Pyperkub wrote: ↑Thu Jul 26, 2018 1:23 am
Kraken wrote:"Conservatives" doesn't mean what it used to mean. Even though we agree on nearly nothing, I actually find myself feeling sorry for genuine conservatives nowadays.
I was reading an article a little while back arguing that many of the positions we think of as conservative (or did, until recently) were rooted in reactionary hatred of the Civil rights movement and act.
E. G. Smaller government, lower taxes, etc.
I'll see if I can dig it/them up, as it's a fascinating argument.
From that perspective, it's more that we're actually seeing conservatism without its polite veneer.
Yup.
I'd say the modern American conservative movement was definitely born in reaction the Civil Rights movement. In the 20th century, "States Rights" was cover for Jim Crow and segregation all along, but it was a strictly Southern rallying cry until the 1950s.
I'm sure we all know the story of the 1960s Southern Strategy and the Dem/GOP base realignment, but another part of it was the 1970s GOP making inroads into the northern white working class through opposition to busing and etc, again sold as "smaller government."
The realignment was complete with the rise of the social-conservative Christian Right, which explicitly adapted GOP opposition to Civil Rights to the fight against the ERA and acceptance of homosexuality, etc.
Actual Edmund Burke-style conservatives probably haven't been running "conservative" politics in American since the 1940s. People like William Buckley, whom we somehow pretend were above the level of today's right-wing, were all-in on opposition to Civil Rights. The distance they kept from e.g. the John Birch Society was often more a matter of style than of substance.