Well it turned out that on the day the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) took effect, the U.S. government had shut down – and now we must ask ourselves whether it is permanently broken?

There are many explanations for the breakdown, but the one over-riding truth, according to Salon’s editor-at-Large, Joan Walsh, is that this is the end culmination of fifty-years of consistent Republican strategy to portray the U.S. government as a culprit and oppressor that seeks fundamentally to be the “protector and provider” for the American negro, and to the detriment of everyone else.

That it all came apart under our first American negro president was not an accident, it was most likely inevitable.

From Joan Walsh at Salon –

Joan Walsh

People talk about the role of race in Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy:” how Pat Buchanan and Kevin Phillips helped him lure the old Dixiecrats into the Republican Party permanently. Far less well known was the GOP’s “Northern Strategy,” which targeted so-called “white ethnics” – many of them from the Catholic “Sidewalks of New York” like my working class family, in the words of Kevin Phillips. Without a Northern Strategy designed to inflame white-ethnic fears of racial and economic change, Phillips’ imaginary but still influential notion of a “permanent Republican majority” would have been unimaginable.

“The principal force which broke up the Democratic (New Deal) coalition is the Negro socioeconomic revolution and liberal Democratic ideological inability to cope with it,” Phillips wrote. “Democratic ‘Great Society’ programs aligned that party with many Negro demands, but the party was unable to defuse the racial tension sundering the nation.” Phillips was not trying to defuse that tension, far from it – he was trying to lure those white ethnics to the GOP (although he later broke with the party he helped create.) But his Northern Strategy truly came to fruition in 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan. Where Nixon swept the South, Reagan was able to take much of the North and West, too.

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