Thread by @GeeDee215

re: that last RT...

winding back the clock a bit: race has always been central to how movement conservatism and its institutional organs have been organized.

People point to the SCOTUS decision in Roe v. Wade as the catalyzing event of the modern evangelical movement, but as the historian Randall Balmer writes, its genesis is actually two decades earlier, in the white backlash to Brown v. Board.

politi.co/2PjHjWu

The modern Religious Right sprouted directly from the political organizing around whites-only Christian academies that popped up in the South as a way to resist court-ordered desegregation.

Meanwhile, in his 1964 campaign, Goldwater actively courted segregationists and racial revanchists, even if he himself head behind the fig leaf of "states rights."

It didn't take a lot of connecting of the dots: on the trail, he delivered stump speeches about the excesses of federal involvement while standing *under* the Confederate flag and next to Strom Thurmond, one of the signatories of the Southern Manifesto.

bit.ly/2Pon8Xr

Goldwater is always held up as an avuncular, curmudgeon who told his audiences things they didn't want to hear, but his contrarian streak evinced some consistent boundaries:

htsotps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1964/10/03/the-campaign-goldwater

Goldwater reportedly agonized abt his vote on the Civil Rights Act — this is held up by his defenders as evidence of his discomfort with racism — but he ultimately voted against it, one of the small minority of Senators from either party who did.

(One of his surrogates during the '64 campaign was an actor, sports announcer and commentator named Ronald Reagan, who decried the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He later called the Voting Rights Act "unfair to the South," and remained a steadfast critic of Martin Luther King.)

Goldwater lost that election in historic fashion. But his failed campaign changed everything: the only states he managed to win comfortably were Southern states that had previously been reliably Democratic.

It helped create a template for appealing to white anxieties about race in the post-civil rights world; Nixon would later adopt the “Southern strategy,” with its coded appeals to "law and order."

the rest of this has been well-covered by @KevinMKruse on here: The party’s center of gravity shifted to the South; the moderate-to-liberal Rockefeller Republicans of the Northeast and Midwest would vanish from existence not long after.

And as Louis Menard wrote: “[Goldwater’s] longest-lasting political legacy was to drive African-Americans out of the party of Lincoln.”

Speaking of avuncular, curmudgeonly, "contrarians," we should talk about the man who took over Goldwater's seat in the Senate when he retired: John S. McCain.

In the House, McCain voted at least a half-dozen times against divestment from apartheid South Africa. As a Senator, he voted against a federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King Day. After Arizona made it a state holiday, anyway, he went back home to decry it.

After George H.W. Bush vetoed a very narrow civil rights bill in 1990 — it would have made it easier for people discriminated against in hiring to sue their prospective employers — McCain voted against overriding that veto.

That put him on the same side of the issue as David Duke, who watched that vote with great interest from the Senate gallery:

trib.in/2PludIl

In his 2000 bid for the White House, the person running his campaign in the South was an actual, honest-to-god neo-Confederate.

nyti.ms/2PpX5PF

During the ever-important South Carolina primary that year, McCain was asked about the Confederate flag flying at the state capitol. (The NAACP had called for a boycott of the state as long as the flag flew, so all the Republican candidates were being asked about it.)

McCain offered the mildest possible critique of the flag: he said it was a symbol of slavery and racism — uh, *yeah* — but then he also lovingly remembered one of his forebears who died at Shiloh fighting for the Confederacy.

He got killed for it, and it allowed the frontrunner, George W. Bush, to stake out a safe position to the right of McCain on the Confederate flag:

bit.ly/2PjPwtM

also, while McCain was being pilloried for insufficient fealty to the Confederate flag, activists on the ground in SC — assumed to be working for Bush but never completely proven — papered the state with flyers saying McCain had fathered a "Negro child."

bit.ly/2PjQ6rs

(the dark-skinned child in the flyers? the South Asian daughter that McCain and his wife, Cindy, had adopted.)

McCain, chastened and desperate to win the GOP nomination, changed his tune on the flag: it was "heritage not hate" and blah blah blah.

Bush meanwhile, was consistently outmaneuvering McCain as a "real conservative," campaigning at Bob Jones University, the politically powerful South Carolina institution that lost its tax-exempt status bc it refused to integrate and, as of 2000, had a ban on interracial dating.

I bring all this up to say: John McCain —  who voted against divestment from apartheid South Africa, voted against the MLK holiday, voted against a narrowly tailored civil rights bill, and who defended the Confederate flag — was considered, by Republican standards, a *moderate.*

so if you think about how a dude like McCain so dutifully took up the racial orthodoxies of the modern conservative movement to advance his career, it becomes less hard to wrap your mind around the ascension of Donald Trump, who simply made those foundational orthodoxies plain.

*"organs have been organized"?

jfc, Demby. get it together.