Sunday, February 13, 2011

Retail politics

So I went into Koreatown yesterday to have kimchi, pork, and tofu stir-fry in a restaurant in a plaza full of Korean restaurants, shops, and a Korean grocery, and come out and there's a sheet of paper under my windshield wiper. I pick it up and read it, and it's a Korean-American politician inviting me to attend a fundraiser for his candidacy for the CIty Council, at a dinner at the largest Korean restaurant in the area. The amount of money requested is modest and it's clear that this restaurant is owned by one of his supporters who is donating a lot of the food and services.

So I'm reading this, and it occurs to me that this is old school retail politics. And it also occurs to me that this applies to immigrant communities in general -- they're fundamentally conservative. They believe in hard work, family, and traditional values. They believe in the American Dream. Which is why the Republican Party is shooting themselves in the foot so badly by becoming the party of the KKK, the latest outrage being of course not allowing brown people to use the emergency rooms in Arizona (they should just go die quietly on the streets, yo!).

The Republicans have gone nuts. That's all I can figure, they've gone nuts. They're pandering to an aging and declining population of white racists upset that brown people will soon be the majority, and not looking at the long term at all. They're like corporate CEO's who focus on the next quarter rather than on a strategic vision of the future, and end up destroying their company and their brand. This outbreak of outright racism from Republicans basically dooms them to minority status in the future, even if there are short-term gains in the present in states like Arizona that have a lot of old racist fucks who retired there from Indiana.

Democrats today are relying on the insanity of their opposition to win elections. It's pretty clear that Alaskan insane moron Caribou Barbie lost the election for John McCain -- Obama didn't win it, Caribou Barbie lost it. Thing is, relying on your opposition being insane is not a recipe for victory in the future. Just ask the Israelis, who relied on Hezbollah being incompetent when they invaded Lebanon in 2006... and ended up getting the shit beat out of'em by Arabs who proved to *not* be incompetent, they didn't even hit mainline Hezbollah forces, just the village militias, and got the stuffing whupped out of'em. Relying on your opponent's incompetence or insanity for victory is, in the end, a losing game, because sooner or later you *will* meet an opponent who is neither incompetent or insane...

So our two legacy parties here in the U.S. have lost their minds. But then, the nation as a whole has gone insane anyhow, so I guess that's no surprise...

-- Badtux the Old-school Penguin

4 comments:

  1. it's an amazing thing to watch as the Big Tent boys work their way down to a segregated pup tent...
    In a way, it's fitting. They don't want Hispanics or blacks cluttering up their gatherings whether it's at the mall or work. But they're happy to let you vote for their asses, if you're stupid enough to do so.

    Good post!

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  2. We really need a viable, non-corporatist third party. In the meantime, though, I'm happy to see the Confederate party undermining its own long-term prospects...

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  3. Well, we've got to live through the short term to get to the long term, and that is no sure thing.

    The Republicans have gone nuts. That's all I can figure, they've gone nuts.
    As Bill Maher puts it, "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to the insane asylum."

    I don't think the Dems have lost their minds - they've just been co-opted by big finance.

    Your post raises an interesting point about "conservatism." Frex, I am a very conservative person. Every detail of how I have lived my life screams conservatism: family values (the real ones,) community involvement, job history, personal finances, real estate transactions, etc, etc . . .

    Yet, I am, in the current political context, a flaming liberal.

    Political conservatism is NOT personal conservatism. Political conservatism is 1) a fundamental negation of logic 2) a belief in a class-ordered elitist society (this is directly from Burke) and 3) an enthusiastic embrace of the road to serfdom under trans-national corporatist overlords.

    WASF!
    JzB

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  4. An enraged, activated minority can politically outplay a lethargic majority. Especially when the corporate forces stirring up the white minority own the voting machines. (And the mass media organs, and the polling companies, etc.) All they need to do is keep the polling numbers close enough so that a cheat-to-win game is not TOO implausible.

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