I wonder if we need to distinguish between those in power and the riff-raff that supports them?
I seriously doubt most republican candidates truly give a shit one way or another about abortion or LGBTQ issues. But, it serves their purpose to rile-up their base. They are a republican stalking horse.
IIRC abortion was a non-issue when Roe came out. It was not until a few years later that republicans decided to make it a wedge issue and they had more success at it than they ever imagined.
This is exemplified by Lee Atwater’s famous quote in a 1981 interview about the Republilcan’s “Southern Strategy” (Note: Liberal use of the n-word so spoilered…among other things he was the chair of the Republican National Committee):
“You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”” - Lee Atwater
I think modern American “conservatism” boils down to one core theme: those at the top must be further enriched and the others must be kept from moving up. Upward mobility is the enemy of conservatism. This permeates every tenet of conservatism. For example:
Every tax increase makes Baby Jesus cry. Self explanatory
Opposition to gun control. As long as the victims are disproportionatey minority and even more disproportionately lower to middle class, conservatives will oppose gun control in order to cull whom they consider to be their inferiors. When CEOs start being the victims, we might see gun reform.
Anti abortion. What better way to keep the lower classes from moving up than to force them to carry unwanted pregnancies to term? One unplanned child is enough to keep a woman and her child in poverty for decades. Meanwhile, the elite can always jet to another country to rid themselves of unwanted pregnancies.
Opposition to affirmative action. Keep those minorities in check by not allowing them in the door, whether to the classroom or the boardroom.
Opposition to Social Security. Republicans have been trying to destroy Social Security for over 8 decades now. In their view, a comfortable retirement is for the upper classes only and the elderly from lower classes should live in squalor.
Opposition to Medicare and the ACA. The healthcare system works just fine for them, so they’re happy with the poor being saddled with mountains of debt for the crime of getting sick while poor.
Gerrymandering. Good heavens, there are so many of those people that we need to corrall them into a few concentrated districts to keep their political power to a minimum.
Voter suppression. Not only do we need to keep those people in isolated districts, we need to stop as many of them from voting as we can. Let’s distribute the voting machines so that the lower class has to wait hours in line to vote while we can stroll right into our precincts. And for goodness sake, don’t let anyone give water to those waiting in line to vote. A few votes not cast because someone keels over in line are a few votes not cast for our enemies.
Class suppression with a healthy dose of racism. The elites gin up racism so that uneducated whites vote against their own economic interests just to keep minorities even worse off than themselves.
A side note about “deplorables”. Hillary said the term ONE time and nine years later Republicans are still butt hurt about it. So if we don’t offend their delicate sensibilities they’ll play all nice? I don’t buy it.
Or at least we rapidly become what we pretend to be.
A point made by myself and several other posters in various threads about “Is Joe So-and-so the frothing RW commentator a believer, or just an actor playing a role?” They might, just might, possibly begin as an actor playing a role. But very quickly the role takes over the actor. To baleful effect.
I don’t see it this way. There are a lot of GOP supporters that are not at the top and do want upward mobility.
I would boil it down to two principles: 1. We don’t want to share (financially) and 2. We don’t want to change (socially). Adding guns and abortion completes the platform.
To the OP: One thing conservativism can apparently drop is foreign policy in favor on isolationism. I don’t think the GOP old guard was ok with this, but their voters certainly were.
Conservatives have swung back and forth on the isolationist/sabre rattler spectrum since forever.
Typically depends on whether the enemy was communist or fascist (ref. the totally not fascist original America First movement) although in the long past, principal may have come into it on occasion.
People love to take that out of context. If you read the entire interview- which was supposedly off the record- you can see he is being sarcastic here.
And Atwater was not revealed as the source of that quote until eight years after his death.
So what does the new contextual wrapping teach us? It vindicates Lamis, who indeed comes off as careful and scholarly. And no surprise, it shows Atwater acting yet again in bad faith. - SOURCE
I don’t see the use of that word as the most appalling thing in the passage. It’s much worse (and more revealling) that Atwater was admitting that the strategy was to quit using that word (and other overt appeals to racism), but to preserve the appeals to racist voters by dogwhistling on issues that were less controversial, but would still hurt Black people more than White people.
He was admitting to misleading his supporters.
E.g., ‘law and order’. Or cutting taxes on the rich, which is less appealing to poor Blacks, who know how unlikely they are of ever getting rich. In contrast to many poor Whites who are deluded about their chances, as evidenced by their voting against their own economic interests in the belief that they’ll someday be rich enough to benefit.
*Adwater was a brilliant strategist.
*That was a typo, but seemed fitting for the guy behind the Willie Horton ad.
Reactionary. The word that you’re looking for is reactionary. And it’s only come up once in this thread (albeit in typoed form). And I find that to be somewhat deplorable.
I’ve taken to referring to them always in all threads as Reactionary Wacko Traitors = RWTs. And the RWT party to which they belong. And the RWT propaganda-for-profit-and-grift machine that drives the whole sordid circle-jerk of hate and fact-free crazy.
I can work with it. “Reactionary whacko traitors propaganda-for-profit-and-grift machine that drives the whole sordid circle-jerk of hate and fact-free crazy” is a little too long, but “RWT” is fine.