Trump is the fascist monster Republicans spawned when they made their corrupt Faustian bargain with the devil years ago. They sold their soul for power.
It began with Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ when white racists left the Democratic party en masse to join the Republican party in protest after LBJ signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The cancer spread in 1980 when Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi — the very site where civil rights martyrs were murdered.
The flames were fanned in 1988 when Bush ran the Willie Horton ad against Dukakis.
It reached it’s apex with the vicious birther attacks — led by Donald Trump — against the first black president followed by eight years of Republican congressional obstructionism leading up to the emergence of the Tea Party in 2010.
And now, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is quoting the evil founder of Fascism — Benito Mussolini — “Better to live one day as a lion than a lifetime as a sheep.”
Madness. Sheer madness.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
…and I generally don’t like to critique people about this on a blog, but this post has several proofreading issues.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
Originally the word Faustian was written as “austian” in the title and the original referred to birtherism coming in 2000, as well as completing what was a sentence fragment in the first paragraph.
In this sentence: “The cancer spread in 1980 when Regan kicked off his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi — the very cite where civil rights martyrs were murdered.” Reagan and site are still misspelled.
for the spelling lesson.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
“Care to elaborate?”
He did.
And you respond, “Thanks Mom”.
You didn’t have to ask him to elaborate.
And made me wake my wife. I not know why I found it so funny, but thank you.
while ignoring the beam of my argument ?
Fred Rich LaRiccia
The argument of this diary has been heavily rehearsed in the opinion papers of all major newspapers and on every liberal blog I can think of. I suppose that’s why Christopher is focusing more on execution than intent.
Christopher is completely right. It is often the line between being taken seriously and dismissed, no matter how impressive the substance of an argument.
It’s bad on Facebook too. I can forgive individual commenters, many of whom probably are suffering from fat-finger syndrome on their mobile devices. However, the original posts from what should be professional sources don’t always proofread. Just today on FB the C-SPAN page asked, “Is the GOP nomination contest now a two-man race?” except two-man was written as two-nan. A legislator referring to MBTA fare hikes called them fair hikes, and he wasn’t trying to say he found them just and equitable. That one has since been fixed. I understand some of these are probably written by “just an intern”, but interns are generally college students who should both know how to proofread and take enough pride in their work to be motivated to represent their employer in the best way possible.
I hadn’t heard about this:
So I searched, and Wikipedia says:
That’s stunning.
Harry Truman said : ” The only thing that is really new is the history that we don’t know.”
Fred Rich LaRiccia
typical
STRIKE AGAIN.
How about this one : ” They are unanimous in their hatred of me — and I welcome their hatred.” FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT
How do ya like them apples ?
Fred Rich LaRiccia
that counts.
At least, JimC is not condemned to repeat it.
EOM
As you may know, I was once part of this loony crowd. It started, I think, with my admiration of William F. Buckley’s sense of humor. From there, as a traveling salesman stuck in a car for hours, I’d listen to Rush Limbaugh. Before I knew it, I was one of them.
Even so, back then, the racists and bigots made me uncomfortable and the evangelicals made me squeamish, but I tried to ignore them and focus on the rest of the party. I left the party soon after the Iraq War and my realization that I had been had, there were no WMD’s. From there I drifted as an independent, hoping that the party would sort itself out and maybe I would return.
When the National Review effectively fired Christopher Buckley and embraced Sarah Palin, I cancelled my 20+ year subscription to that magazine.
And now this. All that is left of the party are the racists and bigots and evangelicals.
I appreciate your candor about your journey.
I just want to clarify that the GOP embrace of “racists and bigots” began long before Rush Limbaugh or the 2003 Iraq invasion. For example, Pat Buchanan has been an influential GOP figure since being hired as a speechwriter by then-candidate Richard Nixon in 1966. The phrase “silent majority” (one of the early racist GOP dog-whistles) was coined by Mr. Buchanan during the Nixon era.
I appreciate your recognition of the nature of today’s GOP. I want to emphasize that the GOP embrace of racists and bigotry has been a central part of its organizational DNA since the Nixon era.
forget Goldwater?
In fact, National Review during the Civil Rights movement openly embraced the notion of racial inferiority.
*
One of the interesting things from 1960s was the attempt to lower the barriers for Black Americans to live in Northern suburbs that had been carved out as white. (Segregation in housing was enforced through all sorts of laws and business practices in addition to outright violence.) One of the standard Republican attacks we hear is on bureaucrats. Think of how eloquent Reagan could wax on that subject.
