One of the weirdest things about the argument Republicans have been using since last fall that criticizing Bush is "hate speech" and uncontrolled anger, is that Republicans have spent the last 35 years successfully courting what has been commonly called the "angry white men" vote.
Sid Blumenthal suggests, perhaps a tad over-optimistically, that the Bush dynasty has driven that strategy to the point where it cannot be sustained much longer: Bush needs to change the subject Guardian (UK) 08/12/04. (The article also appears in Salon.com as The fall of the house of Nixon.)
It was Nixon who created a brand-new coalition of Southern conservatism in reaction to the civil rights movement. He absorbed the Dixiecrat followers of George C Wallace - urban ethnic Catholics and white-collar suburbanites fearful of racial turmoil and the breakdown of law and order and resentful of student protests, assertive women and the loosening of social mores; and he shifted the locus of power in the Republican party from the north-east and midwest to California, the south-west and Florida. Nixon's natural cynicism allowed him to juggle the volatile elements that gelled for Ronald Reagan.
By the time of Nixon's election in 1968, the Democratic coalition had cracked up under the stress of race and Vietnam. Now the Republican party that came to power is exhausted. It has lost political impetus. Its instability, contradictions and anachronisms have been apparent for more than a decade, since Clinton's victory in 1992.
Looking at voting trends in California, Illinois and Michigan, Blumenthal argues that the electoral cost of basing the Republican Party in unreconstructed Southern segregationists and Christian Right conservatives is becoming higher than its benefits and therefore can't be sustained much longer.
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