Reactionaries with a bullet
by digby
I mused a bit this morning over at Salon about the reactionary nature of the modern GOP and how there’s more to Trump than meets the eye. This is an excerpt:
While Ronald Reagan also used the slogan “Make America Great Again” when he ran for president, his vision was much more upbeat and optimistic than Trump’s, which harkens back to paleoconservative candidates like Pat Buchanan and his “Pitchfork Brigade”. Indeed, it centers around “getting rid of bad people” which is not what most people think of as morning in America. Last week he even explicitly went back to the 1950s and evoked the Eisenhower era program “Operation Wetback,” which he characterized on “60 Minutes” as “very nice and very humane.” (It wasn’t.) He said “Did you like Eisenhower? Did you like Dwight Eisenhower as a president at all? He did this. He did this in the 1950s with over a million people, and a lot of people don’t know that…and it worked.”
He elaborated at his rallies later in the week:
“You know, Dwight Eisenhower was a wonderful general, and a respected President – and he moved a million people out of the country, nobody said anything about it. When Trump does it, it’s like ‘whoa.’ When Eisenhower does it, ‘well that was Eisenhower, he’s allowed to do it, we can’t do it.’That was also in the ’50s, remember that. Different time, remember that.That’s when we had a country. That’s when we had borders; you know, without borders you don’t have a country, essentially. We don’t have a country. Without borders, you just don’t have it.But Dwight Eisenhower, this big report, they used to take them out and put them on the other side of the border and say, ‘you have to stay here.’ And they’d come right back, and they’d do it again and again, so they said ‘Wait a minute, this doesn’t work.’ And they took them out and moved them all the way South; all the way. And they never came back again; it’s too far. Amazing.And I’m not saying this in a joking way — I’m saying this happened. It wasn’t working, they were coming back, and then they literally – literally – moved them all the way. A lot of the politicians – they never came back, it was too far. They’d put them on boats and move them all the way down South, and that was it.”
This brought huge cheers as does Trump’s frequent references to former POW Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl and how in the good old days he would have been summarily executed:
“We get a traitor like Bergdahl, a dirty rotten traitor, who by the way when he deserted, six young beautiful people were killed trying to find him. And you don’t even hear about him anymore. Somebody said the other day, well, he had some psychological problems. You know, in the old days ……bing – bong[pantomiming shooting]When we were strong, when we were strong.”
Back when we had a country. When we were strong.
This past week-end at a Second Amendment rally in Tennessee, Trump went back to the 1970s, evoking the old Charles Bronson vigilante movies, saying that he carries a concealed weapon and repeatedly pantomiming drawing a gun and eliciting huge applause from the audience. At one point, Trump had them screaming out the words “Death Wish” in unison. This is not something you see every day at a presidential campaign rally.
Evidently, Trump fondly remembers the gun violence in New York during that era as a time when real men avenged their families by gunning down strangers in the streets. In Trump and his followers’ minds, making America great again isn’t about being the first to go to the moon or re-building the middle class. It’s all about getting rid of “bad people” — by any means necessary.
There’s more at the link. The vision these folks have of an America of the past is not one I remember or think ever existed. It’s something out of cartoons or video games or science fiction. Or, at least, as Perlstein points out in his piece, professional wrestling. (Or maybe Reality TV…) It’s a fascinating phenomenon which is very hard to wrap your mind around. But you can’t look away.
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