The first set of “out of touch” bureaucrats to get adverse political attention from conservatives were those people in the Johnson Administration tasked with making integration in housing possible.
I chose one from a long list of possible targets.
One quibble I have about citing Mr. Goldwater, at least during his presidential campaign, is that at that time (1964), the Democrats were as explicitly racist as the GOP.
It was not until the aftermath of the 1968 election disaster that we Democrats explicitly ejected explicit racism (and our racist southern contingent) from the party. After a relatively brief period of churn (the “Dixiecrats” and so on), the GOP eagerly embraced those former Democrats together with the attitudes that they held on to.
That Democratic decision, in 1968, is a huge part in why today’s south is “red”.
Somewhere between 1958 and 1966 was where that changed. Humphrey had long been pushing against racism, and Truman had made some efforts along those lines. In fact, one reason Stevenson edged out Kefauver for the Democratic nomination was concern about whether Kefauver was to out-front on civil rights.
However, the Republican campaign of 1964 was pretty explicit. It is no accident that Goldwater, aside from his home state, carried Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.
Housing segregation was pretty severe in Chicago. A sign near a highway said, “In your heart you know he’s right.” After the election, it was amended to something like “In the future you’ll know he’s right.” Finally, after marches and riots, it changed to “Now you know he was right.” Clearly racial issues had something to do with that.
*
Anyway, Nixon’s Southern strategy was part of a clever effort to make racism respectable. Nixon was remarkably skilled at getting things (like Nixon himself) to look respectable.
too out front
The other Goldwater “slogan” was “in your guts you know he’s nuts.”
Both were true. There was liberal faction in the Democratic Party exemplified by Hubert Humphrey and Stevenson, and a simultaneous troglodyte wing (ok… Know-Nothing/Racist/Crypyo-Authoritarian wing).
…but I do find odd, then, that you initially chose to criticize the original post for ‘rehearsing’ once more things that had been addressed already in the national “liberal press”. What was that about?
I wrote that in answer to the question, “Why is Christopher picking on proof-reading?” My answer presumes that Christopher may have read some of the same sources I have. I’m not sure my answer constitutes a criticism. Sometimes posts on Blue Mass Group will provide liberal conventional wisdom, sometimes very well-expressed too. That’s not a crime.
*
Beyond that, the role of racism in American political life certainly merits a deeper exploration. Lately I’ve been reflecting a lot on a number of points:
1. The lack of land redistribution after emancipation.
2. The system of enforced poverty that kept Black labor in the American South artificially cheap for about a century. (Pay was after harvest and disputing the amount given was treated as criminal. Negotiating for better wages by seeking better employers was also also treated as criminal.)
3. The systematic denial of credit to Black Americans which was also part of enforced poverty
4. The effect of systematic housing segregation
5. The pervasive and effective terrorism used to prevent Blacks from achieving anything like political or economic power. (Before the Northern migration at least a couple southern states were majority Black but few if any Blacks got elected after the “Redeemers” got in. That was all the result of terrorism.)
6. The invisibility of Black lives due in part to de facto segregation.
7. The current extremely wide disparity in wealth in between Blacks and Whites
This stuff isn’t just Goldwater’s or Nixon’s or Reagan’s fault. Some part of the difficulty in coming to terms with all this is looking again at the dislocations stemming from the sixties: desegregation, riots, busing, affirmative action, Wallace, etc. My take is that a lot of white people drew the wrong conclusions from all that. Any amount of sanctifying Dr. King, sensitivity training, and Republican blaming doesn’t dispel those wrong conclusions.
Trump, for his part, merely plays on what a lot of white people believe. The more difficult task is changing those beliefs, is re-examining the experiences from which those beliefs arose, and is getting people to draw different conclusions from those experiences.
I find much of the criticism of this post to be, frankly, strange. I think that the post is important, because the connection between Donald Trump’s racism and the sometimes inchoate but generally cynically utilized and Dog-whistled racism of the Republican Party has been too often ignored by the media and pretended away by the Republican establishment. Fred Rich LaRiccia is right to explicitly make this connection in a more thorough and seamless way than I have previously seen in other allusions to the fertile soil laid for Trump over the past 50 years by the Republican Party.