The white supremacist right is penetrating the mainstream right with increasing ease.
The Conservative Political Action Conference is the premier gathering of right-wing activists and politicians in America every year, and it serves as a bellwether for the direction of the conservative movement. This year Nazis showed up.
According to an NBC News report, “a group of Nazis who openly identified as national socialists mingled with mainstream conservative personalities, including some from Turning Point USA, and discussed ‘race science’ and antisemitic conspiracy theories.” (Hitler’s Nazi Party was officially called the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party.”) The reporter of the article has video of one of them giving a “heil Hitler”-style salute in the lobby of the hotel where the conference took place and of other members of the group reportedly used the N-word.
This is a critical frog-in-boiling-water moment for the right: The mainstream organs of American conservatism are apparently acclimating to Nazis in their pot. That this group was able to mingle with participants at a high-profile conference, wasn’t kicked out of CPAC, and wasn’t appropriately condemned is a sign of how contiguous mainstream conservatism has become with white supremacist politics today.
I’m old enough to remember when Republicans and Democrats weren’t that different… There were always key issues that they disagreed on but at the end of the day the majority of both parties just wanted what was best for the country, and they would even WORK TOGETHER from time to time when it was for the common good… How did the GOP go from that to this white trash hillbilly Nazi bullshit? Are they ever going to recognize that the enemies of democracy have taken over their party? When did they become so complacent?
I remember a clip from a McCain rally and he was going around, asking people questions, letting them talk to the microphone, etc. One lady said she didn’t like Obama because he was Muslim. McCain shut her down and said something to the effect of “he’s a good man, we just have different opinions on how to run the country”. That stands out a lot to me in hindsight.
McCain is one of the old guard Republicans that went down fighting. His final vote thumbs down for the repeal of the ACA was legendary. I didn’t vote for him but I do have great respect for him.
Contrast that against all the limp dicks who are silently retiring instead of speaking out and trying to right the ship.
He slipped real hard during his presidential bid. Remember how his VP pick was Sarah Palin, for example.
The beginning of backroom concessions to the crazy wing of the party that are so very, very obvious.
If I remember correctly, he didn’t want to nominate her. He wanted Liebermann and didn’t even like Palin that much. She was just sort of forced on him.
Yes, that’s what I mean. Noone in their right mind would choose her. This was a forced choice and an indication that the lunatics were if not running the asylum, at least in charge of a big part of it.
Lieberman is entirely awful in different ways, though. Come to think of it, I’d forgotten he was Gore’s running mate.
I think that wasn’t quite the beginning of the end, but it was definitely a warning sign for what was to become of the Republican party. I think they saw how Dubya was a moron and that was appealing to a lot of voters, so they thought “there’s a recipe for success here.”
On a random note, that just led me to this video where the guy who floated Palin’s name to McCain said it was “the biggest fucking mistake of his life”.
https://youtu.be/ihrCtRCGTro
epic link, damn
She looks like a damned Rhodes scholar compared to what the GOP is putting up these days.
I’m not disagreeing with you, just a comment on how much farther they’ve fallen.
I think if you go back and watch her speaking she has a lot of gibberish with buzzwords as well. The only difference between her and Lauren Booblejuice or margery klanma is palin’s racism and conspiracy theories weren’t on full display.
Oh, I remember. She thought “which magazines and newspapers do you read” was a trick question. But Bobo and the Tuber are new levels of stupid.
She and other “tea party” imbeciles were very much the predecessor of the MAGA horror show.
That was an attempt to appeal to the crazies without directly appealing to the crazies. That never works.
McCain might have thought of himself as a responsible conservative, but he was still a part of the machine that has been a regressive force in America over the last 60 years. He did not fight for the heart or soul of the party, and this moment was an example of the flimsy lip service he paid to being a reasonable person.
Exactly. I just disagreed with him on how to run the country.
Watch just the first minute of McCain’s concession speech. (Watch the whole thing if you like. It’s pretty good.)
