I Am Going To Tell You Why (FINAL)

To Republicans, the Dems are the true enemy. You need to know why. And this is why we must elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz tomorrow.

I Am Going To Tell You Why (Part 4 - FINAL)

This post is written 20 years after the genesis of my blog Last Left Turn Before Hooterville - 20 years after the re-election of George W. Bush.

I am so sorry I have not finished this sooner. I hope by posting this today that it will help someone, somewhere, in understanding what we are facing, and why it is so important that we vote the straight Dem ticket by tomorrow.

The union of Republicans and evangelicals had proven to be a powerful one. The 1980s belonged to Reagan, and after Reagan, his vice-president George Bush. However, after 12 years of Republican dominance, Bill Clinton won the White House, and with him came First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first presidential spouse with a career of her own. The Clintons faced personal hostility from the right in a way that went beyond the usual disapproval from the party not in power. (Fun fact: in case you hadn’t heard it back then, this is the origin of the ‘derangement syndrome’ phrase. It was called “Clinton Derangement Syndrome” or CDS, which MAGA repurposed, as they so often do, as Trump Derangement Syndrome.)

But here, friends, is where the rubber meets the road.

I’m quoting from my book right now, because it’s summed up there, and I want to get this posted as soon as I possibly can.

The Republican message machine has used conservative frames to their advantage, but there has been one man who has taken the message from craft to fine art: Frank Luntz. In 1994, on the eve of the Republican Revolution, the takeover of the House of Representatives, which gained the Republicans their first majority in forty years, then-Minority Whip Newt Gingrich blazed a new trail into the wilderness of polarizing partisan politics, and his guide was political pollster and strategist Frank Luntz.

Luntz, with a doctorate in politics from Oxford, aided Gingrich and Dick Armey in crafting the Contract With America, a manifesto that outlined a severely conservative legislative agenda and promised to end corruption in Congress and reduce Big Government. The House, afire with idealistic young citizen-legislator freshmen, was on a mission to rebuild government from the ground up, and the Contract With America was its blueprint.

The Class of `94, as they were known, was similar to the Watergate Babies, the seventy-five Democratic freshmen elected after Nixon resigned, in that both groups had a zealous desire to make sweeping changes in Washington. One of those sweeping changes had to do with the relationship between the two parties.

Newly elected House Speaker Gingrich was a general (although, like so many of his hawkish brethren, he had managed to avoid actual military service due to deferments) and all-out war was declared on the Democrats. Frank Luntz was the architect of that war.

Unlike other pollsters, Dr. Luntz specialized in not only taking the pulse of the public, but writing a prescription in the form of a dose of opinion-molding language. He regularly sent out to his Republican clients memos and newsletters in which he would list words and phrases that would resonate either positively for his clients or negatively for his clients' opposition.

In 1995, Newt Gingrich, one of Luntz's major clients, circulated a pamphlet to freshman Republican congressmen entitled, "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control." In typical grandiose Newt fashion, he claimed to be besieged with people begging to learn how to "speak like Newt," and his political action committee GOPAC mailed the pamphlet to Republicans across the country.

(for more in-depth information about Newt’s hostile takeover, please read this gift article by McKay Coppins from The Atlantic: The Man Who Broke Politics. This is key to understanding where we are now.)

Here is the first couple of paragraphs. You can read the rest here. It’s not long, but I don’t want to take up more space than I have to.

Newt Gingrich's 1996 memo:

“As you know, one of the key points in the GOPAC tapes is that ‘language matters.’ In the video ‘We are a Majority,’ Language is listed as a key mechanism of control used by a majority party, along with Agenda, Rules, Attitude and Learning. As the tapes have been used in training sessions across the country and mailed to candidates we have heard a plaintive plea: ‘I wish I could speak like Newt.’ That takes years of practice. But, we believe that you could have a significant impact on your campaign and the way you communicate if we help a little. That is why we have created this list of words and phrases.”

Check out the ‘words and phrases’ in the linked pages – any of these sound familiar?

What Newt did, with the masterminding of Frank Luntz, was to label Democrats/liberals, not as “the loyal opposition”, who may have held opposing views but were still respected as legitimate, but as enemies to be vanquished.

Enemies to be vanquished.

Enemies to be vanquished.

Please remember this when you see Frank Luntz making the rounds on TV pretending to be an innocuous non-partisan pollster and all-around chill guy, this is who he really is.

He said this on PBS Frontline:

There's a simple rule: You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again, and about the time that you're absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time. And it is so hard but you've just got to keep repeating, because we hear so many different things - the noises from outside, the sounds, all the things that are coming into our head, the 200 cable channels and the satellite versus cable, and what we hear from our friends. We as Americans and as humans have very selective hearing and very selective memory. We only hear what we want to hear and disregard the rest.

While there have been those on the far right who have believed that liberals were destroying America and must be stopped at any cost, this is the first time that this idea was literally enshrined in official Republican Party canon.

