I have something in common with the first lady of news: born just a year after me, she too came of age in the Reagan era. We can both recite the battles prior to Buchanan’s 1992 RNC speech. Just as she eviscerates Michael Steele’s denial here on a foundation of her past reporting, this weblog has been hyperfocused on the overt and sublimated kulturkampf in today’s conservative movement. Said movement and its struggle have been internalized so completely by the Republican Party that today’s House majority enacts the agenda almost despite itself. Watch:
Steele is perhaps the best person to highlight these issues because of his clear dissonance on them. While on the one hand he recognizes the fading utility of kulturkampf, his endorsement of it is implicit in his denial of its relevance. The claim that such issues are now “at the state level” hearkens directly back to Ronald Reagan at the Neshoba County Fair and today’s Tenther movement.
Maddow recalled the former just before the midterm, when she highlighted the continuing role of Atwater’s “southern strategy” in the GOP; the Tenthers are today’s children of that same culture conflict, the CCC to yesterday’s KKK. The prevalence of John Bircher memes (“get US out of UN!”) in the House majority proves that none of this is new, that the last two years of tea are the reaction of a dying movement to the election of a president who embodies just about everything its culture warriors despise.