I watched him shut down the boos about Obama at the beginning. He took this very seriously and wouldn’t allow the crowd to get out of line. It was well done, and a great example of statesmanship and fair play.
For just a moment then, I wondered if I had voted for the wrong man in voting for Obama, who was more of an unknown for me at the time. McCain acted very differently in the middle of good campaign, compared to the beginning and the end. I couldn’t support the policies, the attitude, or the man that I saw during the national campaign. Listening to John McCain’s concession speech that night, I remember thinking, "where was this person—this attitude—for the last few months? I might have voted for this person.” The party and the campaign forced him to become something that he wasn’t. If he had been allowed to be more authentic, I think that Obama would have had a narrower victory, if he had won at all.
It’s always been there, Harlan Crowe has been a supporter of Clarence Thomas since the early 90’s, and the difference between Confederates and Nazis is only razor thin, so those types have always quasi gotten along, or even where the Klan meetings were on w Wednesday and the Nazi meetings were on Thursdays for some of these people, meaning that there’s a lot of crossover, especially when you factor in that Hitler was heavily influenced by the American Confederacy.
Where the Nazis really started showing up in public more was during the energence of the Tea Party, where the Alt-Right basically came out of the closet to join the Republican party.
Yep. The Confederates and the Jim Crow policies of the South were a huge inspiration for the Nazis specifically. If not, our own homegrown fascists. To make a recess analogy. Bigots have always been the peanut butter to the fascist’s chocolate. They like them both on their own. But they love them together.
Everyone keeps forgetting about the tea party. It cracks me up. This is totally the tea party having its effect on the right.
…and the teabaggers were just a rebranding of the hatriots from the 90s. And they were a rebranding of the Birchers…this stuff goes wayyyyy back.
I’m surprised “hatriot” didn’t come up earlier with these MAGA hats and hatred for everything that the right spreads.
Facism and race “science” has always been the backbone of American conservatism. We are just in a period of time where they are more open about it. And honestly, they might not even be any more open about it, it’s just that social media makes it easier to see; legacy media has always been hesitant to call out the right’s racism, when when it overt.
The modern Republican party was literally founded on anti-black racism. We’ve all heard of the Southern Strategy by now, but it was in 1957 that the RNC started “Operation Dixie” which was aimed at recruiting white southern voters (Dixiecrats) away from the Democrats.
By 1970, you have Nixon’s GOP strategist saying this,
It goes back even further. Look up Frederick Ludwick Hoffman. 3 US Presidents proposed a national healthcare system. The answer was “no”. There are racist roots to why we don’t have healthcare for all.
Any Republican that would have been interested in a centrist governance framework has been run out by this point.
this is why I don’t take seriously anyone who says that both parties are the same or two side of the same coin. maybe you could make that argument 40 years ago. but these days saying that is a shorthand to me that “I don’t pay attention to what’s going on in the news.” clearly one party’s mainstream has gone extreme and you have to be willfully ignorant to not see it.
Both parties are neoliberal. You have to be willfully ignorant to not see it.
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I have no idea what you’re talking about.
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I hope you find peace at some point in your life.
This was true only ~15 years ago. My how things have changed. The Tea Party replaced the old progressives, where like GW Bush even provided government funding to feed the homeless, teach kids, etc. Then even before that finished happening the Alt Right took over from the inside. Now I don’t even know what to call the latest movement, although it seems to no longer matter if it is already over and the Alt Right is back in power with Trump at the helm again.
I have heard that the person most single-handedly responsible for the rift before all that was Newt Gingrich, who proposed the hard-line stance of obstructionism, where after that cooperation was seen as weak while before that it was a strength.
9/11 deeply affected alot of emotion-first thinkers. It bothered the rest of us quite a bit too, but it hurt them in a way that permanently changed them. It was a major turning point in the GOPs course, since they primarily court emotion-first thinkers votes.
So much so that their name literally changed (to GQP).
There’s a very good (and very long) article about all the ways Gingrich screwed over American politics. Not just the obstructionism, but the dirty tricks, gaslighting, nonsense propaganda, as well as the shift from actually governing to constantly campaigning during your term, can be laid at his feet.
