(Brian McFadden, via gocomics.com)
Frequent blind squirrel and Reagan/ Thatcher Tory Andrew Sullivan had some thoughts in his live blogging of the sh*tshow last night:
Just mulling over the events tonight, there’s one obvious stand-out. I didn’t hear any specific policy proposals to tackle clearly stated public problems. It is almost as if governing, for the Republican right, is fundamentally about an attitude, rather than about experience or practicality or reasoning. The degeneracy of conservatism – its descent into literally mindless appeals to tribalism and fear and hatred – was on full display. You might also say the same about the religious right, the members of whom have eagerly embraced a racist, a nativist, a believer in war crimes, and a lover of the tyrants that conservatism once defined itself against. Their movement long lost any claim to a serious Christian conscience. But that they would so readily embrace such an unreconstructed pagan is indeed a revelation.
If you think of the conservative movement as beginning in 1964 and climaxing in the 1990s, then the era we are now in is suffering from a cancer of the mind and the soul. That the GOP has finally found a creature that can personify these urges to purge, a man for whom the word “shameless” could have been invented, a bully and a creep, a liar and cheat, a con man and wannabe tyrant, a dedicated loather of individual liberty, and an opponent of the pricelessly important conventions of liberal democracy is perhaps a fitting end.
This is the gutter, ladies and gentlemen, and it runs into a sewer. May what’s left of conservatism be carried out to sea.First of all, cheers to that last graph.
To be specific though, the "conservative movement" Sullivan says began in 1964 with Barry Goldwater was undeniably founded on "mindless appeals to tribalism and fear and hatred." It has always been a white nativist movement, exclusionary in its "patriotism," authoritarian at heart, comforting the comfortable. To imagine there wasn't a "cancer" at its heart when it ejected Rockefeller Republicans in San Francisco in 1964; when it opted for the racist "Southern Strategy" in 1968; when Reagan kicked off his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980; when Poppy Bush ran the Willie Horton ads in 1988; with the 7- year- long campaign to delegitimize President Obama and cast him as somehow not American; to imagine ALL THAT just happened to spring up personified in the form of Donald "Rump" Trump is to be in profound denial and profoundly ahistorical.
But, hey, welcome to reality anyway.
