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PsychoBabble

(837 posts)
Mon May 15, 2017, 01:02 PM May 2017

 Trump Has Exposed the Dark Underbelly of American Conservatism

 "How historians missed the angry, violent, racist side of the conservative movement."

(Interview)

 Jon Wiener: There’s been a consensus among historians of American politics about the rise of conservatism in postwar America. You’ve pointed out that it worked pretty well—until Trump won.

Rick Perlstein: What we call the modern conservative movement was seen to have emerged in the mid-1950s, when it was believed that conservatism was dead in American life. Then a group of high-minded intellectuals, largely around the National Review and its editor William F. Buckley, hashed out a fusion of various conservative traditions that had existed only in tatters at that point. They purged the conspiracy theorists, the anti-Semites, and the militia types. Maybe you had run-ins with the Ku Klux Klan, and white supremacists, and crazy conspiracy theorists, but they were seen as marginal to the main story. You emerged with a conservative movement that was safe to take home to mother. That paved the way for Reagan in California, and then his presidency.

Once Trump comes into view, a couple things happen. First of all, he’s a crazy conspiracy theorist. Second, the sort of dog-whistle conservatism that we’ve become so familiar with gets thrown aside for a train-whistle conservatism, in which you are allowed to talk about very racist ideas in quite flagrant ways. Talking about how Mexico is sending us their rapists is not dog-whistle conservatism.

Then you have the very people who saw themselves as the guardians of this polite conservative tradition, even the National Review, reversing course and embracing Donald Trump. I realized that we’d been much too polite to this movement that chose Trump as their apotheosis....


AND:

 JW: Trump grows up in Queens in the ’50s and ’60s, and you have very wisely opened our eyes to the dark side of politics in this era in New York City.

RP: There’s a real line of continuity between the Trump family and Donald Trump himself in this kind of alternate, angry, violent, right-wing genealogy. There’s the fact that his father, Fred Trump, was arrested at a Klan rally in Queens. He was released. We don’t know whether he was an associate of the Klan or not. That’s kind of in dispute. What isn’t in dispute was that he ran a very racist organization. Fred Trump built housing for the lower middle class, but it was “whites only.” They were sued by the Justice Department. Donald Trump was working in the organization at the time. He was named in the suit. That’s how he met Roy Cohn—who of course had been Joe McCarthy’s right-hand man—who came up with the brilliant defense that they weren’t discriminating against black people; they were discriminating against welfare recipients—which was BS.


MORE:
https://www.thenation.com/article/rick-perlstein-trump-has-exposed-the-dark-underbelly-of-american-conservatism/
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 Trump Has Exposed the Dark Underbelly of American Conservatism (Original Post) PsychoBabble May 2017 OP
Historians May've Missed It Me. May 2017 #1
+1 Blue_Tires May 2017 #2
Message deleted by DU the Administrators wcast May 2017 #3
weimar media yurbud May 2017 #5
a possibly polyanna view of what's going on: in the 50's they could survive w/o racists & cranks yurbud May 2017 #4

Me.

(35,454 posts)
1. Historians May've Missed It
Mon May 15, 2017, 01:14 PM
May 2017

I bet a lot of people on this board did not. Just as we knew what was up with W in the beginning.

The fact that it is now being full out exposed is good for as we know in the end conservatism kills itself and progressive ideas move forward.

yurbud

(39,405 posts)
4. a possibly polyanna view of what's going on: in the 50's they could survive w/o racists & cranks
Tue May 16, 2017, 08:39 AM
May 2017

today, that's all they got left and where the real passion is.

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