The white supremacist right is penetrating the mainstream right with increasing ease.
The Conservative Political Action Conference is the premier gathering of right-wing activists and politicians in America every year, and it serves as a bellwether for the direction of the conservative movement. This year Nazis showed up.
According to an NBC News report, “a group of Nazis who openly identified as national socialists mingled with mainstream conservative personalities, including some from Turning Point USA, and discussed ‘race science’ and antisemitic conspiracy theories.” (Hitler’s Nazi Party was officially called the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party.”) The reporter of the article has video of one of them giving a “heil Hitler”-style salute in the lobby of the hotel where the conference took place and of other members of the group reportedly used the N-word.
This is a critical frog-in-boiling-water moment for the right: The mainstream organs of American conservatism are apparently acclimating to Nazis in their pot. That this group was able to mingle with participants at a high-profile conference, wasn’t kicked out of CPAC, and wasn’t appropriately condemned is a sign of how contiguous mainstream conservatism has become with white supremacist politics today.
I’m old enough to remember when Republicans and Democrats weren’t that different… There were always key issues that they disagreed on but at the end of the day the majority of both parties just wanted what was best for the country, and they would even WORK TOGETHER from time to time when it was for the common good… How did the GOP go from that to this white trash hillbilly Nazi bullshit? Are they ever going to recognize that the enemies of democracy have taken over their party? When did they become so complacent?
It’s always been there, Harlan Crowe has been a supporter of Clarence Thomas since the early 90’s, and the difference between Confederates and Nazis is only razor thin, so those types have always quasi gotten along, or even where the Klan meetings were on w Wednesday and the Nazi meetings were on Thursdays for some of these people, meaning that there’s a lot of crossover, especially when you factor in that Hitler was heavily influenced by the American Confederacy.
Where the Nazis really started showing up in public more was during the energence of the Tea Party, where the Alt-Right basically came out of the closet to join the Republican party.
this is why I don’t take seriously anyone who says that both parties are the same or two side of the same coin. maybe you could make that argument 40 years ago. but these days saying that is a shorthand to me that “I don’t pay attention to what’s going on in the news.” clearly one party’s mainstream has gone extreme and you have to be willfully ignorant to not see it.
Everyone keeps forgetting about the tea party. It cracks me up. This is totally the tea party having its effect on the right.
…and the teabaggers were just a rebranding of the hatriots from the 90s. And they were a rebranding of the Birchers…this stuff goes wayyyyy back.
Not to discredit any of what you said, but to add to this I think a big piece of this that often gets glossed over is that since then the parties have become more ideologically sorted. Back in the day, conservative Democrats often worked with conservative Republicans and progressive Democrats often worked with progressive Republicans, and that isn’t really an option anymore.
Parties sorted between conservative and liberal, ideologies sorted between urban and rural, and social media sorted all of us into echo chambers. There is no longer any kind of crossover in any part of American society.
Don’t forget suburbs and car-centric city planning isolating people by wealth and white collar vs. blue collar jobs by removing the places where those groups would normally intermingle. And by race. The suburbs also sorted people by race.
I remember a clip from a McCain rally and he was going around, asking people questions, letting them talk to the microphone, etc. One lady said she didn’t like Obama because he was Muslim. McCain shut her down and said something to the effect of “he’s a good man, we just have different opinions on how to run the country”. That stands out a lot to me in hindsight.
McCain is one of the old guard Republicans that went down fighting. His final vote thumbs down for the repeal of the ACA was legendary. I didn’t vote for him but I do have great respect for him.
Contrast that against all the limp dicks who are silently retiring instead of speaking out and trying to right the ship.
He slipped real hard during his presidential bid. Remember how his VP pick was Sarah Palin, for example.
I think that wasn’t quite the beginning of the end, but it was definitely a warning sign for what was to become of the Republican party. I think they saw how Dubya was a moron and that was appealing to a lot of voters, so they thought “there’s a recipe for success here.”
On a random note, that just led me to this video where the guy who floated Palin’s name to McCain said it was “the biggest fucking mistake of his life”.
The beginning of backroom concessions to the crazy wing of the party that are so very, very obvious.
If I remember correctly, he didn’t want to nominate her. He wanted Liebermann and didn’t even like Palin that much. She was just sort of forced on him.
Lieberman is entirely awful in different ways, though. Come to think of it, I’d forgotten he was Gore’s running mate.
She looks like a damned Rhodes scholar compared to what the GOP is putting up these days.
I’m not disagreeing with you, just a comment on how much farther they’ve fallen.
She and other “tea party” imbeciles were very much the predecessor of the MAGA horror show.
