP defies the majority cultural shift that aligns gay rights
with our heroic struggles for civil, women's and minority rights. Let freedom
ring, when no one else is harmed, and gay marriage fits this standard. Thus,
the right forfeits its main talking point (gays threaten traditional marriage)
while sounding bigoted and backward, both about the science of sexuality and
modern trends. Full-fledged homophobia, like anti-abortion excesses, backfired this
election, and the majority message grows: gay rights are human rights and the
state should support, not undermine stability between loving, consenting
adults. New politics routs old-time, reactionary prejudice so mark another
wedge as losing its edge.
4) Mash the Moochers.
Romney leaned on rightwing economic memes with his "blame the needy" class
warfare. Insuring a boomerang, however, the autocratic Romney-Ryan clique took
this wedge over the line, as majorities were indicted simply for not being rich
(or "wealth producers"). Further, pitching lower taxes for the rich
backfires when multitudes understand taxation is a zero sum game: if the rich
pay less, everyone else pays more. Like outmoded crusades against abortion or
gays or women, only dense billionaires dare indict the jobless for wanting jobs, the poor for being poor, or the sick for wanting health care. What Rove used
with care Romney wielded like a club and was thus mortified for his worst
moments. Romney's one positive is perhaps being the last politician dumb enough
to indict millions of voters he should have actively embraced -- probably not.
5) Gun worship.
Though AWOL in the last election, gun worship triggered the Bush-Rove assault
machine. Today, however, the merger of tragedy and common sense indicts the
entrenched GOP-NRA ideology, dramatized by answering the latest bloodbath of
innocents with unhinged, pro-gun rants. That owning guns, the holy of holiest
social wedges, is even on the table augurs ill for the rightwing, an expense of
spite in a waste of shame. Strident defense of unregulated military hardware,
just as fervently as Romney defended predatory capitalism, undermines this once
potent rural-urban wedge. Framing has evolved from Second Amendment
misreadings, now setting the dubious right to assemble arsenals vs. the
inalienable rights of our most fragile youngsters to survive kindergarten. That
opposes "gun rights" ominously with basic human rights to breathe, and so
anticipate outcomes parallel to ongoing abortion, gay, minority, and immigrant
rights. Wedges lose when universal human rights, if not commonplace compassion,
trump perceived electioneering.
Minority Status Better Than None?
My argument positing the backlash of Rove's social wedge
politics grows when Governor Jindal indicts his own "party of stupid," but then
urges more rightward zealotry. As if Romney and the right lost because they
were too "stupidly" moderate. Then we hear Speaker Boehner's dread this White
House aims to "annihilate" his forces and shove the GOP "into the dustbins of
history." Paul Ryan whines that Obama dreams of "political conquest" and I read
such high anxiety that Tea Party Republicans are running scared, fretting over
extended minority status.
No question, as long as rightwing losers look for salvation to discredited,
outmoded social wedge demagoguery, they need not worry about tepid Democrats so
much as the self-generated backlash of the "turd blossom." The blundering logic
that a party regains majority control simply by concocting more decisive and
divisive wedge issues ended with Rove's '06 departure from the Bush White
House. No political party succeeds over time without policy solutions and
programs that address the needs of those who go to the polls. Now, is that
rocket science or political science 101, we ask the party of stupids?
