Trump and Kavanaugh are the natural heirs to the real father of the conservative movement: Richard Nixon
by digby
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| Roger Stone and Alex Jones |
I wrote a long read for DAME Magazine called “Kavanaugh is the manifestation of the party of bad ideas. The SCOTUS pick, like Trump himself, did not happen in a void.” An excerpt:
Conventional wisdom says that Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States is a gift to the rabidly anti-abortion conservative evangelicals who have revealed themselves to be the most coldly cynical transactional voters in the country, throwing their loyalty behind the crude, fascist brute in the White House. It’s tempting to see this nihilistic lust for power as a symptom of Trumpism. But this goes much further back than that. Trump’s 2016 victory has simply brought GOP officials and the conservative movement leadership out in the open, and forced them to admit that they are not organized on the basis of a long intellectual tradition, but are, instead, a cynical political faction that uses propaganda and unscrupulous tactics to obtain and hold power.
Conservatives have long insisted on a fatuous conceit that they are “the party of ideas” driven by an intellectually rigorous adherence to a strict set of principles metaphorically defined as resting on an ideological three-legged stool of family values, small government, and patriotism. They used this framework to justify state-mandated conservative religious morality and patriarchy, laissez-faire economics to uphold white supremacy and an ever-growing global military empire. Academics and writers worked through these issues and they were quite successful in creating an ideological schema that politicians honed into poll-tested catchphrases and symbols designed to signal tribal affinity to American voters.
It is obvious in retrospect that the intellectual underpinnings of the modern conservative movement that evolved from its beginnings in the John Birch Society to its full glory in the Reagan Revolution were a bit of a con. The original influential thinkers were certainly serious in building their ideology, but as a practical political project, it always served as cover for the preservation of the white-supremacist patriarchal instincts of the reactionary American right wing.
Please click over to the DAME site to read the whole thing. It all comes back to Nixon and his ratfucking dirty tricksters. He is the Godfather of all these soulless monsters.
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