Yup, the integration (no pun intended) of a significant subset of Hispanic Americans into the conservative/Republican movement began at least as far back as the first Bush administration. It was temporarily derailed by the white-supremacism revival and anti-immigration frenzy in conservatism triggered by the Obama election, but I don’t think it ever really went away.
It’s bizarre that even full-on Trumpism is succeeding with that demographic, but they don’t really have any other viable alternatives for conservative identity these days.
AFAICT, what’s freaking out the right wing the most at present is the fact that mainstream corporate culture has become more friendly to social (not economic!) progressivism. Conservatives used to feel secure that mainstream corporate culture was solidly aligned with their values, and even if it would sometimes tolerate progressivism would avoid embracing it.
Nowadays, giant corporations have figured out that putting gay people and trans people and mixed-race couples and so on in advertisements appeals to more consumers than it alienates, so they have “embraced” social progressivism. A lot of conservatives feel very betrayed by this.
I have hopes for some possible future alliances for legislative pushback against corporate overreach as a consequence of this attitude shift, but I don’t expect much. The fatcat conservatives are still going to be deferential to corporate power no matter how “liberal” the corporations are acting, and the non-fatcat conservatives are still going to hate and anathematize “liberals” no matter how anti-corporate the liberals are being.
That’s the position of all the never-Trumpers. They’re horrified twice over. Once because they’ve seen what they created and once because they realize they now have no power and nobody is listening to them. They’re the fore-bearers to Stephanie Graham. She understands that nobody on the right will forgive for her tell-all and nobody on the left will accept her because of her complicity in the crimes. These guys are frantic they will become like her.
There is no “respectable conservative” wing to the Republican Party. Just a trampling of bodies as the panderers strive to get to the front of the crazies. Where Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert already are. Since history loves nothing better than irony, people will look back at this time and wonder why so many leftists insisted that politics would be better when more women got into it.
When people feel that their economic futures are uncertain and that their words and thoughts are policed and punished for ideological reasons and real criminals can run amok for ideological reasons you can’t be surprised when those people feel that the institutions that are opposed to them and in favor of others need to be an ideological battleground. Everywhere and everything is now an ideological battleground. The dictionary, how you capitalize or don’t racial adjectives, what crimes are punished, who gets into what school, what comedy you are allowed to laugh at, etc… Why would the group that David Brooks talks about automatically concede one of the largest sources of power on the planet?
And they’re getting these “feelings” from conservative media that are deliberately lying and exaggerating to them, to profit from their overstimulated partisan loyalties.
Of course, non-snowflake reasonable people understand how these cultural shifts are happening and how to talk about them and deal with them like grownups. But conservatives are being constantly triggered by their media bubble to perceive all such issues as THE IMMINENT END OF CIVILIZATION AS WE KNOW IT, so naturally they find the situation very hard to cope with.
There has never, ever been a moment in history when the right fought for the state to be used neutrally. Not one moment. It is a defining characteristic of the right. Every instance of applying state power neutrally has come from the left. Any other reading of history is equivalent to the nonsense that conservatives want to stuff into textbooks denying that America has been racist from the beginning.
Of course, I cut out some critical context. Per board rules about quoting from sources. My intent was that people would be interested enough to read the article.
That’s why I posted a link. Apparently, some were able to access it. Suggest you do the same and supply the missing critical context.
If you quoted from a source in a way that misleads one regarding the critical context of a quote, then it’s not a roll eyes matter to point that out. (“critical” in this context meaning indispensable)
These are the important questions: Did I misinterpret the meaning of the quote? If so, is that because of the way the quote was presented? If that’s the case, that was a fault in the OP. A post should be complete in and of itself.
If I’m going to read a summary of a Brooks article by an esteemed colleague on this board, I’m going to assume it’s accurate. I’m certainly not going to voluntarily read David Brooks, who has spent his career apologizing for the right from the so-called “middle.” He has always been horseshit.
If, however, I missed something in the OP that should have disabused me of my misconception, then that’s my fault. Feel free to point it out if that’s the case.
My post did not claim to be a summary. I quoted the first few paragraphs and a couple of extra lines, which amounted to 576 words of a 3,200+ word article. I have been modded in the past for quoting too much from sources and have had quotes in my posts edited.
My esteemed colleague did indeed misinterpret the meaning of the quote. The meaning was to make you want to read the article.
