Ignorant and pugnaciously proud of it.
Populism has morphed into accepting those conservative Catholics because they are key allies in the coalition on the anti-abortion and other cultural issues divide.
Two words: Pat Buchanan
Yes, indeed. Racism was at the core of Reagan’s rise, and the modern GOP. Atwater is Lee Atwater, a Republican political bomb throwing party operative.
“Questioner : But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?
Atwater: Y’all don’t quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ner, nir, nig***”. By 1968, you can’t say “nigr"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rightsand all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this”, is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigr, n**ger”. So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.[16]
It goes back much further than the 1970s. Basically it started as a knee-jerk reaction to the New Deal and ended up by 1940-41 as a quasi-embrace of Hitler and Mussolini:
For the last dozen years, that Perlstein article has been my go-to document to explain to others how the Republican Party is a snake-oil salesman doing multi-level marketing. I mean, jeez, look at all the trashy merch on sale at any Republican clambake.
And his books are great. I’m astounded that someone so young has been able to accurately convey the political and cultural “feel” of the 1960s and 1970s.
This article rings true in terms of the “New Right” concerns of the 1960-1970s being very similar to the far right concerns of today. I see it from the perspective that everything we fought for in that era–and thought was settled and accepted–is still under attack today by the right, with new generations of power-hungry connivers and witless followers.
That said, I still don’t understand, nor does the article really explain, how the Republican party can now embrace the Soviet Union–oops! Russia–, which they railed about for decades as the source of all evil.
I tend to credit this to Putinism’s public adherence to fundamentalist Christian orthodoxy and the rising influence of Christianist nationalism in America. The Civil Rights act promoted a switch to Republicans in old South (and elsewhere) as LBJ predicted it would and I think something similar is going on as the Democrats and Liberals generally are tagged as godless socialists with Russia viewed as a defender of the faith and so the switch now incorporates it.
One of Trump’s real skills, as opposed to his imagined competencies, is an ability to read his marks and this plus his Putin fan-boying makes Russia a ‘good guy in the room’. Rather sickening as Putinism is functionally Soviets for Christ plus larceny but I think that’s close to it, or at least as close as I can get.
Similar for me, tho I’m prly 10y older than you. Two touchtones that, imo, must always be included in this Reagan-Trump arc and redux. 1) MAGA was Reagan’s campaign slogan. Trump copied it. 2) MAGA-QAnon crazies today are basically the 1980s Satanic Panic crowd – and are every bit as deadly
Kevin Phillips in his book “The Emerging Republican Majority” laid out in 1969 what would come to be known as the “Southern Strategy”. As he stated to the New York Times Magazine in 1970:
“From now on, Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote, and they don’t need any more than that… but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.”
Yeah, the article’s argument never really gets there. My view is that Republican policy positions and apparent ideology morph into whatever form is convenient at the time to maintain a desired (fixed) socioeconomic hierarchy, because it’s the fixed socioeconomic hierarchy with its attendant “value” of selfishness that animates the Republican party – both politicians and voters. It’s all about hierarchy and selfishness. Rather than posing a threat to the desired socioeconomic hierarchy as the USSR did, Putin’s Russia reinforces it. Thus the easy flip-flop.
Putin’s Russia is not the Soviet Union. There is a straight line that runs from the pre-WW2 America First movement to Pat Buchanan then onto Trump. The isolationist America Firsters opposed FDR’s attempt to aid Britain when it was the only country in Western Europe standing up to the Nazis. The MAGA America Firsters are appeasing Putin in Ukraine just as Neville Chamberlain did when he proclaimed “Peace in our time”.
Yes this. It’s the Bolshevik component that made American White Nationalists shit themselves. Straight up nazi, white-sheet-wearing pseudo christian types love them some Putin because he’s killing the people they want killed: people who actually want to see an equal system of justice and rights available for everyone.
In 1860 there were no Catholics on the court- white male Protestants. To the ruling class of the day, white nationalism meant Protestants only.
It would be interesting to trace the religious beliefs of 1860 white nationalism to today’s white nationalism.
In the 50s and 60s you heard a lot of apologists for Hitler and Mussolini about how they made the trains run on time and brought their countries out of the depression, shame about that unfortunate thing with Those People.
I keep this Altemeyer passage in my quote file. Given that it was written more than 15 years ago, it’s pretty prophetic about the fascist orientation of the GOP and its base (it was always there, just kept under wraps).
"They are highly submissive to established authority, aggressive in the name of that authority and conventional to the point of insisting everyone should behave as their authorities decide. They are fearful and self-righteous and have a lot of hostility in them that they readily direct toward various out-groups. They are easily incited, easily led, rather un-inclined to think for themselves, largely impervious to facts and reason and rely instead on social support to maintain their beliefs. They bring strong loyalty to their in-groups, have thick-walled, highly compartmentalized minds, use a lot of double standards in their judgments, are surprisingly unprincipled at times and are often hypocrites.
“Probably about 20 to 25 percent of the adult American population is so right-wing authoritarian, so scared, so self-righteous, so ill-informed and so dogmatic that nothing you can say or do will change their minds. They would march America into a dictatorship and probably feel that things had improved as a result…. And they are so submissive to their leaders that they will believe and do virtually anything they are told. They are not going to let up and they are not going away.”
- Robert Altemeyer, The Authoritarians
They are pretty frank that they view females as lesser, though.
True. So the racism and the sexism. All the Others you can want to beat.