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mcgeedo---well, no. i'm refering to a specific sector of the conservative coalition that's now a millstone around the neck of the republican party, and i do not generally use words loosely--so on the second point, i'm not saying anything that involves the degrees of mangling basic terminology and distorting the empirical world that your "people's republic" line does.
on the first, what the christian coalition accomplished since the mid 1980s, primarily under the leadership of ralph reed, was an impressive organizational feat. the mobilization of mostly baptist evangelical churches as a political force was central both to the material success of the conservative coalition and also the the language that it's developed, particularly during the last period of conservative opposition under clinton. that language is what i usually call in short hand conservative identity politics. it functions to make political positions a question who who one is rather than of what or how one thinks. it's been balled up with a host of other tics particular to the right that we've all seen the results of since september 2001---and it's coming undone. it's because the political machine that the christian coalition was a big part of fashioning was a powerful as it was that aberrations like the bush administration were possible, and because i oppose and have opposed everything--and i mean everything--about the bush administration and the language that enabled it, that it used to sell itself and its various debacles, i see in that machinery a massive retrograde force. and i look forward to it's coming apart. but i'm not so naive as to think that it will really go away. so i am watching the conservative coalition rush toward defeat and i hope that defeat is total.
on the other hand, i should say that the conservative coalition that propelled the farce that was the bush administration into power is not the same as conservatism as a whole--but in the states it has largely substituted itself for it. and i should also say that i have no particular problem with conservatives who are able to argue positions i might not agree with in a lucid way--but i find the populist conservatives who cannot argue but instead resort to cheap term substitutions and recycling of dissociative talking points to be tiresome. i look forward to a diminshing of that style of being-conservative and hope for the emergence of more diversity of views on the right.
but i still oppose everything that conservatives stand for, and wouldn't mind watching conservatives have to deal with a political waterloo that'd marginalize the extreme right fringe that's been moved to the center of republican discourse over the past 15 years or so. i wouldn't mind watching that at all.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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