Revisionism, Reactionism and the ACP Part IV
The original trilogy is done. Let's get prepped for a new hope.
Part IV
Babylon Falls, Confusing Our Tongues
Let’s take a short breath. Things get tense in political discourse and we don’t want to say things we don’t mean so let’s collect ourselves and remind ourselves of who and what exactly we’re talking about because all this is complicated. There are a (figurative) million working parts to piece together and dammit if Joe Rogan and The Five are going to recontexualise and “just ask questions” until none of them connect in any real way or make any real sense. It’s best to make perfect sense here so that together, we can understand how we need to understand.
I mentioned that the Democratic Party was the party of the Ku Klux Klan. You’ll hear white supremacists parrot this same line. It’s a rare instance of truth from their ilk. A single grain of truth doesn’t sweeten the rest of the salt though and they either ignore or are wilfully ignorant of the intervening 180 or so years since, but even this position isn’t entirely genuine. It is true that the early Klanners were Democrat. Let’s recall though that the overt racism inherent in the southern tradition; codified in the Confederate Constitutions and Declarations of War had shifted intra-party sentiment so gradually, but totally that by the time Tricky Dick Nixon (President Richard Nixon) employed the Southern Strategy, the remnant Dixiecrats were primed and ready to jump ship to the new racist party. Modern in form. Where the Democrats of old enjoyed the privilege of white life in the high castle away from and above the ‘undesirables,’ off to suburbanize and gentrify. The new Republican Party, led by a fellow who isn’t afraid to lie about who the enemy was for his own gain, walked down a dead end path that had become so normal that other paths seemed absurd.
The point here is that what one person may mean when they say, for example, “Democrat” can be entirely different, depending on with whom you are talking and exactly what you are talking about. This is not only unhelpful for us, it’s by design, because it is unhelpful for us. This is typified in the above scenario. Maybe you don’t believe me though. Dear reader. I try very hard not to make claims that can’t reasonably be proved and I don’t even have to try very hard with this one, let’s have Mr Lee Atwater, the Republican strategist architect of the Southern Strategy walk us into the outro for this series’ segueue. In a 1981 interview, he recalled,
“Y’all don’t quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
In the next few parts, we’ll get Communist-level specific with our terms so that we can be certain that we understand each other. That’s how we build community right? Subscribe now to join us next time!