@Shoq @DanShenise No, it's not. Part of how we got here was in a culture - and on this, the conservatives are correct - that refused to differentiate between Romney and David Duke. You have no idea the effect of calling people Nazis for forty years. Your guys helped inure people to the charge. /1
@Shoq @DanShenise This is not the same as "you made them be Nazis." It's worse than that: the undifferentiated attacks on centrist GOPers convinced a lot of voters that there was no wolf, when there were plenty of wolves. I have been banging this drum for thirty years. /2
@Shoq @DanShenise I think the 1994 takeover was a shock to the GOP and most of the things you'd want to say about us after 1994 are true and legit. But "it was all you, it was always this way, and it's inherent in conservatism" is not only nuts, but helped create 2016. /3
@Shoq @DanShenise Until liberals think about how the GOP became the "party of everyone who wasn't a liberal," you're not going to understand how it could happen *again*, and trying to retcon all of GOP history to get to Trump is just (again) childish. /4
@Shoq @DanShenise If you want to argue as @stuartpstevens does that there was always racial poison at the heart of the GOP, okay by me, but "Trumpism is just conservatism and was always thus" is to me a recipe for another authoritarian run at the USG that a feckless left won't be able to stop. /5
@Shoq @DanShenise @stuartpstevens The left needs to get over the idea that conservatism will just go away because of Trump. Trying to create a narrative of "it was always thus" is wishful thinking and opportunism trying to extinguish an entire body of thought in a final win. It won't happen. /6
@Shoq @DanShenise @stuartpstevens The sooner the left gets over that and thinks in terms of coalitions rather than a giant revision of history, the better. /6x
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