[ By: Arun Gupta ]
As much as they may grumble, there is a legitimate reason why the Republicans have been labeled the “Party of No.” For decades, the party’s kneejerk stance has been to oppose any legislation or policy involving social, economic or political progress. You name it, the right has opposed it: civil rights, school desegregation, women’s rights, labor organizing, the minimum wage, social security, LGBT rights, welfare, immigrant rights, public education, reproductive rights, Medicare, Medicaid.

And, through the years the right invoked hysterical rhetoric in opposition, predicting that implementing any such policies would result in the end-of-family-free-enterprise-God-America on the one hand, and the imposition of atheism-socialism-Nazism on the other.

Republicans are obstructionist for one simple reason: it’s a winning strategy.

Opposing progressive policies allows the right to actualize the ideals that both motivate and define their base. Rightist ideologies are not without sophistication, but right-wing politicians and media figures boil them down to a crude Manichean dualism to mobilize supporters based on group difference: good versus evil, us versus them. By demonizing and scapegoating politically marginal groups, the right is able to define “real Americans,” who are good, versus those defined as parasites, illegitimate and internal threats, who are evil.

There is a critical paradox at work. The Republicans have deftly turned being the “Party of No” into a positive stance: They signal to their base they are working to defeat an alien ideology while defending real Americans and traditional values and institutions.

Ideologues and opinion-makers spin any redistributive policy as a zero sum game; progressive policies give to undeserving groups by taking wealth from or denying rights to deserving Americans and institutions. Since Obama took office, the rise of the Tea Party has made the Republicans even more strident in their opposition. The GOP fights against every Democratic policy — including the stimulus bill, jobs programs, aid to local governments, court appointees, more labor rights, health care, financial regulation, net neutrality unemployment benefits, expanding access to food stamps and Head Start, action on global warming and immigrant rights — because it claims some sort of theft of money or rights is involved.

Sara Diamond neatly summarizes the politics behind the right’s obstructionism in her book, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States. She writes, “To be right-wing means to support the state in its capacity as enforcer of order and to oppose the state as distributor of wealth and power downward and more equitably in society.” (emphasis in original) These principles, in turn, flow from four interrelated political philosophies that animate the modern right: militarism, neoliberalism, traditionalism and white supremacism.

Bill Press: Conservative radio poisons the airwaves by”telling lie after lie after lie with nobody there to challenge them”

The heart of the right’s agenda is neoliberalism, which is the rule of the “free market” above all else. It demands that everything be a commodity, all actions be judged according to cost-benefit analysis, every realm be opened to capital’s predations, all human needs subjugated to those of finance. If neoliberalism is left unchecked, argues David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, it would result in market anarchy and the dissolution of social solidarities. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously summed it up in her view, “There is no such thing as society but only individuals.”

Faced with market nihilism, “some degree of coercion appears necessary to restore order,” writes Harvey. Enter the neoconservatives, who play a crucial role resolving the contradictions between neoliberalism and traditionalism through militarism. Harvey explains that they “emphasize militarization as an antidote to the chaos of individual interests. For this reason, they are far more likely to highlight threats, real or imagined, both at home and abroad, to the integrity and stability of the nation.”

Militarism is just the means, however. To mobilize support for repressive methods the right stokes the passions and fears of its base by posing traditional values as under attack: the family, God, marriage, America, private property, law and order, and freedom itself. These values are often linked to neoliberalism and contrasted in opposition to “collectivism,” which is presented as a looming danger to both property and God. This also bridges the ideological gap between the religious right and the free-market right.

For example, the Christian Right is stridently anti-union. While the Bible can easily be read as a socialist document, the central role of money-driven ministries and televangelism has oriented Evangelicals toward free-market ideology that is expressed in its “prosperity theology” — “the belief that God rewards signs of faith with wealth, health and happiness.” As many Evangelicals are actual or would-be entrepreneurs, this doctrine is readily accepted. It’s a small step to convince them that unions promote secular collectivism that threatens private religious values, thus creating a theological rationale for neoliberal policies.

