Rick Santorum

Crash and Bern: The 2016 Iowa Caucuses

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Republican Presidential candidate Ted Cruz crusied to victory in IOwa by Trumping Trump.

Republican Presidential candidate Ted Cruz cruised to victory in Iowa by Trumping Trump.

Every four years, the Iowa Caucus allows Iowa to be just a little bit more than that Field of Dreams state. The 2016 Iowa Caucus was an interesting affair, to say the least.

First off, there was the not entirely unsurprising second-place finish of marmot-domed billionaire braggart Donald Trump. The Donald got thwomped fairly decisively by immigrant Ted Cruz, proving that the universe does indeed have a sense of humor. Trump’s defeat was predictable: his entire campaign has been long on foamy-mawed resentment but short on real-deal, right-wing meat and potatoes. The policies he’s mouthed – building a Mexican border wall; banning Muslim immigration, and shoring up Social Security for cranky old honkies – have ranged from the absurd to the frankly liberal, hence the disdain he’s engendered among GOP establishment Grand Poobas.

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The Christian Right, the Millerites, and the End of the World

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Congressnut Michele Bachmann (R-MN) speaks at the Values Voters Summit, where the End Times are kind of a thing.

Congressnut Michele Bachmann (R-Toontown) speaks (possibly in tongues) to the Evangelical Values Voters Summit.

A large and very politically active segment of the American population, mostly Evangelical Christians, can’t wait for the end of the world. As the Washington Times recently reported, a Barna Group poll found that 4 in 10 American adults believe that “the world is currently living in the ‘end times’ as described by prophesies in the Bible.” When the data was broken down further, the poll revealed that 54% of mainline Protestants agreed that the end times were immanent, while 77% of evangelicals and 45% of Catholics believed that Jesus would soon return to earth to do stuff that He could, as the Almighty, theoretically do from His celestial La-Z-Boy recliner instead. But I digress.

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The Republican Party, Race-Baiting, and Reconstruction’s Legacy

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A campaign button worn by so-called "Reagan Democrats:" blue collar white northerners worried that Democrats had caved to black interests.

A 1984 Reagan-Bush campaign button worn by so-called “Reagan Democrats:” blue-collar white northerners worried that Democrats had caved to black interests.

Its become a truism in modern American politics that the Republican Party traffics in coded racial resentment. Dog-whistle phrases like “taxes,” “welfare,” “food stamps,” “dependency,” “entitlement reform,” or, if you’re the non-too-subtle former Pennsylvania senator Rick “Frothy Mix” Santorum, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money,” have helped relay the message to status-anxiety ridden working and middle class whites that the GOP will protect them from the welfare scrounging black hordes.

With good reason, the GOP’s use of racial resentment to win votes is considered a twentieth-century century phenomenon, but it also has deep roots in the nineteenth century Reconstruction era, when the intersection of race and class planted the seeds of racial resentment that show a clear link between the party of Abraham Lincoln and the party of, well, the Tea Party.

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