by BRUCE A. DIXON
Every now and then attentive listeners and readers ask why we at Black Agenda Report don’t spend nearly as much time denouncing racist, misogynist and downright evil Republicans like Romney and Ryan as we do detailing the betrayals and failures of Democrats like our black political class, and its current corporate mascots in city halls, state legislatures, the Congress and the White House.
We know who and what the Republican party is. Back in the mid 1960s, when Democratic president Lyndon Johnson, under relentless pressure from the Freedom Movement embraced enforcement of the Voting Rights Act in the South, Republicans opened their doors wide to welcome the exodus of white supremacist voters and politicians who’d been Democrats until that time. The modern Republican party re-made itself into the permanent white man’s party not just in the South, but across the country, the party whose brands are rancid racism, pretentious piety, monstrous misogyny and shameless warmongering.
When you match Republican brands against those of Democrats, who claim to stand for tolerance on racial and sexual fronts, who cloak their imperial wars in the garb of “humanitarian interventions,” but who agree with Republicans that wealthy corporations do have the right to rule over us, that presidents possess the right to imprison, torture or kill us at a whim, the difference isn’t black and white, but it’s clear enough. The Republican brand is odious and deeply scary, easily more frightening than that of Democrats.
In today’s political ecology, the job of Republicans is to provide political camouflage to right wing Democrats like the last two Democratic presidents Clinton and Obama, by moving still further rightward, even past the boundaries of lunacy. When Bill Clinton was busy passing NAFTA and ending welfare as we knew it, both measures tried and failed at by Bush 1, Newt Gingrich provided covering babble about taking poor children from their homes. While Barack Obama offered to put Medicare and social security on the deficit cutting table and enacted a so-called “Affordable Care Act” first passed as an insurance company bailout by Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney in 2004, Republicans threaten the piecemeal repeal of Rove V. Wade and cuts to unemployment compensation.
The fact is that 120% evil Republicans offer the only justification for our support of 100% evil Democrats. And with the dissolution of what used to be the black consensus for equality, civil liberties, full funding for public education, and opposing war spending and corporate privilege, Obama-era Democrats continue to flee rightward toward war, privatization and austerity.
Black Agenda Report for more