There are hills in Florida?
I think this is the deeper question.
I think a “Mt. Rushmore of Conservatives” built on the highest hill in Florida would still be low enough to piss on.
Newt Gingrich, definitely. Nominations: Dick Cheney, Oliver North, Phyllis Schafly, Mitch McConnell
He’s not well known among the general population but Richard Viguerie. He was the direct mail specialist who helped merge the pro gun and religious right into the Republican Party.
But you could equally well argue that conservatives have been pandering to evangelical Christians. Trump mostly ignored that group and handed them off to Pence.
Reagan pandered to people who were afraid of communists, Bush Sr pandered to people who were afraid of gays, Bush Jr pandered to people who were afraid of Muslims, Trump pandered to people who were afraid of non-white people. The pattern is conservatives making people afraid and then telling those people that conservatives will protect them from the things they are afraid of. The actual target of those fears is irrelevant.
When it comes to GOP pandering to evangelical Christians it should be noted that it has always been white evangelical Christians. Similarly, Bush and and Reagan’s pandering have always been subsets of whites. It is white fears that are stoked and pandered to. The message is always the same: unclean savages are coming to take away your special place in American society as white Christians.
Huh? Neither party really touched on gay issues in 1988, the HW campaign was on Willie Horton, the pledge of allegiance and the ACLU among other trivialities.
I feel that you’re projecting the current centrality of white nationalism back unto past Republican administrations. In the Reagan administration, for example, the primary enemy was the Soviet Union - and that certainly was not portrayed as a racial issue.
I won’t say there weren’t appeals to white nationalists, like Reagan’s Neshoba County Fair speech and Bush’s Willie Horton ads, but they were never the primary message.
In the spirit of the original Mount Rushmore, I am picking those who made a positive contribution to America and the world:
Ronald Reagan
George Shultz
George HW Bush
James Baker
Bush was mostly riding Reagan’s coattails in 1988 and denouncing the Soviets. It was 1992, when the communists no longer looked like a credible threat, that the Republicans needed a new enemy. That was when we heard about “culture war” and how the “militant homosexual rights movement” was attacking America.
Yes, but that was Pat Buchanan, the first ‘elite’ cultural warrior of the new conservatism, one which ignored GWB’s Compassionate Conservative ethos. Buchanan’s GOP has no room, no time for compassion, in fact, the world must be saved from those who express it.
This hill is in an undrained swamp.
He’s like the Benjamin Franklin or Alexander Hamilton. Not on Rushmore but maybe if he’s on their imaginary $10 or $100 bitcoin note.
Newt and Mitch sucking on Trump’s moobs, with Dubyuh and Regan off to the side trying to figure out how to escape from a finger trap.
No, the modern Republican movement is white nationalist, but there are precious few conservatives left among them, and the few conservatives that are left hold almost no power. Conservativism has been replaced by white nationalism, which makes a piss-poor replacement.
And for what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure I’ve read that the highest hill in Florida is a garbage-dump landfill.
Certainly since 1976, the date of the OP (and before), the GOP has always been racially and culturally conservative. It’s about racial purity now, it was about racial purity for Reagan. I’m 53 and I don’t remember a time when the Republican party wasn’t about tax cut and spend and maintaining white privilege. The idea that there was a time when the conservative movement was otherwise is demonstrably false.
I’ve heard of being “socially conservative,” “fiscally conservative,” and a few others, but I don’t think I’ve ever encountered the term “racially conservative.” Does it have a commonly-accepted meaning?
Happy to educate.
Here is the term in use from the linked academic paper (bolding mine), “We show that defection among racially conservative whites explains the entire decline from 1958 to 1980.”
So are we talking about enshrining the worst that the conservatives have to offer, or the most reasonable, exemplary conservatives from our perspective?
There’s no overlap between the two from what I can tell.
Yeah, several people have asked, and I don’t think the OP has clarified, so I guess it’s up to you to decide how you want to play it:
Conservatives you admire most (however grudgingly)?
Conservatives that other conservatives admire most?
Most important or influential conservatives?
Individuals who best represent post-1976 American conservatism?