I don’t blame you, but that is the crux of this exchange between us.
No argument from me. I loathe the man.
Maybe someone else will take on the task of summarizing the article so you and @bobot won’t have to read it.
I think the crux of the issue of quotes is the ones that start with “The movement has three distinctive strains.” Are those descriptions that those folks think of themselves or is that what Brooks thinks is the origins of those strains? Because if the later then it runs contrary to his assertion otherwise quoted in this thread that NatCons are wrong to think there is a unified thing called the left that hates America and that they are wrong to think there is a wokeist Anschluss on American institutions.
I think it comes down to the oft quoted " When you’re accustomed to privilege equality feels like oppression."
Back in the old days life was simpler, people didn’t get offended so much. You could pull up the corners of your eyes and tell your friends you were Japanese and everyone would laugh. We didn’t mean any harm its just that Chinese had funny eyes not like the normal eyes we had. We wouldn’t get upset if a Japanese person made a joke pulled down their eyes to try to look normal like us. Now we are all being told that that isn’t “culturally sensitive” that the joke was racist. Well I told that joke and laughed at the joke so does that mean I’m a racist? Hell no! I ain’t got nothing against Chinese people. My next door neighbor is a Chinaman from Vietnam and he’s one of the nicest people I know. If you want to know what’s really offensive its those people calling me a racist just for liking normal things.
Also now when I call up on the phone I hear I have to press one for English and then hear some other “e hablo dos” gibberish that I can’t even understand. And if I press the wrong button the whole think turns to gobbledygook. I don’t have time to learn a whole 'nother language why can’t they just learn English. Meanwhile the TV shows are starting to have black people and gays and god knows what with all these “cultural references” that I don’t get. This wasn’t the way it was when TV used to be about what everybody was familiar with. Its getting so a white person is being forced to bend over backwards to accommodate everyone else. Now how the hell is that fair!
Yeah, and that’s a fascinating subplot – one in which I don’t claim to have any expertise.
But … if it plays out the way California’s Proposition 8 did, then it’s quite likely that gains in support among People of Color are probably closely correlated to religiosity and the social conservatism it tends to imply.
“The whole world is going to Hell in a handbasket” and “Then, can I marry my dog ?” resonate(d) with the social conservatives.
I’m not sure it’s substantively different from the basic ‘fear and faith’ dynamic, but it’s definitely interesting.
And definitely has that cohort voting against their self-interest.
Which hardly explains why people support the Republican Party which often advocates positions that will ruin these people’s economic futures. As for real criminals, we can take a look at criminal behavior from politicians in the last thirty or forty years. You probably won’t like or agree with the tally.
I’m not surprised at all. I’m also from south Texas and see it first hand. IMHO what’s happening is that some younger people with last names like Garcia and Rodriguez see themselves as white, just like in past generations people with last names like McGregor and O’Reilly stopped seeing themselves as mainly Irish and people with last names like Cavuto and Romano stopped seeing themselves as Italian.
This has always been the case. What’s changed is that their social ideology is no longer the dominant one. They had no problems with policing and punishing others for their word and thoughts when those people were expressing other ideologies. It’s only now that it’s there’s that is being criticized that they have an issue.
As my wife puts it, Brooks is shallow all the way down. That was her reaction to The Bourgeois Bohemians. Just remember that his original hero was William Buckley and Buckley went to his grave insisting that Joe McCarthy was a great patriot. So that’s where Brooks started. A person can change of course, but until he understands and publicly says that Buckley was one of the people that brought us to this pass, I cannot take anything he says seriously.
So much this. I can’t stand the smug bastard with his faux surprise at the country reaping what he sowed. David Frum and George Will are two more pricks I can’t stand.
As they have accustomed us to, we see here how all their rhetoric about how the liberal are elitists who wanted to rule over the common folk, was all along a projection of how they saw themselves as the rightfully ruling Patricians, who would sop to the Populist-Nationalists with some culture war distractions while they offered “wise guidance” to steer things in the right direction (benefitting capital as job one).
But, alas, they did not manage it, they just went right along and ignored its turning for the worse as long as it was not them who were the target of the culture war. They expected to be able to say “kid, listen to the adults in the room” forever. But the kids grew up, and now the old-schoolers are aghast that the Young Turks… erm Young Jerks, are taking over and have no use for them.
Per board rules about quoting from sources. My intent was that people would be interested enough to read the article.