Posted on 08/13/2018 10:45:22 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Is President Donald Trump a perversion of the American conservative movement — or simply an honest reflection of what it’s been for decades?
Ever since Trump’s victory in the Republican primary, this has been one of the big questions hanging over American politics. If Trump’s anti-intellectual and race-baiting brand of politics is a parasite on the American right, then it’s possible the Republican Party can be cleaned up after him. That’s the premise of the so-called Never Trump movement, a small group of Republican elites and conservative intellectuals who have denounced the president and his allies in no uncertain terms.
But it’s possible the Never Trumpers are wrong. It could be that they’re the ones who have been deluding themselves into thinking that the conservative movement is a higher intellectual calling, when in fact it’s been a cover for a shallow and vicious brand of white identity politics for decades. If that’s true, then there’s no coming back from Trumpism. The conservative movement and its core institutions need to be radically reformed, if not outright abolished and rebuilt.
One of the most prominent Never Trumpers, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, posed precisely this question at the end of an Atlantic essay on conservative polemicist and convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza. “Did they really change so much?” Frum muses about his Trump supporting allies, “Or did I?” Seth Cotlar, a professor of American history at Willamette University, set out to answer Frum’s question in a lengthy and extremely worthwhile Twitter thread — and suggested an answer the Never Trumper won’t like.
Cotlar, who grew up in a Republican household and teaches a course on the history of American conservatism, suggests that Frum is, in fact, the one who changed....
(Excerpt) Read more at vox.com ...
1. Frum is a Bush speech writer and fall off the conservative hay bail long ago
2. Isn’t Vox the publication trying to justify MS-13?
“I believe it was the Democrats that voted against Civil rights, owned slaves,..”
Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Ronald Reagan opposed it as well.
George Washington was one of the largest slaveholders of his day, if not the largest. The vast majority of Presidents up through Grant owned or had owned slaves. That includes Federalists, Democratic-Republicans, Democrats, Whigs, National Union and in the case Grant, Republicans.
“2. Isn’t Vox the publication trying to justify MS-13?”
They try to blame MS-13 on us, Americans.
Can’t blame the El Salvadoran imports themselves, you know.
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