Let us open with a hymn, courtesy of The Toadies:

Origin of Species

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

Please open your copies ofto Chapter Nine, verse six:

Last November’s election was definitely a “change” election. A new progressive majority in America asserted itself. Profound changes to the demographic and cultural landscape led to an outcome that was impossible even a decade ago. So how have the opponents of change reacted? First, by replacing the word “nigger” with “acorn”:

He says he overheard a police officer ask them if they were selling for ACORN and the young woman — who appears to be a young teen — told the cop “yes.” The older woman tells him flatly they’re not from ACORN, but he keeps shouting it anyway. Most of all, Jones and his wife are harassing these people based on some shaky presuppositions: that a young teenage girl would answer a cop’s question — particularly the addition of the ACORN element — accurately is probably the shakiest, but toss in the fact that “off brand” vendors, people who have nothing whatsoever to do with a political entity like ACORN, employing young African Americans often flock to these political events and sell whatever is selling in terms of hats, T-shirts, pins, flags, and whatever gewgaws can be sold. Cops regularly chase them off if they don’t have a license. Which is probably what these people were doing, and why they fled. Well, that and the fear of being lynched by these maniacs.

How does the man in that video “know” the flag vendors work for ACORN? He doesn’t. As David Neiwart puts it

Same old fear and hate, same old paranoid delusions, new word. Bob Cesca traces this to Lee Atwater of Willy Horton infamy:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”(Emphasis mine)

Rather than adapt to change, the reactionary elements of American society are adapting an old strategy. But why? Why so much fear? What are they afraid of? Ask them, and they cannot say:

Leaving aside race, we find Glenn Beck still standing at the center of all this fearmongering. His show is the afternoon flagship on a network wholly devoted to fearmongering. Lately, that fearmongering has taken a rather classical turn:

As I’ve said before, the nexus of race and politics has been exploited by reactionary elements in this country since before the Civil Rights era . None of this is new.

Indeed, since last November the sum total of reaction on the right has been to reassert the racist and inflammatory rhetoric of yesteryear. The results are an emboldened fringe and a political party on the verge of extinction outside the south:



Once again, I reassert that one-party government is a bad thing for democracy and must be avoided at all costs. Yet the Republican species seems unwilling or unable to adapt to change. Rather than embrace the issues of Hispanic America, the Grand Old Party bends to its most radical elements and endorses shameful hysteria about illegal immigration. America’s opposition party has failed to win, in fact has disowned, the fastest-growing American demographic. That is refusal to adapt.

But we cannot be surprised by the refusal to adapt. After all, the core Republican demographic is least likely to believe in evolutionary adaptation. Why should they change their rhetoric?

There is only one way to save the Republican Party from itself: the GOP must lose. And lose, and lose, and lose — on every front — until the party leadership is forced to recognize that racism and fearmongering are a losing proposition, or else the party dies to leave a vacuum that can be filled by something new.

In summation, let us reflect on the words of Charles Darwin regarding extinction:

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.