How Judeofascism took over America:
The Christian right and the Republican Party: the dirty secret of American politics
By Patrick Martin
6 March 2000
The political crisis within the Republican Party has reached an extraordinary level of intensity with the speech given by Senator John McCain February 28 in Virginia Beach, Virginia. McCain's indictment of Texas Governor George W. Bush as a prisoner of right-wing bigots was more than a campaign broadside. He put his finger on the dirty secret of modern American politics-the pervasive influence of extreme-right, racist and fascistic elements in the Republican Party.
Traveling to the city which is the headquarters of the Christian Broadcasting Network and the other business and media ventures of Pat Robertson, McCain denounced Robertson and Reverend Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, declaring that the two right-wing fundamentalist preachers were "agents of intolerance." McCain labeled Bush a "Pat Robertson Republican" whose subservience to the ultra-right would alienate voters and produce a Republican defeat in November.
It is easy to point to the hypocrisy in McCain's attack on the extreme right. Contradictions abound, as McCain blasted Robertson and Falwell while standing side by side with the equally right-wing fundamentalist Gary Bauer, who abandoned his own presidential campaign last month and threw his support to the Arizona senator. McCain proclaimed the Republican Party the "party of Abraham Lincoln, not Bob Jones," after having refused to condemn the flying of the Confederate flag over the state capitol in South Carolina during the recent primary campaign there.
Barely 24 hours after issuing his denunciation McCain began to retreat, after he was attacked by erstwhile supporters such as Bauer and former Secretary of Education William Bennett. McCain apologized for a later comment to the press in which he sarcastically referred to Robertson and Falwell as "the forces of evil."
But in an appearance Thursday night in a debate with Bush and Alan Keyes sponsored by CNN and the Los Angeles Times, McCain amplified his criticism, saying that unlike Falwell, he didn't consider President Clinton a murderer, and unlike Robertson, he rejected "cockamamie theories about the freemasons."
McCain's speech may have little effect on the course of the primary campaign-Bush swept primaries in Virginia and Washington and the North Dakota caucuses February 29, and was leading in polls in advance of the March 7 votes in California, New York, Ohio and Georgia. Nonetheless, his attack on the Christian right and the ferocious response from the Republican establishment reveal political fissures within the ruling elite which have far more significance than who wins the Republican presidential nomination.
[...]
In the course of the 1980s and 1990s, the social base of the Republican Party has narrowed and it has been steadily transformed from the party of the corporate establishment into a party which far more resembles the extreme-right, anti-immigrant and chauvinist parties which have arisen in many European countries.
[...]
wsws.org
"...a party which far more resembles the extreme-right, anti-immigrant and chauvinist parties which have arisen in many European countries." Indeed, but, unlike Europe's far right, the US extreme right can easily coalesce into one, big, unified, nation-wide party! European far-right parties are too diverse and politically at odds with each other to merge and sink all their dissensions into a single European party.
That's why the GOP leadership, somehow, felt compelled to co-opt the US far right... in an attempt to defuse it within the Republican apparatus (*).
Gus
(*) Message 20188926 |