I use “the right” instead of “Republican” or even “conservative” to describe the movement and its ideas. Until recent years, there was a breed of socially liberal, fiscally conservative Republican that retained a foothold in the GOP. These Republicans provided critical support for civil rights and other progressive legislation. This segment, which tended to concentrate in the North, has largely shifted to the Democratic Party (with the result of pushing the Democrats further to the right). So while the right may now overlap significantly with the Republican Party, it wasn’t always so. More important, as shown by the Christian Right in years past and the Tea Party today, the right will try to purge those Republicans deemed not sufficiently orthodox, making the party more and more extreme.

The Tea Party is the latest chapter in the history of the Republicans as the “Party of No.” Its existence depends on continuous promotion from FOX News, organizing by Republican consultants, front groups such as Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works, and the GOP itself. Much of the Tea Party’s funding comes from right-wing foundations through the front groups, and its politics are anti-government, anti-labor, pro-corporate and often socially conservative, which is the same agenda the right has been pushing for more than 30 years.

The roots of right-wing obstruction are represented by three pivotal historical figures: William F. Buckley, Jr., Barry Goldwater and George Wallace. “The father of modern conservatism,” Buckley proclaimed his intention to stand “athwart history, yelling Stop!’” in founding National Review in 1955. He knit together traditionalism, free market ideology and anti-Communism, and his politics were a textbook case of opposing distribution of power and wealth and for imposing social order. In the 1950s, he dismissed civil rights legislation because Southern whites were “the advanced race.” This wasn’t a passing fancy; he defended this position as “absolutely correct” in 1989 on NPR. He inveighed against the 1965 Voting Rights Act as threatening “chaos” and “mobcratic rule.” While opposing basic freedoms for all people because it threatened the traditional order, he was for using force to impose gulag-like policies such as quarantining drug addicts, tattooing people with AIDS on their buttocks and suggested “relocating chronic welfare cases” to “rehabilitation centers.”

Buckley was not alone in believing progressive policies eroded traditional mores and institutions. Barry Goldwater, who was trounced as the Republican presidential nominee in 1964, voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, calling it “unconstitutional.” He fought school desegregation, and the desegregation of public accommodations, claiming it “tampers with the rights of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of property.” He railed against federal aid to schools, the minimum wage, Medicare and the entire welfare state because “socialism can be achieved through welfarism.” He opposed the progressive income tax because it artificially “enforce[ed] equality among unequal men.” One of Goldwater’s informal advisers in 1964 was economist Milton Friedman, who saw nothing wrong with racial discrimination in employment because it was a matter of “taste.” Many campaign volunteers came from the conspiratorial John Birch Society, which labeled integration a communist plot. Within Goldwater’s campaign one can see how various segments of the right united in opposing racial equality, but each for different reasons.

Mr. Conservative: Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964

In contrast to Buckley, Goldwater was no religious traditionalist, but he did combine libertarianism and anti-Communism. He hewed to a secular traditionalism forged from patriotism, the Constitution and frontier mythology, and was far more open-minded on social issues. His wife Peggy helped found the Arizona chapter of Planned Parenthood, and he made clear his contempt for and opposition to the Christian Right when it began to take over the Republican Party in the 1980s.

A contemporary of Goldwater was the unapologetic racist, former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who swept the Deep South in the 1968 presidential election running on a segregationist platform. He represented yet another form of traditionalism, one that stoked fears that “blacks were moving beyond their safely encapsulated ghettos into ‘our’ streets, ‘our’ schools, ‘our’ neighborhoods,” according to Dan Carter, author of From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994.

Wallace pioneered the race-based appeals that still excite the populist right today. But he was also a deft cultural warrior who, writes Carter, “knew that a substantial percentage of the American electorate despised the civil rights agitators and antiwar demonstrators as symptoms of a fundamental decline in the traditional cultural compass of God, family, and country, a decline reflected in rising crime rates, the legalization of abortion, the rise in out-of-wedlock pregnancies, the increase in divorce rates, and the proliferation of ‘obscene’ literature and films.” Add gay marriage, Islamophobia and immigration, and you pretty much have the right’s culture war agenda of today.

The right’s need for enemies is coded in its political DNA. Without enemies to defeat, vanquish and even destroy, the right would suffer an existential crisis. For Goldwater it was the Communist menace; for Wallace, integrationists and intellectuals; for Nixon, liberals, antiwar activists and black radicals; for Reagan, labor, welfare queens and the Evil Empire; for Gingrich and his cohorts it was gays, feminists, welfare mothers and the Democrats; during the Bush years, it was Islam, immigrants, gays and abortionists; For the Tea Party, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, it’s all of the above.

