The Brown Nose Party
Trump’s BNP of the GOP
I hate the phrase “extremist right wing” of the Republican Party. Worse yet is the phrase GOP, which has always confused me, which I guess stands for Grand Ole Party, though I’ve always suspected it means something else. Why not come up with a simpler phrase; it’s just hard to follow. But extreme and extremist is easier to follow, and that’s the main deception of it.
During the second Bush, W. Bush the 43rd, the term the “extreme right wing” meant religious nuts, hard core ones. To those on the left like my mother, a non-Christian Quaker, the right wing was extremists were evangelicals, Baptists, or other frothing-at-the-mouth Christians with unyielding beliefs and completely closed minds. They believed fervently in God, so hard that Jesus might come back suddenly and bring about the apocalypse, taking only true believers to heaven. The rest of, atheists and democrats, destroyed.
Although it was implied, at least to me, that the party was still white, it seemed semi-OK to be black and Hispanic born-agains. Bush himself seemed to honestly like Hispanics. To be fair, without checking the internet or any notes, I don’t recall he had any personal hatred or animus towards blacks either. I don’t readily recall any dog-whistle references he made constantly, though I’m sure there were some. Maybe my mind and memory are clouded by his disastrous war based on a lie of WMDs that killed over 250,000 Iraqis. Different sources estimate from 151 to 400,000 directly, with indirect additions to just over a million. To Iraqis, Bush was the most disastrous US president, more so than Trump.
Before Bush became Baptist and recruited the evangelicals to become extremists, the snake eaters and Pentecostals were just wandering around in the political wilderness apparently. This group was brought in a more unified manner, and they liked the safety of the group whiteness so much they stayed.
Before him was papa Bush 41. He picked up the racist trope and institutionalized the ghetto and the myth of welfare queen, consolidating the white business class. He held up the bag of crack cocaine that the cops found on a black man sitting outside the bench of the White House and said, “You see this big crack bag sold by blacks. It’s come directly to the White House steps. America, we cannot stand for this and must continue to drug war” [against blacks and browns].
Now he didn’t actually say that, but when he held up the bag of crack, he definitely implied it when he said it was “turning our [inner] cities “battle zones.” In all fairness, the drug dealer was set up and the sting were set up in front of the white house, so the FBI could seize the prop, the crack bag, that he could then hold up like a toxic pollutant to America, and of course those who sold it (it was a black man who sold that bag, but he meant blacks in general).
Bush 41 was competent and picked up the mantel started by Reagan of the new morning in America myth. Reagan busted the FAA union as one his proverbial first act. He wanted capitalism restored and put back in the hands of, well, capitalists. The unions were to end. No more socialist unions.
Back then under Reagan, it didn’t seem there were extremist wings and right wings. Sure, there were militias and the KKK, racists and the Southern strategy that took the Southern whites from the democrats under Nixon. But I don’t recall the constant use of the term “extremist right wing.”
I’m not letting the Democrats off the hook, with Hillary’s Super Predator remark; her philandering husband ending welfare based in part on the welfare queen and crack battle zone “myths”; and the passing the crime bill with Joe Biden’s open support that put blacks in jail at rates unprecedented until America had more back men in jail than slaves at the end of the Civil War. But I don’t recall personally the constant use of the phrase “right-wing extremists,” or for that matter left wing extremists.
Today, post-Trump presidency, the phrase “extreme right” refers solely to white supremacists or those masquerading them, like Senator Josh “the real man” Hawley, Ted “Cancun Cruz”, Lauren “arrest record” Boebert, Matt “the teen trafficker” Gaetz, or MJT, or Brooks or representative Paul “the AOC Killer” Gosar. These are not principled people. They are more like Mexican wrestling night at an urban arena.
Extremist now refers to the hatred of Latinos at the border, the hatred of blacks, the hatred of China. Being caught in contradictions doesn’t faze this group. They don’t care much about ideology. Anger and skin color are their life’s greatest achievements. You can’t have a ‘gotcha’ moment with them as anger and reason don’t mix.
Don’t get me wrong: The constant anger and scathing criticism they dole out is extreme. It just isn’t American in the typical political way Congress has been as part of daily spectacle. No American president who lost did not concede defeat, only Trump, and none denied a normal handover of power.
I don’t like phrase “extreme right” from this group of sore Trump losers, because it is not a principled stance that puts them on the extreme part of an American ideology spectrum. There is nothing principled about them. It is just hatred and anger. They don’t subscribe to any coherent ideology, like evangelicals or union busters, or anything else like those that went before Trump.
I disagreed with the Bushes and Reagan’s strategies and their actions based on ideologies. I disagreed with their “subliminal” racist intent manifest in their policy. Competent politicians can do a lot of damages to races and lower classes through deliberate policies, usually ones that take decades to reverse, it at all. Trump did really none of those, and we should add thankfully.
But open hatred is more insidious. Anyone can join in.
They can now bring their AR-15 with 223 full metal jackets as well thanks to Kyle. There can’t be a rational argument against such naked hatred either, because it is vile in its very nature. So, I’ll just stick to the word “Extremists” for now until someone can come up with something better for me.
I just won’t apply it to those on the ‘far right’, and certainly not the left. These new round of extremists Trump whipped up started with Obama’s “birther” controversy (the one he alluded to constantly meant Blacks Don’t Belong in America, which is also a view pre-Civil War and even endorsed by Lincoln to ship “them” all back to West Africa after the war.)
Trump beat the racism drum for years, and it worked — the Wall, the Birtherism, “Jina” (China), the Caravan. All those and other key messages or memes were not about policy — he had no policy. They were all about fanning constant hatred and fear in whites. Thus, we can’t use policy or principles against him in analysis to place him on the extreme right wing, as he didn’t have any, and neither do his followers. Trump was a Democrat, then a Republican, a win at any cost racist whose father was a Klan member.
His followers may or may be religious, may or may not like unions, they don’t care though. They only care about loyalty to him, and those that don’t brown nose will be primaried, kicked out of the party, no matter if they stand on the traditional right like Adam Kinzinger, who is quitting, or Liz Cheney, who is not. You must kiss the ring, or as we said in grade school, brown the nose, become a brown noser.
They are extremists, but their anger is not a principle. It not stuck to any part of the spectrum. It roams freely.
