Trump Proves Republican Obama Hate Was Never About Obama’s Ideas

[All Along The Watchtower]

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[quote]The rise of the tea party occurred in tandem with this new spirit of ideological purity within the movement. From the standpoint of the conservative movement’s elites, the two phenomena were one and the same. But the truth is that the freaked-out Republicans in America, watching Fox News in their Barcaloungers, were not animated by newfound appreciation for Rand and Hayek. As careful studies of the tea-party movement revealed, what animated Republican voters was a fear of cultural change. Their anti-statism was confined to programs that seemed to benefit people other than themselves. Racial resentment and ethnocentrism, not passion for limited government, drove the conservative base.

Almost alone within the party, Trump understood this. That is why his comically long list of ideological deviations never hurt him. Trump’s racism demonstrated to most Republican voters that he stood with them on the essential divide that ordered their political world — one defined by identity more than ideology.[/quote]

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/08/trump-proves-republican-obama-hate-was-never-about-ideas.html

All of this should be blatantly obvious, but conservative intellectuals and Republican elites are in serious denial about it. The reality is that Trump is the result of the so-called "Tea Party movement" (i.e. most of the Republican voter base) finally nominating the type of candidate that they had wanted all along.

[All Along The Watchtower]

I have been saying for years that conservatism in America is cultural not ideological. Is this news to people?

Yeah, because you're still wrong.

Take it up with your party's current presidential nominee. Or basically the entire Republican congressional caucus. Or the countless examples of Republicans/conservatives at all levels of politics, activism, media, etc.

The present and future of the Republican Party is Donald Trump, no matter how much "respectable" Republicans like yourself want to believe otherwise. Your party has burned too many bridges with black voters, Latinos, and other "minorities" (who will soon be a majority - hence, why Donald Trump is the nominee) for anything else to be the case. And most of you elite "respectable" Republicans just happen to live in Democratic-voting states - particularly the major metro areas that make those states so damn Democratic. Funy how you love the results of liberalism, pluralism, multiculturalism, diversity, and progressive social policy, but apparently not enough to vote for the major party that most closely aligns with all of those things. I guess being a contrarian has a certain kind of appeal. Or maybe you (collectively) just vote Republican because you think that your "unfairly high" personal tax burden is a policy issue of the utmost importance.

Either way, I respect your kind of Republican politics less than any other kind - even less than Trump and his supporters. At least they have correctly identified the reality of their dominance over the 21st century Republican Party and have acted acordingly. Furthermore, by nominating Trump, they have exposed the Republicans for what they have become -  a particular strain of White Identity politics that owes much to Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan, all of whom (especially the latter two) made it respectable to advocate against policies that benefited black people and other minorities in a "race-neutral" way. Trump is just the completely predictable result of decades of that trend, as well as the fact that - in spite of the White Identitarians' best efforts - black and minority political power and social influence (along with their percentage of the US population) has increased within the past half-century, which culminated in the historic election and reelection of America's first black President. You know, the one whom this year's Republican presidential nominee had spent the years immediately preceding his campaign demagoging against in a profoundly racist manner, questioning the President's very legitimacy as both a President and and as an American. And a few years later, he is now the Republican nominee. Go figure.

Your party can't and won't run from Trump. Sorry if that fact bothers you.

[All Along The Watchtower]

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What Southern Republicans? There were literally zero Southern Republicans in the Senate.

In any case, it's been well established that the Democrat party is the party of racists due to their opposition to the Civil Rights bill.

Which is why the Deep South voted heavily for the Republican presidential nominee and "Mr. Conservative" Barry Goldwater - in the same election in which he lost nationwide in a historic landslide - instead of the the Texas-born-and-raised Democratic President who pushed through the Civil Rights bill of the previous Democratic President. Seriously, what are you talking about?

Oh, and Republican Senator John Tower of Texas voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Anyway, I don't think many people actually deny that the shift of Southern whites from being monolithically Democratic to being (nearly) monolithically Republican wasn't a long-term process. But you're kidding yourself if you think race wasn't central to it. Not only was the first Republican presidential nominee to ever win Dixie (and by large margins, I might add!) also the first Republican to campaign against expanding civil rights to black people, but the Republican figures of the South who began to emerge in that era (like John Tower) were basically all conservatives of the Goldwater stripe - with many, of course, also being closely associated with the Religious Right. And the few who weren't tended to not be native Southerners (e.g. George H.W. Bush, who still felt compelled to run as a hardline Goldwater type in 1964 in a statewide race in Texas, and whose political career - and possibly, his life - was seriously threatened when as a Congressman he voted for the fair housing provisions).

A good case study is the 1968 Republican presidential primaries. The candidate whom most Southern delegates initially supported wasn't Richard Nixon, but Ronald Reagan. It wasn't until Nixon ally Strom Thurmond convinced them that Nixon wasn't a closet Rockefeller Republican that the other Southerners came around.

As for later decades: the only Democrat to win the South (rather than a few Upper Southern states, like Arkansas native and serial pandered/populist Bill Clinton) in the post Civil Rights era was Georgia native and very openly Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter in 1976 - against the comparatively moderate (especially compared to Reagan) Gerald Ford. And then he loses much of the South (and reelection, of course)  to Reagan, who launched his presidential campaign by complaining about federal infringement upon states rights in the Mississippi town where three Northern civil rights volunteers were murdered by the Klan. Since then, the South has only gotten more Republican. Curious stuff, indeed!