There is one final step in how the right mobilizes grassroots support behind an obstructionist agenda. Few people mull over philosophical concepts when making political decisions. That’s why mobilizing group resentment and solidarity simultaneously is so effective. It gives people a way to see both enemies and allies in their daily lives. In the case of immigrants, the narrative is about “illegals” stealing jobs and social services from taxpayers. In the case of the Obama administration, the story is that taxes are being stolen from hard-working Americans to support parasites ranging from welfare recipients to Wall Street bankers.

Chip Berlet, a scholar at Political Research Associates, describes this as “producerism.” He defines it as “a world view in which people in the middle class feel they are being squeezed from above by crippling taxes, government bureaucracies and financial elites while simultaneously being pushed around, robbed, and shoved aside by an underclass of ‘lazy, sinful, and subversive freeloaders.’ The idea is that unproductive parasites above and below are bleeding the productive middle class dry.”

Segments of the right use producerism differently, explains Berlet. “Economic libertarians blast the government for high taxes and too much regulation of business. Anti-immigrant xenophobes blast the government for letting ‘illegals’ steal their jobs and increase their taxes. Christian fundamentalists blast the government for allowing the lazy, sinful, and subversive elements to ruin society.” In recent history, Wallace and Nixon used producerist rhetoric to mobilize white working-class resentment against blacks.

Producerism is premised on other techniques. First, argues Berlet, a group of people are dehumanized so they are seen as objects and then they are demonized as evil. Next, the group is scapegoated irrationally for specific problems. Lou Dobbs mastered this process in defining undocumented immigrants as “illegal,” then spouting dubious claims about immigrants being responsible for crime waves and disease outbreaks, and finally blaming them for stealing jobs and social services. Another example is FOX News and its hit job on ACORN. The group was caricatured as so nefarious and omnipotent, a poll last year by Public Policy Polling found that 52 percent of Republicans believed ACORN had stolen the 2008 election for Obama.

The Tea Party movement — which the Republicans have helped create and exploit to oppose the entirety of the Obama administration — is the latest political variant of the right’s themes. Much of the right’s anger is directed at immigrants, African Americans and social welfare and equality in general. Among Tea Partiers, 73 percent think “Blacks would be as well off as whites if they just tried harder”; 73 percent believe “providing government benefits to poor people encourages them to remain poor”; 60 percent believe “We have gone too far in pushing equal rights in this country”; 56 percent think “Immigrants take jobs from Americans”; 92 percent want a smaller government with “fewer services”; 92 percent think Obama’s policies are moving the country toward socialism; only 7 percent approve of Obama’s performance as president; and a combined 5 percent identify themselves as black, Asian or of Hispanic origin.

One survey found that identifying as a conservative or a Tea Party supporter was an accurate predictor of racial resentment. Additionally, only one-third were opposed to the government tapping people’s telephones and racial or religious profiling, and barely half opposed indefinite detention without trial. This is a movement that thrives on opposing the distribution of power and wealth more equitably in society and for imposing a repressive social order.

With nearly 60 percent of Tea Partiers believing Obama is foreign born or saying they are not sure, it becomes clear why so many on the right have adopted violent and revolutionary rhetoric. The thinking is he’s a foreigner or a Muslim or stole the election, so he is alien and illegitimate. As such, it makes sense he is pushing an alien idea like socialism that may be part of some grand conspiracy like the New World Order, the North American Union, the Bilderberg Group or Satan. (In a poll last September of New Jersey residents, not known for being prone to right-wing radicalism, 29 percent of Republicans thought Obama was the Anti-Christ or were unsure.)

However irrational this position may be, the logical consequences are not: anything Obama and the Democrats do must be opposed because it is a life-and-death struggle. In opposing the health care plan, the right is not just trying to deny services to the undeserving, it is affirming and protecting free choice, family, the sanctity of life, the market, God, country, the Constitution — all arguments trotted out in the last year.

