Yet Another Cowboy?

When George Bush left the White House after eight years, he was one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history. Two poorly managed wars and total financial breakdown had driven confidence to its lowest ebb.

Back then, in January 2009, there couldn’t have been anybody who thought that just a few years later another Republican Texas governor would turn up in the context of the presidency — and one even more reactionary.

George W. Bush, that American calamity, marketed himself as a “compassionate conservative.” In Rick Perry’s case, one must erase the word compassionate and add the prefix “ultra” to the term conservative.

In a month, Perry breezed in as the Republican favorite for next year’s presidential election. According to the current weighted opinion polls published by the site RealClearPolitics, he has gained a lead over the former Massachusetts governor, Mitt Romney, despite the fact that the more subdued Romney would have a better chance against Barack Obama.

Perry, 61, who grew up on a simple ranch in Texas and with a background as an Air Force transport pilot, was at first a Democrat, but got his political breakthrough in 1990 when he was elected as the Republican Agriculture Commissioner. Eight years later, he became lieutenant governor and later succeeded George W. Bush as Texas’ governor when Bush left at the end of 2000 to become president.

It’s worth noting that Perry, at the beginning of his career, had considerable help from Karl Rove, Bush’s election strategist. Rove, who was called “Bush’s brain,” may be brilliant but has in reality been one of the most destructive figures to sweep through American politics.

With the exception of the loony tea party movement, formed in 2009 in protest against “the socialist” Obama, Republican enthusiasm for Perry is fairly temperate. After Perry’s weak debate efforts and some much-criticized statements, there is now increasing pressure on New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to launch a bid for the White House.

The widespread dissatisfaction with the Republican lineup was confirmed last weekend when the otherwise-discounted Herman Cain, the former director of a pizza company, won a straw poll in Florida.

That Perry can establish himself at the top of all the hopeful presidential candidates says something important and worrisome about the atmosphere in the U.S. in general and about the American right in particular.

Opinion in the USA and among those with the ability to shape the media narrative has shifted far to the right. The average American voter now places himself to the right of the middle and nearer the Republicans than the Democrats. Over a third of Republican voters state they are more conservative than a party that today is more conservative than ever.

It is a matter of gradual right-radicalization and polarization that was initiated as far back as the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, partly as a reaction against liberal reform of, among other things, civil rights. The process was reinforced by Ronald Reagan and cemented under George W. Bush.

Barack Obama’s election victory in 2008 appeared to be a sudden and temporary aberration. And sure enough: After only two years with America’s first black president, the Republicans scored great successes in the congressional elections in 2010.

One can without hesitation speak of a slow political and social decline in the USA, a decline that Jonathan Franzen uses as a backdrop for his powerful and acclaimed novel “Freedom,” which has now been published in Swedish.

Sometime in the 1990s, when the hate campaign against Bill and Hillary Clinton was at its peak, the dams burst. In a thorough review, Michael Tomasky observed recently in The New York Review of Books that inflated rhetoric started to push conservative ideas.

Rush Limbaugh’s grotesque radio tirades reached a growing public, and the aggressive TV channel, Fox News, became the right’s mass media platform. Since then, blogs and Internet forums have risen to prominence. This is, without a doubt, the same type of confirmatory and self-reinforcing flows of information, or bubbles, which became the subject of discussion after this summer’s massacre on the Norwegian island, Utöya, and formed Anders Behring Breivik’s distorted view of reality.

Conspiracy theories run rampant: 45 percent of tea party sympathizers believe that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. and therefore isn’t a legitimate president.

It is this not insignificant and rather paranoid group that Rick Perry addresses with points of view that make Ronald Reagan look like a reasonable center politician.

Rick Perry has been in power longer than any other governor in Texas. However, this is not his only record. He can also boast that he has signed more than 234 death sentences — more than any other governor currently in office in the USA — and seems to be unconcerned that at least one of the convictions was faulty. When the subject of the execution was raised in a Republican debate in California, the public responded with applause.

Perry, who baptized his cowboy boots Freedom and Liberty, makes a habit of quoting the Bible and has, in his role of governor, prayed to God for more rain over drought-stricken Texas. He doesn’t believe in evolution and believes that global warming is an invention of the left. On the latter point he has a majority of the tea party movement on his side; only 14 percent believe in anthropogenic climate change. In the run up to 1988’s presidential election, Perry supported the Democrat, Al Gore. Today, he labels Gore, the former vice president, as a “false prophet” on the climate issue.

Barack Obama’s health care reform, maintains Perry, is “the closest this country has ever come to outright socialism.” Like many conservative Americans, Perry believes that everything went wrong with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s reform and crisis policy, the New Deal, in the 1930s, and he argues that the Social Security pension system introduced under Roosevelt is unlawful.

Perry wants to dismantle the Constitution’s 16th and 17th amendments, since these allegedly weaken individual states and consolidate Washington’s power. The first facilitates federal income tax, and the second allows the direct election of senators. He has threatened that Texas, which joined the United States in 1845, may withdraw from the Union.

Perry, who makes a big deal out of jogging while armed, received a barrage of criticism when he let it be known that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is a traitor who ought to be careful if traveling to Texas, in case he should come to harm.

The financial crisis was triggered, in Perry’s opinion, not by too little government regulation, but by too much.

An explanation for Perry popularity, aside from the ideological support from the tea party, is that Texas in most recent years has created more jobs than any other state. This is at a time when the USA’s overall unemployment has been stuck at around 9 percent, a figure which constitutes Obama’s worst headache in the run up to the presidential election.

It is true that around 40 percent of the jobs created in the USA since 2009 were in Texas. However, these are for the most part low productivity “McJobs”: In reality Texas is, together with Mississippi, the state with the largest proportion of people earning minimum wage or less.

Nor are Texas’ statistics otherwise particularly impressive: Just over 17 percent of the population in the USA’s second-most-populous state lives under the poverty line, a higher proportion than nationally.

If Perry becomes the victor of the Republican nomination battle, which will start in earnest early next year, it may be to Barack Obama’s good fortune:

Perry is regarded as too extreme.

But November 2012 is a long way off.

With another recession that further fuels the rage that the tea party exploits, the situation can change. If Obama’s crisis measures — which the Republicans do all they can to block — do not produce results, it will be difficult for the president to mobilize the same broad support as in 2008. Low voter turnout among minorities and the progressive-minded will cripple his chances of being re-elected.

The particular voter demographic that Rick Perry is primarily aimed at tends to be highly motivated when an election is brewing. These voters — slightly older and embittered whites, with the Bible and gun as prized possessions — were the deciding factor in 2004. Excited by Karl Rove’s campaign machine, they came out en masse to give the USA ― and the world ― another four years with the most disastrous president in living memory.