The GOP’s pathetic crybaby agenda: Trump, Scalia and the whiny, paranoid new face of the right

[applegrove]

The GOP’s pathetic crybaby agenda: Trump, Scalia and the whiny, paranoid new face of the right

by Bill Curry at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2015/07/05/the_gops_pathetic_crybaby_agenda_trump_scalia_and_the_whiny_paranoid_new_face_of_the_right/

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The right blames all social pathologies on the left but would howl were anyone to imply that it helped spawn Dylann Roof — or that its anti-intellectualism led any young man to forgo college or that its economic policies left anyone without the chance for a decent job at decent pay. How does a young man so ensnared rationalize his fate? Roof got many of his theories from the website of the Concerned Citizens Council—“We oppose all efforts to mix the races”—headed by the lovely and vivacious Earl P. Holt III (“Black people are the laziest, stupidest, most criminally inclined race in the history of the world”). He was a donor to at least five current or former GOP presidential candidates. But the problem isn’t confined to the dark demimonde of far right hate groups.

Young white males are dropping out of college, high school and the workforce in droves. In the reddest of states many turn to crime and drugs. They deserve better than a steady diet of racially coded conspiracy theories; better than Rick Santorum calling college a liberal trap or Mike Huckabee calling their centrist black president a “tyrant”; better than being taught each day to despise those who think different thoughts or blame those who don’t look enough like them. The toxicity of right-wing politics seeps steadily into the larger culture. It runs on infantile rage and so must infantilize white men. We must find a way to reach even the ones who seem a danger only to themselves.

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The first reason is that the culture wars that have raged since the 1960s are at last winding down, at least as we’ve known them. Such historic changes don’t happen overnight, but the week showed America at or near at or near a tipping point. Race ignited these wars. Issues of gender and sexuality fueled them. America is taking a harder look at all who seek to foment or exploit racial anger or fear, even as it continues to be transformed on issues of sexual preference and identity. We don’t need to prove Republican complicity in the culture wars. They deny ever stooping to such tactics. Fine; if so, they’ve nothing to worry about.

The second reason is that religion is—there’s no better word for it—evolving. If the GOP can’t keep pace it will pay a steep price; we all know what evolution does to those who fail to adapt. Its response to Pope Francis’ masterfully composed encyclical on climate change is a case in point. Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, and Jeb Bush, heretofore three of the showiest Catholics in all of Christendom, told His Holiness quite bluntly to mind his own beeswax. It seems they don’t see how a threat to the survival of our species has a moral dimension. They don’t listen to scientists either so one wonders whose advice they do take. (Oh, right.)



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[merrily]

1. New?