Like the Clinton years, no matter how much Obama tries to appease Republicans, he will remain under attack and be held responsible for bizarre crimes and conspiracies because the right has nothing to gain from compromise. In fact, Republican opposition has devolved from the philosophical to the tactical. The right-wing noise machine frames Obama and the Democrats as the source of all evil, making compromise virtually impossible. Republicans now assail Obama policies they used to champion from the market-friendly health care law and huge tax cuts in the stimulus bill to the bipartisan deficit commission and pay-as you-go budget rules.

At the same time, the Obama administration has stoked support for the Tea Party by providing aid and comfort to Wall Street rather than Main Street. The Republicans have exploited legitimate anxieties over high unemployment, a shrinking economy and onerous taxes by scapegoating the weak and marginal for policies that are structural and historical in nature.

The lesson for Obama and Democrats is not that they went too far to the “left,” it’s that they went too far to the right. Obama had the political capital and the leverage over the banking and auto industries to push for a “Green New Deal” that could have restructured the transportation and energy sectors and created millions of new jobs. Slashing the bloated military budget while fighting for some type of single-payer health care — instead of a plan that uses public money to subsidize the for-profit healthcare industry — budget deficits could have been constrained while reducing the financial burden of medical bills for most American households. Implementing such an agenda could have created a mass constituency that would fight for a progressive vision and against the right’s repressive politics.

The right has well-thought-out ideologies, a specific agenda, clearly defined enemies, and ruthlessly pursues power to achieve its goals. And it’s fighting a Democratic White House and Party that stand for nothing, which is why being the “Party of No” will continue to be a winning strategy for Republicans.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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By Joshua Holland, AlterNet

Modern American conservatism is based on an almost endless series of grievances. Author Thomas Frank coined a term for it: the conservative “plenty-plaint” — a long and ever-evolving list of personal and cultural gripes dressed up as an ideology.

But there’s also fear! And while it spans the breadth of the movement, this is the year of the Tea Party revolt, when the grassroots right, disgusted with the idea of semi-affordable health-care and tepid financial reforms, is rebelling against even its own establishment. And the divide between the grassroots base and its leadership extends to the very fears that animate them.

As we’ll see, the conservative movement’s business-attired hacks and the hard-right Tea Party types waving misspelled signs out in the streets have some very different causes for alarm.

So, here are ten of the most interesting things that absolutely terrify Wingnuttia. First, a few terrors of the real hard-core Right. For the Tea Partier, the midterm GOP primary voter, it’s not just the anxiety over social change that typifies more traditional conservatism. A broad chunk of the GOP base today is animated by wildly unrealistic terrors — monsters stalking them as the sun sets, perhaps hovering just beyond their peripheral vision.

1. Government Concentration Camps

Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, who’s been facing uphill prospects for re-election in Nevada, is breathing a sigh of relief that his newly nominated Republican opponent, Sharron Angle, isn’t a typical civil libertarian. According to Talking Points Memo, Angle endorses the views of (and may be a member of) the “Oath Keepers.” It’s a fast-rising right-wing group “whose membership of uniformed soldiers and police take an oath to refuse orders they see as unconstitutional — including enforcement of gun laws, violations of states’ sovereignty, and ‘any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps,’" according to TPM.

Fear of Obama’s Kenyan shock troops rounding up good conservatives and throwing them into Thunderdome-esque detention centers is nothing new on the Right. For years, conspiracy theories about “FEMA camps” have been percolating among the more feverish true believers. At TrueSlant, Matthew Fleischer wrote about a friend discovering that one of her co-worker’s believed there to be an imminent threat:

FEMA was building camps to round up and annihilate Christians. The roundup would start soon, but it would move slowly and quietly. Whole families would disappear and not be heard from again, but it would be made to look like they simply moved out of town. Christian children, her children, would be gassed and put into plastic coffins. Two of the woman’s friends had already moved out of the country. Others were following soon. She intended to join them as soon as she could save up enough money. But finances were tight and it might be too late.

Truly horrifying. And you can see pictures of actual FEMA camps right here on the internet, where everything’s true! Or, you know, perhaps not.

