,
6 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
1. It's worth asking what the hell is going on with this tweet. Partially, its the cheap insult humor that the GOP thinks works well for Trump, doing the Beto the same thing Trump does when he calls Warren "Pocahontas."
2. The other thing though is that for the ethnonationalist right, increasingly ascendent in today's GOP, the "whiteness" status of groups like the Irish and Jews is still is dispute,
3. You might think that the "whiteness" of Irish Catholics or Ashkenazi Jews was settled a long time ago in America, say 1945 at the latest. But in fact, there's an element of the right that has never been fully comfortable with that expansion of whiteness.
4. This can be most clearly seen in the writing of the late Samuel T. Francis, the paleo-conservative thinker whose writings of 1980s and 1990s anticipate Trumpism in many ways. Francis always made a distinction between White Anglo Protestant core America & rest
5. In his book Beautiful Losers (1994) Francis located the weakness of postwar Conservative intellectual movement in fact that white anglo-Protestant core was underrepresented and it was dominated by Catholics (Buckley) and Jews (Strauss).
6. I don't think we should read too much into this, it's probably a one-off insult. Especially since Irish Catholics do in fact make up a big chunk of the Trumpian right (Hannity, Conway, etc). But still shows how underlying beliefs can sometimes come to the surface.
