against Yarborough.
From the vantage point of the police state conditions of the early 1990's, we can discern a further
implication of the southern Republican project of which Bush was in several moments of the 1960's
a leading operative. As the southern GOP emerged out of the play of gang and counter-gang
between McGovernite left liberal investment bankers and Nixon-Reagan right liberal investment
bankers (and Bush has been both), it made possible that Southern Strategy which elected Nixon in1968 and which has given the Republicans a virtual lock on the electoral college ever since. The
Watergate-Carter anomaly of 1976 confirms rather than alters this overall picture.
The Southern Strategy that Bush turns out to have been serving in the sixties was not called to the
attention of the public until somewhat after the 1964 election in which Goldwater had garneredelectoral votes exclusively in the south. As William Rusher wrote in the National Review: "The (^)
Democrats had for years begun each race with an assured batch of delegates from the South." "The
Republican Party strategy," argued Rusher, needs refiguring, given a chance to break into this bloc
once denied them...." His conclusion was that ""Republicans can put themselves in the position of
having the Southern bloc as a starting handicap; after that, they can compete for the rest of thecountry, needing only that 50 per cent minus (say) 111 [of the electoral college votes]." Doing all (^)
this, Rusher contended, would allow Republican Presidential candidates to ignore the " traditional
centers of urban liberalism," especially in the northeast. [fn 4] These ideas were further refined in
Richard Nixon's brain trust, presided over by Wall Street bond lawyer John Mitchell at 445 Park
Avenue, and received their definitive elaboration fromthe thesis that the "whole secret of politics" is in "know Kevin Phillips, who in those years advanceding who hates who," which is of course
another way of speaking of wedge issues.
The result of the successful application of the Southern Strategy in 1968 and in the following years
has been a a period of mBranch, of which George Bush personally has been the leading beneficiary, first through hiore than two decades of one-party Republican control over the Executives
multiple appointments, then through the vice-presidency, and now through the possession of the
White House itself. This has had the decisive structural consequence of making possible the kind of
continuous, entrenched bureaucratic power that we see in the Bush regime and its leading
functionaries. As we will see, such administrators of the corporate state as James Baker and BrentScowcroft, for whom the exercise of executive power has long since become a way of life, appear (^)
to themsleves and to others as immune to the popular reckoning. The democratic republic requires
the moment of catharsis, of throwing the bums out, if the arrogance of the powerful is ever to be
chastened. If there is no prospect for the White House changing hands, this amounts to a one- party
state. The southern Republican Party, including two-party Texas, has provided the Republican lockon the White House which has proven a mighty stimulus to those tendencies towards authoritarian
and even totalitarian rule which have culminated in the Administrative Fascism of the current Bush
regime.
Bush's opponeYarborough hant in that Goldwater year of 1964 wd been born in Chandler, Texas in 1903 aas Senator Ralph Webster Yarborough.s the seventh of eleven children. He (^)
attended public schools in Chandler and Tyler, worked on a farm, and went on to attend Sam
Houston State Teachers College and, for one year, the US Military Academy at West Point. He was
a member of the 36th division of the Texas National Guard, in which he advanced from private to
sergeant. After World War I he worked a passage to Europe on board a freighter, and found aGermany working in the offices of the American Chamber of Commerce in Berlin. He also pursued job in
studies in Stendahl, Germany. He returned to the United States to earn a law degree at the
University of Texas in 1927, and worked as a lawyer in El Paso. At one point he found a job as a
harvest hand in the Oklahoma dust bowl of the late 1920's, and also served a stint as a roughneck in
the oil fields. Yarborough entered public service as an Assistant Attorney General of Texas from