The coming Obama Reich will naturally be justified by his own version of burning down the Reichstag — the Brownshirts will blame say they’re responding to Right-wing terrorism. In 2009, when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report warning of violence from Right-wing extremists, it caused near-apoplexy among the brethren. Talkradio host Roger Hedgecock summed up the danger like this: “So, if you disagree with Obama on amnesty for illegals or stand up for the Second Amendment, you are branded a ‘rightwing extremist’ by the Department of Homeland Security and become the subject of scrutiny by some 850,000 local and state law enforcement personnel.” All of this led one commenterto observe, “At least we know now who all those FEMA camps are for.” Oh, the report was commissioned during the final years of the Bush administration — Homeland Security just end up releasing it under Obama.

2. Moooslims!

If you pay attention to the Right, you might think there are large Islamic armies occupying a few majority-Christian countries these days instead of the other way around. If their rhetoric didn’t justify real-world violence, one could say conservatives have becomeentertainingly unhinged when it comes to Islam. Here’s a blurb for Mark Steyn’s ominous-sounding book, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It:

Someday soon, you might wake up to the call to prayer from a muezzin. Europeans already are. And Liberals will still tell you that "diversity is our strength"–while Talibanic enforcers cruise Greenwich Village burning books and barber shops, the Supreme Court decides Sharia law doesn’t violate the "Separation of Church and State," and the Hollywood Left decides to give up on Gay Rights in favor of the much safer charms of Polygamy. If you think this can’t happen, you haven’t been paying…

Hey, it could happen! Bloggers have uncovered General David Petraeus embracing “the jihadist rhetoric of Islamic anti-Semitism,” a nefarious plot by the Obama administration to transmit Islamic messages at an international nuclear summit, a similar plan by Food Network star Rachael Rae in cahoots with Dunkin Donuts and a plot by MasterCard to finance Islamic terrorism through those credit card fees. Perhaps most alarming, however, was a sinister scheme by devious Muslims to infiltrate the highest levels of government by applying for low-level internships in Capitol Hill offices. Only the tireless diligence of brave far-Right lawmakers like Reps. Sue Myrick (R-NC), John Shadegg (R-AZ), Trent Franks (R-AZ), and Paul Broun (R-GA) kept them from achieving their goals.

3. They’re Coming to Take Your Guns

During the 1990s, the Democratic Party came to the conclusion that gun control was a losing issue at the national level. (Not that they’d ever tried to ban guns, of course — gun control advocates had only sought to further limit the types of arms being sold, but mostly they pushed for background checks and stricter licensing requirements.) But the Right — and especially the NRA, which needs to raise money — never got the memo. With the election of a Kenyan Candidate, things have become decidedly more feverish. As Media Matters noted:

Since President Obama’s election, several conservative media figures have warned their audiences that Obama is planning to, in the words of Glenn Beck, slowly but surely take away your gun or take away your ability to shoot a gun, carry a gun" or have suggested that a government effort to ban guns is likely.

There’s also the UN “gun ban treaty” to worry about (it’s actually a proposed treaty governing the international transfer of arms, and specifically states that it isn’t applicable to domestic law, but, you know, still kind of spooky).

This irrational fear is cause for a certain amount of rational fear among others. There have been at least two incidents of (no doubt already unhinged) people who took this threat so seriously they gunned down police officers in cold-blooded attacks.

4. Article 3 of the United States Constitution

Remember those Oath Keepers? They say they’ll honor their pledge to uphold the United States’ Constitution by defending against federal encroachment on states’ rights. Like a lot of Right-wingers these days, they believe they’re doing the Lord’s work based on the 10th Amendment, which says that powers not expressly granted to the feds remain in the hands of the states.

Ah, but there’s a conundrum! It’s Article 3, which gives the Supreme Court the power to say whether a law oversteps the powers designated to the Federal Government. Believe it or not, the Founders never intended for the most reactionary law enforcement personnel in the country to decide disputes between the states and the central government, so they created a court to do that job. It’s one of the enumerated powers in the Constitution!

5. Plotting Global Elites

Somewhat lost in the brouhaha over Kentucky senate candidate Rand Paul’s views of the Civil Rights Act was his worry over the coming of the “Amero,” the official currency of the absolutely terrifying North American Union to come.

