Thread by @RevDrBarber

Love them. Pray for them. But don't stay stuck in the past with them. It's time for America to stop asking Trump to be magnanimous. He will have to confess his sins and the sins of his party to do that and that’s on him, McConnell, etc.

It’s time for America to shake the dust off our feet and move forward together.

Now, just in case you want to know one last time why Republicans are so tied to Trump and his tactics, it's because these are the tactics they have used for the last 52 years.

Read this to understand what’s going on and let’s move forward together:

In Nixon’s 1968 campaign, he read a little theory that Kevin Phillips called America "the melting pot that never melted" and explained that "all you've got to do with American politics is work out who hates whom and you've got it."

Phillips advised Nixon that the Republican Party could win w/o Negro votes, in fact, by painting Democrats as a "black party." Phillips predicted "a new American revolution coming out of the South & West" b/c of fears & objections raised by the civil rights movement's victories.

Pat Buchanan & his Nixon aide/colleague Phillips called it “positive polarization,” ways to divide the country for political advantage. Some of you will remember the key line that Buchanan ends on because it’s quoted in Jonathan Schell’s magnificent 1976 book, Time of Illusion.

The aim, wrote Buchanan, was to “cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half.” He noted that "white ethnics" in the North were also ripe for the picking,

correctly predicting, for example, that the Irish Democrats in New York would turn Republican "because they don't like the Jews and Negroes who run the New York Democratic Party." The South, Phillips said, would become the base for a new Republican Party.

Harry Dent urged Nixon to use racially coded language strong enough to persuade white Southerners that Wallace was “not a viable alternative and [they will] turn to Republicanism in droves.” The GOP should “follow Phillips’ plan,” said Dent, but “disavow it publicly.”

Nixon intended for his “Southern Strategy” to go beyond Election Day and to establish a new Sunbelt power base for the Republican Party in the South and West.

By 1968, many Southern white conservatives—Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and most of what would become the "New Right" in the South—left the Democratic Party. Thurmond organized conservative Democrats across the South to abandon their party and become Republicans.