America is on the verge of something fateful, but it cannot escape history

Australis13@fedia.io to politics @lemmy.world – 146 points – America is on the verge of something fateful, but it cannot escape history
abc.net.au

Of all the schisms that cleave contemporary America, few are more stark than the divide between those who consider themselves to be victims of US history and those who fear they will be casualties of its future.

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The current GOP is still entrenched in their Southern Strategy. To quote Lee Atwater:

Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "removed, removed, removed." By 1968 you can't say "removed"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "removed, removed."

This plus fundamentalist Christianity is the basis of the modern GOP playbook, only now it's Latinos that are the target, at least moreso than blacks

Sure we can't distill it down to just racism since the GOP has become so entrenched with the religious right, so let's just call it Christofascist Racism, but let's not ignore 60 years of Republican racism and bullshit

Edit: Lemmy blocks the n-word even when it's a direct quote, but Atwater was using that derogatory term for blacks in the above quote

That's just demagoguery. There's a guy I know who thinks progressives hate America and everything they do is for the sole purpose of destroying it. It's like that. I get that it's far simpler to reduce your (political) enemies that way, but it's lazy and uninteresting to me.

Your guy isn't in the inner circle of the highest ranking members of a party. Atwater was, and refer to the quote above. Rather than being overt, they couch the racism in other terms, but it's the same terms.

Since the 1960s and the ERA and Nixon, racism and fear-of-the-Other has been intrinsic to the Republican party.

Like... Per their own words. In the quote I referenced. From someone in the inner circle of the Republican party, and who helped them get elected. How? By preying on the fear-of-the-Other ie racism