Why Right's Lemmings Don Suicide Vest

There is an old saying from the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." But the modern American Right seems to believe that "Hey, this is the USA, why shouldn't we have our own facts!"

That sentiment is at the center of the current U.S. crisis involving the shutdown of the federal government and the threats to default on America's credit. A determined minority within the House of Representatives has decided that its view of the Founding Principles and its assessment on the role of government are the only ones that count, whether factually anchored or not.

And it doesn't even matter that this right-wing group has no mandate from the American people. Not only did the Democrats win the White House and the Senate in 2012, but the Democrats garnered about 1-1/2 million more votes for House seats than the Republicans did.

The Republican House "majority" is derived to a significant degree from aggressive gerrymandering of congressional districts, like the one for northern Ohio where the GOP-controlled statehouse combined a Democratic district in Cleveland (represented by Dennis Kucinich) with one in Toledo (represented by Marcy Kaptur). The two cities are 116 miles apart and the connection along Lake Erie is so narrow in spots that you have to leave the district to drive from one half to the other.

But today's Republican Party cares little about genuine democracy. Especially the GOP's right wing is about shaping a false historical narrative which misrepresents the intent of the Constitution's Framers and then insists that the Right's fake Founding Principles must be applied regardless of how the majority of Americans voted. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Right's Made-Up 'Constitution.'"]

Thus, holding the federal government -- and indeed the nation's economy -- hostage to impose the Tea Party's will on the people makes a sort of perverted sense. If you've convinced yourself that the normal democratic process is threatening the esteemed wisdom of the Founders, then -- as Sen. Barry Goldwater once proclaimed -- "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."

For many Tea Partiers, their hostility toward democracy is even stronger when you factor in that President Barack Obama and the congressional Democrats won their majorities by piling up votes from African-Americans, Hispanics and Asian-Americans. In the view of many on the Right, these non-whites are not "Real Americans" and thus their ballots should not count -- or at least not count as much as the votes of whites.

That racist attitude explains the recent surge of voter ID laws and the reduction of voting hours that are being enacted by Republican statehouses around the United States. They are doing so with the aid and encouragement of the five right-wing U.S. Supreme Court justices who gutted a clearly constitutional provision in the Voting Rights Act which required states with a history of racial discrimination in voting to get prior federal approval for changing voting rules.

The Fifteenth Amendment states, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." And the amendment gives Congress the "power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." Yet, the five right-wing justices deemed that their ideological belief in "states' rights" trumped the explicit wording of the Constitution.

White Power Structure

Many on the Right with their selective interpretation of the Constitution despise these post-Civil War amendments, in particular, because they were forced on the white power structure of the South after the Confederate insurrection fought to save but failed to preserve slavery, the right of whites to own blacks.

So, these amendments, especially the Fourteenth and Fifteenth which protect the rights of blacks and other racial minorities, are seen as illegitimate, tolerable only if they don't intrude on ultimate white rule. Or as famed conservative William F. Buckley declared in 1957, "the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically."

Buckley's edict is still the operational theory of the American Right: it's okay to let black and brown people express their silly little opinions once in a while but they must never be in charge. So today's Republican Party feels justified in taking action to make sure that whites can continue to "prevail, politically and culturally."

There were political optimists who thought that the election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president would lift the United States into a post-racial era, but it instead has prompted an angry last stand for white supremacy.

That history of defending white supremacy can be traced back to the battle over the Constitution when some of its prominent opponents, known as Anti-Federalists, saw the document's concentration of power in the federal government as an eventual death knell to slavery (despite the Constitution's implicit acceptance of slavery).

To the slave-owning Anti-Federalists, the Constitution's powerful central government combined with the North's emerging industrial strength presaged an eventual elimination of slavery. To them, it didn't help that some key supporters of the Constitution, like Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin, were abolitionists.

As Virginian Anti-Federalist leader Patrick Henry warned his fellow slave-owners in urging them not to ratify the Constitution, "they'll free your niggers!"