It’s an increasingly popular conspiracy theory about a group of shadowy and mostly nameless international "elites" who are planning to "replace the United States" — in the words of Jerome Corsi, a key figure in the SwiftBoat Veterans for Truth project and a leading NAU conspiracist — with a transnational government. The theory holds that the borders between Mexico, Canada and the United States are in the process of being erased, covertly, by a group of "globalists" whose ultimate goal is to replace national governments in D.C., Ottawa and Mexico City with a single trinational state ruled by a bloated EU-style bureaucracy.

The North American Union story is an offspring of the John Birch Society Right, with its simmering xenophobia and paranoia. It’s terrifying, but fortunately it’s also completely baseless.

It should go without saying that the Tea Partiers are also a bit apprehensive about the conservative establishment-types because the latter are elitists who live in high-rent cities along the coasts. Much of their alarm was of course stoked by those slick political operatives with partisan ambitions in mind. But once stirred to fear, a group of terrified people can be tough to control. The political hacks find the Tea Partiers useful, but no doubt also look upon them with some trepidation because they’re crazy and might hurt someone. That, combined with a changing electorate, causes conservative leaders — ostensibly sensible people — an entirely different set of anxieties.

Their fear can be summed up as: Oh My God, We Won’t Be Able to Win a Race for Dog-Catcher Outside the Deep South!

6. The Decline of Married White Christians

This one worries the operative class: the decline of married white people who identify as “Christians.” The GOP relies on them — they represent the party’s most loyal demographic.

To be clear, there are a lot of white people, a lot of married people, and a lot of people who say they’re Christians. But the share of American voters who are white and marriedand identify as Christians has been in a long and steep decline, and by every estimate will continue to fall.

That tidbit comes from an analysis by Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz. As he put it, “In American politics today, whether you are a married white Christian is a much stronger predictor of your political preferences than your gender or your class — the two demographic characteristics that dominate much of the debate” among the pundits. These two bone-chilling graphics reveal the trend:

[ Enlarge ]

That’s the base, and it’s shrinking fast:

[ Enlarge ]

7. The Graying of the Culture Warriors

Because the plenty-plaint is so flexible, you can rest assured that tomorrow’s conservatives will never run out of wedge social issues. Nonetheless, some of the most popular aren’t being embraced by the kids these days, and that’s cause for alarm among those trying to win some elections.

An analysis by Columbia University statisticians found a “generation-gap” on support for same-sex marriage that they called “huge.” According to the nerds, “If policy were set by state-by-state majorities of those 65 or older, none would allow same-sex marriage. If policy were set by those under 30, only 12 states would not allow-same-sex marriage.”

According to the Pew Social and Demographic Trends Project, “About two-thirds of people 65 and older said religion is very important to them, compared with just more than half of those 30 to 49 and 44 percent of people 18 to 29.”

Even the rural-urban divide is becoming narrower, at least in terms of lifestyle. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, the number of Americans who hunt has dropped seven percent over the past decade, and NPR notes that “fewer young people, in particular” are taking up the sport.

The generation gap cuts across a range of social issues — including interracial marriage and abortion. "Around the notion of morality and work ethic, the differences in point of view are pretty much felt across the board," Pew’s Paul Taylor told the Associated Press. He said the gap has never been greater.

8. White Minority Status

Many people believe that in 2050, if birth and immigration rates do what experts expect them to, white folk will become a minority in the United States. This caused the so-totally-not-racist-and-how-dare-you-even-suggest-as-much Pat Buchanan a shiver of fear, tinged with a hint of nostalgia:

In 1960, when JFK defeated Nixon, America was a nation of 160 million, 90 percent white and 10 percent black, with a few million Hispanics and Asians sprinkled among us.

We were one nation, one people. We worshipped the same God, spoke the same English language, studied American history and English literature, honored the same heroes, read the same books, watched the same TV shows, went to the same movies …

That never happened in reality, of course.

But … that America is now gone forever…. In 2050, there will be three times as many people living here as in 1960 ? 420 million. White Americans will be a minority, 49 percent, and falling… By countries of origin, America will be a Third World nation.

Oh, cry for the European Americans! Or don’t — Pat’s numbers don’t include white people of “Hispanic heritage.” When you factor those white folks in, 74 percent of the population will remain pasty in 2050, down just six points from today.

