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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 10/21/21

Is The Final Stage for the GOP & Democracy the 2022 election?

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Thom Hartmann
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Reprinted from hartmannreport.com

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Congressman Steve Scalise, the #2 Republican in the House of Representatives and the guy who ran for office from Louisiana as "David Duke without the baggage," has announced he's whipping Republican votes today to block a criminal contempt referral to the DOJ from the Jan 6 Select Committee against Steve Bannon.

My father's Republican Party is now the modern-day Confederacy, and Republicans' defense of Steve Bannon defying subpoenas this week pretty much proves it. If it keeps moving in the same direction, our American republic may soon be fully transformed into a racist, strongman oligarchy.

The racist and big-money poisons began to take over the Republican Party in the 1950s and 1960s after the Supreme Court ordered an end to school segregation with Brown v Board, and LBJ and the Democrats embraced the Civil Rights, Voting Rights and Medicare Acts.

In aggregate, Johnson's Great Society offended both the nation's billionaire oligarchs, who saw Medicare and other programs as "socialism," and the white racists who were horrified that they'd now have to share schools, hospitals and polling places with African Americans and other minorities.

Those white racists, particularly in the South where the majority of America's Black people lived, fled the Democratic Party and flocked instead to the GOP. Richard Nixon saw this as the key to his presidential victory in 1968, openly inviting racists in with his "Southern Strategy."

Thus began the transformation of the party founded by Abraham Lincoln.

At the same time, the Libertarian and Objectivist movements found common cause with the anti-communist movement led by the John Birch Society that saw every effort to help working class or poor Americas as a step towards full-blown Soviet-style socialism. They all marched into the GOP.

"The mob," as Ayn Rand used to call us American voters, couldn't be trusted any longer to determine who held power in America, these early leaders of the GOP determined, so they worked out ways to get around a multiracial and politically active populace.

The leading conservative light of the era, William F. Buckley, wrote for his National Review magazine an article titled Why The South Must Prevail:

"The South does not want to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving him of the vote," Buckley wrote. "In some parts of the South, the White community merely intends to prevail - that is all. It means to prevail on any issue on which there is corporate disagreement between Negro and White. The White community will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way."

His article was grounded in a discussion of the jury system, but he couldn't help veering off-course (or on-course):

"The central question that emerges " is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?

"The sobering answer is Yes - the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists."

It's exactly the philosophy that today animates the new voting laws put into place over the past six months in Florida, Georgia, Texas and multiple other states.

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Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program on the Air America Radio Network, live noon-3 PM ET. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People," "What Would Jefferson Do?," "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle (more...)
 

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