This is why having Charlie Pierce have a blog is fun:
This is now a party of pure Id. It's been building toward that for almost 50 years now. It began the trek as the party that absorbed the remnants of white supremacy and that employed (to considerable effect) the political energy of white reaction to the triumphs of the Civil Rights movement. Through the years, it absorbed into itself reactionary religion and a modern partisan media, but the basic template always has been that which was constructed when, as Lyndon Johnson predicted, white Southerners fled the Democratic party in the mid-1960's. By the time it elected Richard Nixon in 1968, it already had become the embodiment of organized resentment, Nixon being the perfect embodiment all by himself. Ronald Reagan's political career was born in that resentment. He stoked it as governor of California, and as a candidate for president in 1980. No soft-focus CNN feature about avuncular old Dutch should trump the bullshit about the welfare queens buying Cadillacs, and young bucks buying steaks, and that 1980 campaign kickoff not 10 miles away from the dam out of which the dug the bodies of Michael Schwerner, Andy Goodman, and James Chaney. Reagan knew his audience, and he played to it. Now, that Id is all the party has left, and, as its intellectual life shrinks, it becomes more rigidly orthodox. There's little room left in which candidates can maneuver.
There is no issue the party engages that is not broken down to the embattled Us, and the overwhelming, privileged Them. Poor people are also "elitists." Rick Perry gave a crumb to Them without asking Us. And then he implied that, maybe, They should be seen as worthy of the crumb he gave them, thereby engaging what 23 percent of the party might recognize as that vestigial impulse known as a conscience. How dare he anyway?
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/rick-perry-immigration-6503697#ixzz1ZlT4TkxO
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