The number of ironies surrounding the Tea Party’s latest depiction of Karl Rove as a Nazi is almost too many to count. It was, after all, the Turd Blossom who, together with Lee Atwater, launched the so called “southern strategy.”
That strategy was not novel at all from a world history perspective. In fact, virtually every fascist organization in the world that has ever gotten legs begins with a strategy similar to the “southern strategy.” It is where the elite industrialists first recruit a small core of totally devoted demagogues. Those demagogues are then assigned the task of rallying the most ignorant, low information, and most easily influenced elements of a culture for the purpose of creating social unrest.
It is a textbook approach to launching a fascist movement – for that matter, any extremist movement. In this case, the American elite, billionaire industrialists began by recruiting Karl Rove as their lieutenant demagogue. Karl was then ordered to rally as much of America’s intellectual, low-hanging fruit as possible. Karl began with southern bigots who already had a D.N.A. structure that allowed them to easily hate and Rove used that hate capacity wisely.
In his ugly career the Turd Blossom taught his recruited rabble to hate according to color, gender, sexual preference, social standing, education, regional origin, religion, and political party affiliation – Karl was successful, he helped launch the Tea Party. Karl’s billionaire enablers benefited greatly from Karl’s tea-bag, hate machine.
But there is also another chapter to how most fascist movements play themselves out. Most of the time the turd-blossom-type demagogue, the Karl Rove characters, are inevitably gobbled up by the very riff raff, and ignorant rabble that they helped launch. The billionaires inevitably press on, unscathed, and rarely even visible while the Karl Rove type demagogue dies by the very sword he handed to his excitable, hateful, and angry followers.
So as we look at the tea bagger picture of the Nazi S.S. trooper that captures Karl Rove’s true, inner spirit, a few thoughts should occur to all of us. First and foremost should be our recognition that almost every fascist demagogue ends up in the same place – gobbled up by the same radical wing-nuts he helped to create.