How the GOP Organized The Big Lie

Change for America: The Big Lie -- Part I

You, [the GOP] have become as powerful as any political party since the New Deal Democrats in the early 1930’s, but unlike FDR’s populists, your members are not forever in pitched battle with powerful plutocrats and aristocrats – they are your allies. That’s not the triumph, though. What is truly amazing is how you have convinced large portions of the working and middle classes to vote again and again for the party which is stripping them of their protections and eliminating the very measures which built the American middle class in the first place. You have become the populist party, and you have remained the party of the aristocracy. You control all three branches of government on the federal level, and in many state and local governments as well. And you owe it all to the façade you painstakingly and patiently erected. You spent years in building up The Front.

The Front is a distraction, the Great and Powerful Oz designed to divert American eyes from the man behind the curtain. It is what you publicly stand for, what America believes it is voting for when it pulls the lever for a Republican. It is an amalgam of cultural issues, “values,” whether preceded by the words “family” or “small-town” or just plain “American.” It is these “values” which have made the poorest states in the union the linchpin of your electoral lock. These values are barely-disguised reactionary politics, and the fact that they sometimes contradict themselves is of little importance. They work because they make Americans afraid of Democrats, afraid of those who associate themselves with the Democratic Party – because you have associated the Democratic Party with things that Americans are afraid of.

The Front is almost entirely rhetorical, though, which is the beauty of it. It is not a walk, but a talk. Because the truth is, The Front is not where you’re focusing your actual attention, policy-wise. There will never be an amendment to the Constitution banning gay marriage. Prayer will never return to public schools. Our borders will remain just as porous as they always have been when it comes to illegal immigration, and television and radio will continue corrupting our children with images of sex and violence peddled by some of your most loyal contributors. It would be absurd to focus on these things, in fact – imagine a crime family devoting its resources to bettering the Laundromat chain that exists on paper as its phony source of income. It would be ridiculous. The Laundromat is the front. Everyone knows that the real money is in racketeering.

As Thomas Frank writes in the April issue of Harper’s, “The trick never ages, the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital-gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization efforts. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.”

In Part I of The Big Lie, we focused on The Front - the collection of cultural "values" issues that the Republican Party uses to distract voters from its other pursuits. In Part II, we take a look at the quieter goals and successes of the Republican Party in the last 40 years.

All politics in America is about economics, even when it is not - when a politician's hand is on the Bible, his other hand is most likely on someone's wallet. That wallet isn't yours, though, since you're on the winning team; that same politician can't wait to rob the working Peter to make Paul fatter.