Breaking Mad - The Republican Party is addicted to whiteness. [View all]

[kpete]

BY JEET HEER
June 16, 2016

Imagine an autopsy that concludes the cause of death was a drug overdose. After the funeral, distraught family members assemble to talk about how they could have prevented such a senseless tragedy. Then, after brief reflection, they all decide to start mainlining heroin.

The GOP is addicted to whiteness, a psychological drug it started ingesting in the early 1960s with the encouragement of Goldwater conservatives, who argued that the party could win over the traditionally Democratic white South by resisting the civil rights movement. Richard Nixon was one of the Republicans who initially had trepidations. “If Goldwater wins his fight,” he told Ebony magazine in 1962, “our party would eventually become the first major all-white political party. And that isn’t good. That would be a violation of GOP principles.”

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Consider how much worse the GOP’s whiteness addiction has grown in just the past four years. Mitt Romney was a powder-cocaine Republican, a socially acceptable xenophobe offering a high that made whites feel like masters of the universe: Still in charge here! Trump, by contrast, is dealing meth—a trailer-park drug you take when you’ve given up hope and just want to get rip-roaring stoned. Compared to the country-club slickness of Romney’s cocaine conservatism, Trump’s meth-head politics are at least more honest. Instead of Nixonian euphemisms about law and order, or Reaganite winks about welfare queens, Trump offers the intoxicating thrill of telling protesters and immigrants—them—to get the hell out. It’s an intense high. And the aftermath will be tooth-rottingly ugly.

MORE fun:
https://newrepublic.com/article/133884/breaking-mad