This Election Is a Referendum on Hate

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" Trumpism didn't start with Donald Trump.

The politics of exploiting racism, bigotry, hatred, and fear has long been a core strategic component of the Republican Party. In this regard, a straight line runs from Barry Goldwater through Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to the current GOP nominee. It may be a tough truth for many Republicans and conservatives to handle. But the party has long relied on racial resentment and patriotic animus as high-octane fuel to power its way into office. Sometimes it has done so behind a veil of euphemisms and smiles—with what it could claim as plausible deniability. Yet with Trump as the Republican nominee this year—with a large majority of its voters and officials supporting him—the party has traded a dog whistle for a megaphone.

Here was a candidate directly advocating bigotry, repeatedly uttering racist statements, and publicly engaging in misogynistic conduct. And most of the party said this was acceptable. So on Election Day, there will be a variety of ways to define this presidential election. Continuity or change? Will Hillary Clinton be judged a policy wonk who cares about the public interest or a cynical, status quo handmaiden of the elites? Will Trump be seen as a successful businessman well suited for the White House or an erratic, narcissistic huckster completely unfit for the presidency? But at a fundamental level, the election is a referendum on the explicit use of hate in politics—a reckoning toward which the GOP has been hurtling for half a century.

In 1964, Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the Republicans' archly conservative nominee, who had vanquished moderate GOPer Nelson Rockefeller, kick-started his party's embrace of racial politics when he campaigned against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 under the joint banners of states' rights and individual freedom. Most prominent Republicans at the time supported civil rights legislation, as had Goldwater previously. After all, this was the proud party of Abraham Lincoln. But Goldwater's opposition to this measure appealed to white Southern Democrats looking to hold on to segregation. He lost in a landslide to President Lyndon Johnson, but he snagged the electoral votes of the Deep South, the first Republican to do so since Reconstruction.

Goldwater, who had won over Southern white voters resistant to changing the region's racist ways, showed Nixon the path forward. Nixon and his crew adopted what came to be known as the "Southern strategy." In 1968, he, too, campaigned on states' right to pander to white Southerners. (This helped him pull border states away from the Democrats, though the Deep South was bagged by George Wallace, the former Democratic Alabama governor running as an independent defending segregation.) Nixon also pushed the theme of "law and order"—a counter to anti-war and civil rights demonstrations. In 1970, Kevin Phillips, a GOP strategist associated with the Southern strategy, noted the party's goal was to drive "Negrophobe whites" to "quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are." "

More here: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/this-election-is-a-referendum-on-hate-donald-trump-hillary-clinton
 

Larry Gude

Strung Out
" Trumpism didn't start with Donald Trump. ly unfit for the presidency? But at a fundamental level, the election is a referendum on the explicit use of hate in politics—a reckoning toward which the GOP has been hurtling for half a century.

In 1964, Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the Republicans' archly conservative nominee, who had vanquished moderate GOPer Nelson Rockefeller, kick-started his party's embrace of racial politics when he campaigned against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 under the joint banners of states' rights and individual freedom. Most prominent Republicans at the time supported civil rights legislation, as had Goldwater previously. After all, this was the proud party of Abraham Lincoln. But Goldwater's opposition to this measure appealed to white Southern Democrats looking to hold on to segregation. He lost in a landslide to President Lyndon Johnson, but he snagged the electoral votes of the Deep South, the first Republican to do so since Reconstruction.

Goldwater, who had won over Southern white voters resistant to changing the region's racist ways, showed Nixon the path forward. Nixon and his crew adopted what came to be known as the "Southern strategy." ]

This is a lie. More accurately, it is a distortion so vulgar that it is worthy of the worst of Trump. How does it feel to be against Trump and then act just like him? It should sicken you. It really should shame you.

Barry Goldwater was no bigot and there is nothing but evidence to the contrary. His opposition to the Civil rights act was plainly, and clearly, that it DID violate states rights. Hew was for it, for states doing it and he was profoundly uncomfortable with the racial based support he got from the South.
 
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