9. And the Browning of America

Among the political class a more reasonable fear is that the base’s boiling rhetoric over immigration will permanently alienate Latinos and Asian Americans, two fast-growing voting blocs that are heavily concentrated in a handful of key swing states. Rather than shaking over the prospect of a white demographic minority like Buchanan, they’re afraid the venom coming from Republicans like Tom Tancredo (R-CO) and JD Hayworth (R-AZ) will saddle them with a structural inability to win national elections for a generation. As former Republican House majority leader Dick Armey, the chairman of the corporate-funded front-group Freedomworks and a key organizer of the angry and ostensibly “grass-roots” Tea Parties, put it, “Who in the Republican Party was the genius that said that now that we have identified the fastest-growing voting demographic in America, let’s go out and alienate them?”

10. Unions

Here’s another one that scares the Right-wing coastal elitists who in fact run the conservative movement, the operatives.

Most people understand that the Right’s corporate patrons don’t care for organized labor because it hurts the bottom line. But there’s another thing to fear: Union members are more likely to vote their economic interests than be blinded by culture war distractions.

In 2004, although George Bush won the votes of white working-class men by 25 percent over John Kerry, blue-collar white guys who belonged to unions broke for Kerry by 21 percent. Charles Noble, a political scientist at IC Long Beach, commented, “Clearly, union members had a different perspective on the election, most likely provided by the unions themselves, which poured millions into educating and mobilizing union households.” In 2008, John McCain beat Obama by 25 percent among all gun owners, but Obama won over union members who pack heat by a 12 percent margin. Guy Molyneux, a partner with Hart Research, which conducted exit polls for the AFL-CIO, told the New York Times that white male union members “supported Mr. Obama over Mr. McCain by a margin of 18 percentage points, while for all white men, exit polls found they backed Mr. McCain by a 16 percent margin.”

White working-class “Reagan Democrats” voting for the colored guy? The horror!

There you have it: it’s a scary world out there, and the Right represents a big, strong Daddy figure who can guide you through.

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A series of ads in Michigan highlight this year’s roughest political attacks: narrowly aimed shots from small groups. They are not coming with the loud, nationally recognized cannon blast of the type launched by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth against Senator John Kerry in 2004, but, rather, as more stealthy, narrowly aimed rifle shots from smaller groups armed with incendiary material.

The advertisements running here (Macomb County, Michigan) against Mr. Obama come from a group called Freedom’s Defense Fund, a political action committee based in Washington that was formed four years ago and raises money from conservatives around the country. The advertisements have stood out because of the group’s connections — including to its paid consultant, Jerome S. Corsi, the author of the highly negative, largely discredited political biography of Mr. Obama, “Obama Nation” — and what local critics say are their racial overtones…

A Mr. Centanni said said Freedom’s Defense Fund, with relatively scant resources to spread nationally, decided it could have the most impact by focusing its presidential efforts here for tens of thousands.

| Google Maps – Macomb County (Surburbs of Detroit, Michigan | Why Macomb? |

“We feel Obama can’t win the presidency without Michigan and he can’t win Michigan without Macomb,” he said. “We’re relatively small, but we’re trying to be effective and relevant.” | Read More |

   Discredited RACIST-BIGOT Jerome S. Corsi

Despite stating that he had apologized for what was described as a “series of bigoted and hateful posts,” Jerome Corsi, author of The Obama Nation, wass scheduled to appear with host James Edwards on the August 17 edition of The Political Cesspool Radio Show [Republican Hate Radio], which, according to its “Statement of Principles,” “represents a philosophy that is pro-White.” In a blog post, Edwards has stated that “interracial sex is white genocide.”

| Read More |

Email Jerome Corsi: jco...@worldnetdaily.com

…..Visit The Southern Poverty Law Center — Intelligence Report For More…..| The Nativists — Profiles of 20 Anti-Immigrant Leaders |

De-Bunked!

1. Debunking Jerome ‘Bigot’ Corsi’s Smear Attack Book: ‘The Obama Nation’
2. Unfit for Publication: Corsi’s The Obama Nation filled with falsehoods.
3. Corsi’s Dull Hatchet — Jerome Corsi’s “The Obama Nation” is a mishmash of unsupported conjecture, half-truths, logical fallacies and outright falsehoods.
4. Jerome Corsi is a Racist
5. Jerome Corsi: How a Racist, Conspiratorial Crank Became a Top GOP Anti-Obama Point Man