1. Some thoughts on the role of racism (or white identity politics) in the history of American conservatism. tl;dr--racism has long been a feature of conservatism, but conservatives have succeeded in convincing white centrists (and perhaps even themselves) that it is a bug.
https://twitter.com/letsgomathias/status/1035201314127523841
2. It's significant that Steve King & other white nationalist conservatives will be speaking at this annual event founded by Phyllis Schlafly in 1972. This is not some Johnny-come-lately conservative affair, it's got deep roots in the conservative movement.
3. Schlafly was a key figure in conservative history, using the fight against the ERA to promote anti-feminism & a racially-coded version of "traditional family values." She played a central role in turning the GOP into the party of Goldwater/Reagan. npr.org/sections/thetw…
4. Schlafly's hero Goldwater marked a major shift in the racial politics of the GOP. Just look at what happened to the black Democratic vote in 1964. Black voters ran screaming from the GOP in 1964 and have never returned. 
5. Jackie Robinson, a long-time Republican himself, gave voice to this dynamic. He went to the 1964 GOP convention in California that nominated Goldwater. He said it made him feel like "a Jew in Hitler's Germany." Not mincing words there.
6. Goldwater was the ultimate "feature/bug" candidate. In his personal life he decried bigotry. In his political life, he was most known for opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. His campaign flopped, tho he won a bunch of Southern states that hadn't voted GOP since the Civil War.
7. From 1964 on, the growing number of Republicans in the Goldwater mold said "we oppose anti-racist legislation because we have principled, non-racist, small government reasons. It's just a coincidence that the racist white people we intentionally court happen to vote for us."
8. From 1964 on, black voters showed that they thought this whole GOP feature/bug distinction was BS. They saw that the GOP was a party becoming ever more devoted to implicitly if not explicitly defending white supremacy. Not that the Dems were perfect, but they were better.
9. But white moderates/centrists failed to listen. Black voters kept telling them, the GOP is a racist party, and almost all white people said "come on now, you're just being hyperbolic. Sure there are some racist wackos like David Duke, but no one pays attention to them."
10. This dynamic was beautifully captured in this SNL skit about election night 2016. It's "well-meaning" white liberals who have done a lot of the work that has enabled the GOP to frame its racism as a vestigial bug, not an essential feature.
11. Jackie Robinson knew racism was a feature, not a bug, of the new GOP he saw emerging in 1964. Nonetheless, he kept fighting it from within the party. He considered endorsing his friend Nixon in '68 until Nixon starting courting Wallace voters.
12. Most black voters, however, had long given up on the GOP by the late 60s. Yet all my life white conservatives & moderates have insisted that the GOP isn't a racist party, they endorse a color-blind conservatism. Sure, there are some racists in the party, but they're marginal.
13. I know there are many long-time conservatives who genuinely believed that (and some still do). They were willing to overlook the racist dimensions of GOP messaging and policy because they assumed/hoped that they were a bug, a fringe element soon to fade.
14. Those principled, non-racist conservatives woke up to a party in 2016 that now largely belongs to Corey Stewart, Steve King, Stephen Miller, Kelli Ward, Joe Arpaio, Ron DeSantis, Roy Moore, and Steve King. That's a lot of racist "bugs" in an otherwise color-blind movement.
15. Trump didn't come out of nowhere. Most black voters (like Chappelle in that SNL skit) weren't surprised he won the nomination, or the election. Meanwhile, well-meaning white centrists and conservatives told themselves "a racist like Trump can NEVER win!!!"
16. Trump won not in spite of his appeal to white identity politics, but because of it. It's a feature, not a bug. cambridge.org/core/journals/…
17. And what if that's been the case with the GOP since 1964, despite the efforts of many conservatives and white moderates to convince themselves otherwise? One can arguably trace a direct line from Jackie Robinson's 1964 warnings to today's MAGA-hat wearing tiki-torch rallies.
18. Jackie Robinson knew in 1964. Black voters have known my entire life. it's taken until 2016 for a significant number of white Americans to finally acknowledge that racism has always been a pretty central feature of conservatism, not an unfortunate bug.
19. This was the first tweet that popped up on my feed after posting the above thread. Holy ratio, batman! It appears Twitter is having none of this incredibly lame effort to defend Trump and Tucker from the charges of racism.
20. Obviously, this is a very cursory overview of the GOP's politics of race since 1964. The go-to book on this is @LeahRigueur's amazon.com/Loneliness-Bla…
21. And now in the "you've got to be freaking kidding me" department, the author of that American Conservative piece asking "what does the word racism even mean?" is a Confederate flag waving "Southern avenger."
https://twitter.com/lachlan/status/1035254319770152960
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