This emboldened Republicans to believe, since liberalism itself was an existential threat to American society, that anything done to take down Democrats was, not just permissible, but imperative. And they started with the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

Adding fuel to the fire in the 1990s was the advent of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, who gleefuly attacked all things liberal and Democratic.

I’m going to skip ahead past the Bush years, past the Obama backlash and the Tea Party, and look at the Trump years.

There are many reasons that Donald Trump captured the presidency, but there’s not time to go into those here, and if you’re reading this, I’m sure you know already.

But what you may not think about is what’s going on behind the clown show of Trump: the idea that Democrats and liberals/progressives are the enemy of America.

In the last week of the campaign, Trump, of course, has come right out and called Dems “The Enemy of the People” and many other epithets out of the Nazi playbook.

What the Republicans have been looking for is a vehicle to carry its message of “Dems are the enemy and must have no place in government because liberal ideas will destroy America itself.” In the Bush era, Karl Rove came right out and said it: they are working towards a “permanent Republican majority.” Not a two-party system, but full control by one party. They want permanently low taxes and minimal regulation, and the elimination of social programs and a safety net. In exchange for that, they are prepared to give the religious far-right their demands for Christian dominance of the public arena, eliminating as far as possible the separation of church and state that has been the hallmark of the American political system.

Grover Norquist, a radical tax-reduction crusader, is the founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, an organization that opposes all tax increases as a matter of principle. He was so influential beginning in the Clinton years, and even more so in the Bush years, that 60 Minutes journalist Steve Kroft claimed that “Norquist has been responsible, more than anyone else, for rewriting the dogma of the Republican Party.”

A sworn foe of so-called ‘big government’, he was quoted as saying, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

Norquist felt that the way to implement these policies was through groups like his and other like-minded think tanks. He believed that a Republican president’s job was to facilitate those policies, not to have their own agenda. He was quoted as saying, “We know what direction to go. We just need a president to sign this stuff. Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to be president of the United States.”

Trump was the perfect vehicle for these policies. He has no real ideas of his own, save for his innate racism, and he has such a deep narcissistic need for fame, wealth, attention and flattery that he will gladly do whatever he is told in order to obtain these things. More typical politicians would have their own ideas, which would need to be negotiated with. Trump simply does what he is told.

The overriding idea driving the Republican Party right now is this:

Democrats are the devil.

Democrats are dangerous and destructive to society in every way – socially, morally, and fiscally.

The ideas that Democrats stand for will destroy America. This is why they have no legitimacy in the eyes of the Republican Party. They DO NOT BELONG in government.

This is why any actions taken to prevent Democrats from being elected, from having any social influence at all, are completely justified. This is why it is not hypocrisy when Republicans say “We can do this but you can’t” – it is the elimination of an existential threat.

Trump’s mistake is that he is saying these things out loud. His base, of course, adores this, but the rest of non-MAGA America is appalled and repulsed.

But make no mistake. This is the central message of Republican politics: liberal/progressive ideas will destroy America, and Democrats are the enemy to be vanquished.

It is why they have teamed up with the extremist evangelicals to amass the power that neither one can wield on their own.

It is the culmination of half a century of Republican money and organization.

And they are so close to attaining their goal.

So close that after more than 50 years, that they will accept anything – anything – from their candidate in order to win this election. They understand the stakes here: win, and the win is permanent. Lose, and the decades of effort will be set back for generations.

They have gotten their judges lined up. Trump likes to brag that he did it, but that is nonsense. He wouldn’t know a judge if one bit him on the nose. He merely did as he was told, Sharpie at the ready.

When the fate of society itself is at stake (for them), there is no action too extreme.

Believe this, friends – behind all of the chaos, hoopla and bombast is the idea that the Republicans have been trying to implement for a half-century:

Democrats are the enemy.

Please know this.

It’s not about policy. It’s not about personalities. It does not matter what position a Democrat takes; it does not matter what a Democrat does or does not do, says or does not say. If a Democrat makes a cogent argument, the Republicans will simply move the goal posts. There is literally no position a Democrat can take that a Republican would find satisfactory.

Democrats must be removed from government. That is all.

This is why they have been pushing the idea of a “unitary executive”. They do not want a two-party system in anything but name. It just so happens that their nominee is an authoritarian wannabe who would be over the moon with excitement if that were to come to pass.

But please understand that, as vile as Trump is, he is just a gibbering, capering baboon. The true goal of today’s Republican Party is one-party rule – the only way to keep America safe from the destruction that Democrats will bring if allowed a voice in government.

And they don’t care about women’s rights. They don’t care about the rights of Black folk, Latin folk, Asian folk, LGBTQ+ folk, immigrants (except for White immigrants). They don’t care about anyone’s rights (except Ammosexual-Americans) because they have a higher priority - saving America from the doom of Democrats.

Please think about this as you go to the voting booth tomorrow.