AuthenticM
Member
This thread is about two articles I just read. The thread title is mine, and sums up (too succinctly) the articles.
You need to read them.
Vox: A Republican intellectual explains why the Republican Party is going to die
NYTimes: How the Stupid Party Created Donald Trump
You need to read them.
Vox: A Republican intellectual explains why the Republican Party is going to die
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The conservative movement has something of a founding myth Roy calls it an origin story.
In 1955, William F. Buckley created the intellectual architecture of modern conservatism by founding National Review, focusing on a free market, social conservatism, and a muscular foreign policy. Buckleys ideals found purchase in the Republican Party in 1964, with the nomination of Barry Goldwater. While Goldwater lost the 1964 general election, his ideas eventually won out in the GOP, culminating in the Reagan Revolution of 1980.
Normally, Goldwaters defeat is spun as a story of triumph: how the conservative movement eventually righted the ship of an unprincipled GOP. But according to Roy, its the first act of a tragedy.
Goldwaters nomination in 1964 was a historical disaster for the conservative movement, Roy tells me, because for the ensuing decades, it identified Democrats as the party of civil rights and Republicans as the party opposed to civil rights.
Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He himself was not especially racist he believed it was wrong, on free market grounds, for the federal government to force private businesses to desegregate. But this principled stance identified the GOP with the pro-segregation camp in everyones eyes, while the Democrats under Lyndon Johnson became the champions of anti-racism.
This had a double effect, Roy says. First, it forced black voters out of the GOP. Second, it invited in white racists who had previously been Democrats. Even though many Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act in Congress, the post-Goldwater party became the party of aggrieved whites.
The fact is, today, the Republican coalition has inherited the people who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 the Southern Democrats who are now Republicans, Roy says. Conservatives and Republicans have not come to terms with that problem.
The available evidence compiled by historians and political scientists suggests that 1964 really was a pivotal political moment, in exactly the way Roy describes.
Yet Republican intellectuals have long denied this, fabricating a revisionist history in which Republicans were and always have been the party of civil rights. In 2012, National Review ran a lengthy cover story arguing that the standard history recounted by Roy was popular but indefensible.
This revisionism, according to Roy, points to a much bigger conservative delusion: They cannot admit that their partys voters are motivated far more by white identity politics than by conservative ideals.
Conservative intellectuals, and conservative politicians, have been in kind of a bubble, Roy says. Weve had this view that the voters were with us on conservatism philosophical, economic conservatism. In reality, the gravitational center of the Republican Party is white nationalism.
NYTimes: How the Stupid Party Created Donald Trump
Its hard to know exactly when the Republican Party assumed the mantle of the stupid party.
Stupidity is not an accusation that could be hurled against such prominent early Republicans as Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root and Charles Evans Hughes. But by the 1950s, it had become an established shibboleth that the eggheads were for Adlai Stevenson and the boobs for Dwight D. Eisenhower a view endorsed by Richard Hofstadters 1963 book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which contrasted Stevenson, a politician of uncommon mind and style, whose appeal to intellectuals overshadowed anything in recent history, with Eisenhower conventional in mind, relatively inarticulate. The John F. Kennedy presidency, with its glittering court of Camelot, cemented the impression that it was the Democrats who represented the thinking men and women of America.
Rather than run away from the anti-intellectual label, Republicans embraced it for their own political purposes. In his time for choosing speech, Ronald Reagan said that the issue in the 1964 election was whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant Capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. Richard M. Nixon appealed to the silent majority and the hard hats, while his vice president, Spiro T. Agnew, issued slashing attacks on an effete core of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.
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There is no evidence that Republican leaders have been demonstrably dumber than their Democratic counterparts. During the Reagan years, the G.O.P. briefly became known as the party of ideas, because it harvested so effectively the intellectual labor of conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation and publications like The Wall Street Journal editorial page and Commentary. Scholarly policy makers like George P. Shultz, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick and Bill Bennett held prominent posts in the Reagan administration, a tradition that continued into the George W. Bush administration amply stocked with the likes of Paul D. Wolfowitz, John J. Dilulio Jr. and Condoleezza Rice.
In recent years, however, the Republicans relationship to the realm of ideas has become more and more attenuated as talk-radio hosts and television personalities have taken over the role of defining the conservative movement that once belonged to thinkers like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and George F. Will. The Tea Party represented a populist revolt against what its activists saw as out-of-touch Republican elites in Washington.There are still some thoughtful Republican leaders exemplified by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, who devised an impressive new budget plan for his party. But the primary vibe from the G.O.P. has become one of indiscriminate, unthinking, all-consuming anger.
The trend has now culminated in the nomination of Donald J. Trump, a presidential candidate who truly is the know-nothing his Republican predecessors only pretended to be.