DownWithTyranny!: Republicans Today Are Actually Even More Heinous Than The Nixonians Were 40 Years Ago

It's certainly clear the Republican's agenda was never about jobs after all. If anything, their programs are meant to destroy middle class jobs, make the rich richer and the poor poorer and put a nail in the coffin of the middle class. It's almost funny, though, how obsessed they are with destroying the hopelessly conflicted and thoroughly ineffectual supposed defenders of working families. But that's the real conservative action agenda. They think by destroying the hollowed out wreck of the Democratic Party, already so beholden to corporate interests as to be nearly useless to working people, they'll leave millions and millions of Americans without a voice.

The people-power standoff in Wisconsin, however, which isn't being led-- or even especially condoned-- by the Beltway Democrats and in which the weakest link are the Madison Democratic Establishment, should be showing the GOP that working people will find a way of expressing themselves with or without the wimp, pathetic Democratic Party. But the Republicans have long exerted all the energy they could towards destroying their career rivals. Yesterday Adam Serwer wrote in the Washington Post about the efforts of Republican legislators to restrict voting rights wherever they can. It's just like the old days-- 300 years ago (and ever since)-- when conservatives didn't want anyone to be able to vote but wealthy old white males. They never changed much.

This is happening all over the country. Newly empowered Republican legislatures have been imposing onerous voter ID laws in at least 32 states, even though in-person voter fraud is virtually nonexistent [other than among conservatives themselves]. Texas went as far as exempting concealed carry permit holders and people born before 1931 from its voter ID law, a transparent admission that such laws can needlessly disenfranchise voters and that the intent of the law was to disenfranchise likely Democratic constituencies. New Hampshire Republicans are trying to ban many college students from voting because they "vote as liberal." These days, the most important battles over access to the ballot box don't happen on election day, and they don't involve dramatic examples of flagrant voter intimidation. They happen in state legislatures, around the basic rules for how to show up and vote on election day.

They want to defund the Democrats by destroying unions, a big source of campaign financing for Democrats, often even for anti-worker Democrats like pro-corporate/anti-family Blue Dogs. In fact, almost everything the GOP has done in the House since coming to power there is to undermine the Democratic Party, President Obama and traditional Democratic constituencies. This morning I recalled a passage in Rick Perlstein's wonderful Nixonland which makes us back a few years to the same tricks the GOP is still up to today. Pat Buchanan had just been offered a new leadership post-- head of the Plumbers-- which he had passed on and Nixon had just nominated not just a raving right-wing fanatic to the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist, but a raving right-wing fanatic who was willing to use all his energy to harass and intimidate minority voters at the polls to keep them from voting. (No wonder he went on to be Chief Justice-- the worst since Roger Taney... until the current corporate and partisan hack, John Roberts (Rehnquist's perfect replacement). "Conservatives," Buchanan was whining in an internal White House memo, "are the niggers of the Nixon administration."

[He] was downright lustful in strategizing for the 1972 election. He had been refining his ideas on the subject since March, when he wrote, proposing a "Muskie Watch," that the campaign goal should be to "focus on those issues that divide the Democrats, not those that unite Republicans." That, he said in July, must be their "guiding political principle."

He knew the Old Man's heart. Nixon had been working that angle since 1948.

Buchanan filed his masterpiece on the subject in October. "Top level consideration should be given to ways and means to promote, assist, and fund a Fourth Party candidacy of the Left Democrats and/or the Black Democrats," he wrote. "There is nothing that can so advance the president's chances for reelection-- not a trip to China, not four and a half percent unemployment." Though they should also hedge their bets, and "continue to champion the causes of the blacks within the Democratic Party"-- promoting the message that "the Power Elite within the Party is denying them effective participation." Keep a flow of letters full of damaging information on Democrats to journalists; fake a poll showing Humphrey ahead (he was third); keep the president out of everything-- "the President and the Presidency" were "quintessential political assets"-- cut welfare, even though the president had already increased food stamps and food assistance by 500 percent-- it "would force a division within the Democratic Party."