{"id":15449,"date":"2021-01-29T03:57:15","date_gmt":"2021-01-29T03:57:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=155848"},"modified":"2021-01-29T03:57:15","modified_gmt":"2021-01-29T03:57:15","slug":"the-capitol-assault-was-symptomatic-of-our-dysfunctional-two-party-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/01\/29\/the-capitol-assault-was-symptomatic-of-our-dysfunctional-two-party-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"The Capitol Assault was Symptomatic of Our Dysfunctional Two-Party Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"
Americans were shocked to witness the assault on the capitol building on January 6, the day Congress was scheduled to ratify the presidential election. Washington DC and the nation\u2019s state capitals remained on high alert through the inauguration as right wing groups promised more violent attacks.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to trace the proximate cause of this assault, a president who has long cultivated the lie that the 2020 election was somehow stolen. Prior to the capitol assault, he exhorted his \u201cSave America\u201d rally on the Mall to \u201cstop the steal\u201d and \u201cfight much harder,\u201d asserting \u201cYou have to show strength, you have to be strong.\u201d<\/p>\n
Much has been made of the fascist overtones of Trump\u2019s efforts, but it is important to understand how we got to such a place. It goes well past Trump to forty years of dysfunctional, neoliberal American politics, and beyond that to the racism deeply embedded in this nation\u2019s history. Both political parties share responsibility for our current condition.<\/p>\n
Republicans<\/strong><\/p>\n The Republican Party role is the most obvious.<\/p>\n In 1968, President Nixon rode a law and order campaign into the White House, appealing to a so-called \u201csilent majority\u201d frightened, if not alienated, by the images of antiwar protesters, inner-city \u201crioters,\u201d and counterculture \u201cfreaks\u201d during the 1960s.<\/p>\n The corporate mass media, of course, fed this dynamic by refusing to take seriously the actual claims of black, antiwar, New Left and feminist activists, instead, making sure the public saw the most inflammatory examples of their behaviors and appearances. In mass mediaspeak, \u201cradical\u201d was used to describe militancy, whereas any system-challenging argument vanished from mainstream discourse \u2013 sound familiar? That\u2019s a story I have documented elsewhere.<\/p>\n Nixon\u2019s racist \u201csouthern strategy\u201d set in stone the future of the Republican Party, although it remained for Ronald Reagan to seal the deal. Reagan\u2019s rhetoric<\/em> about basic \u201cdecency\u201d and \u201cfamily values,\u201d effectively played on the feelings of those disaffected by the 60s.<\/p>\n Yet Reagan\u2019s actual policies focused on eliminating ways the government addresses public needs, cutting taxes on the wealthy, rebuilding a huge military complex, regenerating an aggressive foreign policy, and deregulating the economy.<\/p>\n However, the people drawn to Reagan\u2019s so-called \u201cconservative\u201d rhetoric and his tax-cut pitch \u2013 whether religious traditionalists, rural folks, or members of the white working class \u2014 actually lost more and more ground, economically, under Reagan\u2019s and the Republicans\u2019 neoliberalism. They got symbolic gratification while their attention was diverted to the Democrats, liberals, and \u201cEastern elites\u201d who allegedly caused their problems.<\/p>\n