That red, white and blue leg of the GOP stool
by digby
Over at Salon today I talk a bit about the Republicans’ new National Security strategy:
If there is one thing liberals have envied about the conservative movement over the years, it’s the simple and clear metaphor they employ to describe their coalition: a three legged stool consisting of “family values, small government and a strong national defense.” (If you’ve ever had the experience of listening to Democratic strategists struggle with an “elevator pitch” you’d understand why.) The original brilliance of that metaphor was the idea that it requires all three legs to stand up so every faction must be equally supported by the others. (I would argue that the seat of the stool is law and order — aka race — but the poor metaphor is so tortured at this point that it’s about to collapse of its own weight, so I won’t.) In any case, over time those factions all merged into a party consensus that was simply called “conservatism” and the three legs of the stool today merely symbolize the three issue areas that animate the Party. Each set of concerns is always relevant to some extent or another but when one gets a little bit shaky they can usually trot out one of the other ones to rally their troops.
So it’s not just an ideological coalition, it’s also an electoral strategy. For instance, when the Obamacare fearmongering fails to produce the predicted chaos they could shift gears and start frothing about debt and taxes. Or when the culture warriors go too far and start babbling about “legitimate rape” and call women who use birth control a bunch of sluts they can call in the nativists to scream about an “invasion of illegals” or stoke fears that we are in imminent danger of terrorists killing us all in our beds. When events break just right, they can even combine them to create a full-blown panic.
Here’s how it’s being done for the upcoming election:
You won’t believe some of these ads …
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