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This comes up a lot, along with the usual liberal carping about the “Southern strategy“ and it’s worth a moment of comment, especially since I am stuck in an airport. /1
No arguing that mod-con GOPers like me treated the southern evangelical wing of the party with a shrug. I think many of us figured: Meh, we’re stuck with them, not just because of their racial views, but because they were conservative Christians not welcome among the Dems. /2
For people like me, the Southern strategy wasn’t a strategy. It was really just a “keep them in the tent and harvest their votes by default” strategy. This was Reagan’s approach, and it definitely pissed off the evangelicals, as GOPers knew back in 1984. /3
But I always assumed that the GOP was a prudent, rational, conservative party that would never let the wingnuts (as opposed to the mainstream conservative Christians) gain actual power within the party. I was wrong. There were plenty of warnings that it was going to happen. /4
People like Pat Robertson were canaries in the coal mine. I admit that I brushed this off, as something so irrational and so obviously self-destructive that I really didn’t think it had a future. I did not think the GOP would commit suicide for the fringiest evangelicals. /5
Ironically, this is why I did not fight with those evangelical GOPers, or shame their choices. I simply did not take them seriously enough as a force in the party. (These earlier mistakes are a reason I think shame needs to make a comeback.) /6
Even more ironically, the victory of the hard-core evangelicals is now the election and unbending support of one of the most decadent and un-Christian GOP politicians ever. I knew the political evangelicals were hypocrites; I did not realize they would go to the wall this way. /7
A lot of us in the GOP should have seen this death spiral coming a lot earlier: more power in the south and west, a smaller base, more evangelical and gun nut influence...lather, rinse, repeat. But I, at least, did not think that was possible. Oops. /8
So the people who carp at us that “we should have seen it coming“ may have a point, but it is important to remember how insane it seemed - at least to me - even 25 or 30 years ago that these people would overtake the base of the GOP. /9
If you want to accuse us who have left the GOP of anything, it is not that we condoned or encouraged these folks, it’s that we didn’t take them seriously enough to try to stop them back when we should have. /10x
