It has become more and more difficult to explain the United States presidential election process to Mexican friends. (This predicament is glittery with irony, because after 20 Republican debates it’s become difficult for most U.S. citizens to make coherent sense of what’s going on.) The picky interest in the U.S. political process for many of my Mexican friends and acquaintances is relatively new — certainly it’s a newly informed interest. The quickly spreading appearance of computers in middle-class homes here — and in poorer households, where hand-me-down PCs are appearing — means the sudden arrival of a social media among people whose spotty educations don’t equip them to usefully handle the avalanches of information rushing their way. Yet their interest is not idle curiosity. A great many have family members — some legal, some illegal — living in states where anti-Latino laws and racists are rife. And they are seeing these rough attitudes being flourished in various ways by the revolving cast of over-excited and verbally undisciplined aspirants battling to become the Republican candidate in the coming general campaign for president. That fosters apprehension here regarding relatives living in such states as Georgia, Florida, Ohio, Nevada, Colorado, and, especially Arizona.
But even the leading GOP aspirants appear oblivious of the blight they are sowing with their open admiration of Arizona Governor Janet Brewer and other political figures well-known for their racist rants. Latino leaders now busy organizing register and get-out-the-vote campaigns point to the dispersion of Latino voters. They are at work in many states not known to be “immigration-portals” or strongholds of progressive fever. Such states, they say, promise to give the 2012 election a new reach and a different “edge” than in the past. Some such groups in the U.S. are calculating that Latino voters will play a crucial role in the vote in nine states besides California and Arizona: Nevada, Indiana, Texas, New Mexico, Florida, Colorado, New York, New Jersey, Illinois.
But that’s in the future. At the moment most new local explorers of U.S. political ways are trying to decipher what Tuesday’s GOP Michigan primary election means.
For Mexicans whose curiosity is prompted by the fate of their north-of-the-border relatives and friends, no good news has resided among the gracelessly revolving corps of GOP would-be candidates. Because there are an estimated 11 million illegal aliens living in the United States, those from Mexico are scattered among the millions of Mexican-Americans — and other Latinos — living in the United States. The racist attitudes strike many U.S. citizens, legal visitors, people who are working and studying legally in the United States. It turns a majority of U.S. citizens with “unusual” names and dark complexions, many of whom were indifferent to politics, into avid, permanent opponents of all those who practice such hostility.
Mitt Romney’s electoral victory in Michigan (his home state) and Arizona primaries does not create the “clarity” that many such observers were hoping for. “He won, didn’t he?” said a friend. “So he’ll run against Obama, no?”
In sports and gambling if you win by a single point, it’s an indisputable win. But, always with politics, it’s more complicated. Romney won by three percent, and was happy with that slim score. But that doesn’t cheer many of his co-religionists. Romney spent much of the last five years courting conservatives of his home state, where his father was a three-term governor. The Tea Party & Co., having never completely “trusted” Romney — he’s East Cost business elite — still prefers Rick Santorum.Yet a procedure that tends to be puzzling in Mexico reveals something else. First, the emotionally and mentally erratic Santorum split Michigan’s delegates with Romney, 15 and 15. This while proclaiming an agenda of sensual-free sex, calling a college education unnecessary (he has three university degrees and home-schools his children), objecting to the separation of church and state, declaring that contraception harms women, that there should be no abortion even in cases of incest and rape, and announcing that Satan is about to destroy the United States. He’s begun to sound like a later day Tomas de Torquemada, shorn the high spiraling theological blood-and-guts paranoia of 15th century Spain. Mexico has gone through its public/personal debates and name-calling regarding contraception and abortion, so folks here understand that commotion, though they find it taking place a bit late in the day.
But Santorum’s Satan gig grabs attention. Mexican history is heavily stocked with folks who seemed competing for the role of Satan. Most of them were power hungry and/or politicians. And in modern time, those with the taste for large scale torture and blood-letting were officials who seemed to aggressively vie for that sobriquet. Hitler and other fascists, right and left, come instantly to mind, so does the history of the Mexican political organization, the Institutional Revolutionary Party at various times, and of course the Republic’s drug lords. A good many people my age have seen a lot of brutal behavior, but few blame it on Satan. It’s the vicious doing of devilish people. People with a couple of springs loose doing bad stuff. Most of them are self-righteous a__holes most often with a political-and-or greed trip. No need for Satan, Rick.
But the most important thing that a suddenly increasing number of U.S. citizens are now realizing: The GOP appears to be self-destructing. Most of those Republican legislators with any brains and a sense of humanity are jumping ship.
Each day Capitol Hill reveals more evidence that the place “is broken beyond repair,” wrote one journalist who covers Congress. His news Thursday: “The last remaining vestiges of sense and moderation are fleeing. The latest blow came Tuesday, February 27, when Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, one of the Republican Party’s last moderates, said she wouldn’t seek a fourth term because she sees no imminent change in ‘the partisanship of recent years.’” He adds: “Also heading for the door is much of the remaining core of Senate moderates: Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas; independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut; and Democrats Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Jim Webb of Virginia.”
In addition to those examples, David Brooks, the highly regarded and generally level-headed conservative columnist of the New York Times wrote Tuesday that the present leaders of the Republican Party no longer speak for him. Because he doesn’t throw fits on the page, or vilify people with whom he disagrees, some wingnuts call him a “false” conservative who doesn’t spend the prescribed time hating those of differing opinion. Brooks was a protégé of William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder and chief shepherd of the National Review magazine, with which he declared war in 1960 upon liberalism and created what many have called “the new American conservatism.” Buckley’s aim was to shape and nourish a system of conservative ideas. He embraced large, intricate concepts and words, and possessed an unfettered sense of sharp humor. He could be slashing in his polemical criticism, yet able to keep friendship with many of those he criticized. These included such exceptional writers as Norman Mailer, William Styron, and Joan Didion (who wrote for the National Review as a young woman).
Buckley was an opponent in the early 1960s of the John Birch Society’s founder Robert Welch. Buckley later recalled, “His influence was near-hypnotic, his ideas wild. He said Dwight D. Eisenhower was a ‘dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,’ and that the government of the United States was ‘under operational control of the Communist party.’” Buckley attacked what he termed Welch’s “operative fallacy.” That was the “assumption that you can infer subjective intention from objective consequence: We lost China to the Communists, therefore the president of the United States and the secretary of state wished China go to the Communists.” The Tea Party and similar presently “severe” conservatives wouldn’t like having Buckley around today analyzing the present state of the GOP political thinking — if they could understand him.