Thank you for sharing that.
He is not entirely wrong - the weaponization of such measures (e.g. gaslighting to name just one) is, if not quite “smart”, then at least “tactical”. i.e. even if your intelligence is about average but your emotional intelligence is roughly that of a 5-year-old, then yes indeed you can get your way using those measures. That is the largest part of the problem there: it works.
One quote calls out to me:
But it is entirely a whoosh moment when he understands the idea that for a lion to eat when it is hungry is not viciousness - that much of what he said is (somewhat?) true - yet entirely misses the point that when a human DELIBERATELY CHOOSES to engage in similar behaviors, especially when no hunger is involved, THAT is indeed “viciousness”, essentially defined as:
Like, I get it - a homeless person might trespass to sleep somewhere that they should not be b/c they are cold. They might even steal a sandwich b/c they are hungry. That does not make it right but it is understandable. But how does Bezos or Musk not paying their workers measure up when compared to that? Why is the former called “theft” while the latter is called “just doing business”?
I struggle a LOT with the ethics of various matters in life. e.g. should I cease purchasing cheap chocolates, knowing full well that near (occasionally even actual) slave labor conditions are involved (even for those that claim to be “fair trade” or whatever - nope, it’s nearly all a lie, according to that video anyway), or would that actually lead to an even WORSE outcome, to deprive those workers of that source of income, when they clearly have nothing else to turn to besides that which can offer anything close to that quality of life?
And I think I know the answer, given by another quote in the article you link to:
In other words, like Trump, people often give him too much credit. He may symbolize the turning of the tide, and he may even have fallen victim to their swings before most anyone else (at least, at a roughly similar level of power & notoriety), but he is no “driving force” of a man himself, and rather seems more like a child to me. Which notably excuses him from precisely none of his actions btw. It’s just that the problem isn’t so much him, as all of our society that will continue to elect people exactly like him long after he is gone.
Cancer is also “natural” I note, but it would take a severely twisted person to act like a cancer on purpose. Moreover, why would we, The People, CHOOSE to elect a Cancer to lead us?
Not to discredit any of what you said, but to add to this I think a big piece of this that often gets glossed over is that since then the parties have become more ideologically sorted. Back in the day, conservative Democrats often worked with conservative Republicans and progressive Democrats often worked with progressive Republicans, and that isn’t really an option anymore.
Parties sorted between conservative and liberal, ideologies sorted between urban and rural, and social media sorted all of us into echo chambers. There is no longer any kind of crossover in any part of American society.
Don’t forget suburbs and car-centric city planning isolating people by wealth and white collar vs. blue collar jobs by removing the places where those groups would normally intermingle. And by race. The suburbs also sorted people by race.
Not that different in the sense that the Democrats were the home for bigoted, racist Dixiecrats. And the Republicans had always been home for American fascism.
However, they’ve been wildly different since the late '60s early '70s. When the fascist courted The racists.
Finally. Thanks for getting to the civil rights movement and the white flight of the Dixiecrats.
Southern Strategy.
You should also be old enough to understand that the leadership from back then is dead and buried.
I’m not sure what your point is here. We shouldn’t need leaders from the past to tell us that Nazis are bad.
We shouldn’t but we do.Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. And it’s quite easy to forget the past when you haven’t experienced it.
Those in charge now aren’t the ones that suffered. They don’t know the pain so they ignore the pain of others.
clearly we fucking do
Same.
Literally never been true a day in your life. Politicians all want the same thing: money and power (they use each one to acquire the other). Exceptions exist, but are exceedingly rare; Bernie Sanders is an exception. In the days you’re talking about, Democrats and Republicans agreed on critical points like “We need to tax the absolute shit out of Americans”; what they disagreed on was where and how exactly to spend those dollars. It’s never been the case that the majority of Congress had a real interest in helping you or me out.
All the “real” Republicans quit the party to stay clear of Trump. Only the worst remained, so now it’s the party of the worst.