Doubling down on the past
by digby
This is the stuff that gets the base excited but it's very short-sighted:
Conservative Republicans are worried that political correctness is creeping into their party.
They point to the decision by a House committee to replace 50 state flags — including Mississippi’s, which is emblazoned with the Confederate battle flag — with 50 state coins from the U.S. mint.
Separately, Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) sidestepped the controversy this week raging over a North Carolina law barring transgender people from using bathrooms that do not match their born sex, saying he didn’t know enough about what he said was a state proposal.
And while conservative Republicans grumble that President Obama’s decision to pull Andrew Jackson off the front of the $20 bill is playing politics with currency, they feel there’s scant motivation in their ranks to stop him.
“Political correctness has crept into the Capitol,” said David Bozell, president of ForAmerica, a conservative advocacy group.
Brian Darling, a conservative Republican strategist, accused House GOP leaders of caving in to the PC police.
“The House making the decision to take down all the flags so the Mississippi flag is not in the Capitol is a sign of political correctness,” he said. “Until the people of Mississippi decide they want to change it, Congress should fly the state flag.”
Taking umbrage at the “PC police” has been a go-to card for conservatives for years.
It’s been used to great success in this year’s presidential race by Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the party’s nomination.
Trump regularly faults the country for sliding into political correctness, an argument he’s used to parry criticism of statements he’s made about Mexico, women and Muslims.
While he called Tubman “fantastic” this week, he also criticized the decision to replace Jackson with her on the $20 bill as “pure political correctness.”
Last fall, he told a South Carolina audience “I’m so tired of this politically correct crap.”
Yet even Trump this week came under criticism from his GOP presidential rival Ted Cruz that he had bowed to political correctness by stating that the North Carolina bathroom law had done harm to the state.
Cruz’s campaign launched a new television ad Friday accusing Trump of joining “the ranks of the PC police” — a charge that would have been all but unimaginable a few weeks ago.
Conservatives fear that squeamishness on social controversies is linked to what they see as a lack of full commitment to confront Democrats on major policy issues, such as defunding Planned Parenthood.
They are also making the case that if the GOP cannot fight President Obama and Democrats on those issues, it is no wonder they can’t take more basic steps in governance.
“If you can’t say that guys should be going to the bathroom in men’s rooms and women should have the privacy they’re entitled to, if you can’t make that case as a leader of the Republican Party, no wonder you can’t get a budget through,” Bozell said this week.
I suppose they have no choice. Their constituency is dug in and there's no getting them out of it. But leadership is going to be required by somebody to get them out of this trap. There's little evidence of it coming from the political class. Industry is showing some spine on the ridiculous transgender discrimination and have been helpful with the confederate flag nonsense. There's little evidence they care about immigrant or women's right's however. You can't count on them for social justice --- their motives are pecuniary. Political leadership will have to emerge eventually but there's little sign of it yet.
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