1. Stoking white racial resentment has long been the key to the GOP turnout efforts. They learned in 1988 that such strategies could help erase a lead as big as Dukakis's 17 pts. But until Trump, many Republicans at least had the decency to feel ashamed about race baiting.
2. GOP leaders eschewed (or outsourced) the more overt expressions of racism--because they knew they were wrong, and they knew they were potentially dangerous to the polity.
3. Watch GWB speaking at the DC Islamic Center one week after 9/11. It's embarrassing and stumbling in many ways...he doesn't know how to pronounce "Islamic," for example. But he's at least trying to say the right thing.
4. I intend no apology for GWB's policies or administration, but only to register the difference in language and tone between the Trump GOP and the Bush GOP. Imagine the furies that would have been unleashed in September 2001 had the President told the nation "Islam hates us." 
5. Fox News and Rush Limbaugh filled the airwaves with Islamophobic bile. Their words helped fuel a spike in Islamophobic hate crimes in the US. GWB, to his credit, refused to pour gasoline on that fire that could have burned much hotter.
6. Here's why shame is an important concept for us to understand here. If one was a GOP President in 2001-2, there was zero electoral incentive for you to tamp down Islamophobia. Your base was totally there for it, and you could have ridden it to more victories.
7. But GWB and his people were decent enough to recognize that whipping up the Islamophobia of their base at that moment, despite the electoral good it could have done, was the wrong thing to do. It would have made them ashamed, just as Atwater was ashamed of the Horton ad.
8. Our current President has no sense of shame. He understands one thing, winning, and he will say and do anything it takes to win. Perhaps that's a personality trait some ppl might admire in real estate moguls and ambitious businessmen, but it's dangerous in a political leader.
9. His baldfaced lies about protecting pre-existing conditions reveal that he has no shame. His latest, racist, lying ad about immigrants reveals that he has no shame about stoking racism. His post-PGH comments about Soros reveal that he has no shame about stoking anti-semitism.
10. In this way, Trump is the logic of reality TV applied to politics. Reality TV taps into our least impressive impulses as people--our pettiness, our enjoyment in watching others suffer or fail, our desire to make ourselves feel better by laughing at others.
11. Defenders of reality TV will say "come on, that's what people are like and we're just giving them what they want. If they didn't want it, they wouldn't watch." That's largely true. And playing to those base instincts makes media folks a ton of money. The market has spoken.
12. But politics, ideally, is not the marketplace. Politicians have a responsibility not just to channel whatever their constituents want, but also to lead, to inspire, to persuade their fellow citizens to realize the egalitarian ideals upon which the nation was founded.
13. There is a huge constituency for racism in the US. The GOP has known that since 1964 and capitalized upon it...sometimes subtly, sometimes more overtly...but never as overtly and shamelessly as it is currently doing (at least in my living memory).
14. The words of leaders can't make the various hatreds of racism, misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, etc. go away (as evidenced by what happened after GWB said the right words in 2001), but they can move the needle in either a positive or a negative direction.
15. Reagan and the Bush's were not above using racist dog whistles to get out the vote, but they at least knew they had to counter that racism with the rhetoric of "color blind conservatism." Racism may have worked as electoral politics, but they knew it was ethically shameful.
16. Shame is an emotion that encourages self-restraint. Shame tells a person "that thing you're tempted to do might serve your self-interest right now, but in the future you'll regret it." Authoritarians are almost always people without shame, because they brook no restraint.
17. Now is a good time to compare how our current GOP POTUS talks about the "threat" of a few thousand people seeking asylum, to how the first GOP President talked about white supremacists who took up arms against the US and killed 600 K Union soldiers. avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/l…
18. "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds...to do all wch may achieve...a just & lasting peace among ourselves & with all nations."
