Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
Editorials & Other Articles
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
The Origins of MAGA Thuggery (and Why It Matters) - AfAm Group
Tim Wise posted this on Medium today- quick 6 minute read.
https://timjwise.medium.com/the-origins-of-maga-thuggery-and-why-it-matters-e9995dae88bd
It's not in our heads - and wish we could wake up a lot of well meaning folks to what is coming down the pipe.
It was a time when, although race and racial resentment heavily influenced their rhetoric and policy choices — and had since Goldwater — it was typically buried under at least a few layers of plausible deniability.
In this era, the ostensible problem with Democrats and liberals was that they supported “big government.” And although this complaint was tied to racialized perceptions of who reaped the benefits of government (as opposed to who largely financed it), it often manifested more as a libertarian desire for a smaller state than as a politic of pure racial resentment.
Think Paul Ryan rather than Marjorie Taylor Greene.
We know this. We saw in in 1994 with the GOP's Contract on Black Women in America, and in 1976 with Reagan's 'supposed' Welfare Queen.
But as this story demonstrates, the new conservatism has been a long-time coming. Trump harnessed it but did not release it from the stables whence it came.
It is a conservatism that is hostile, violent, and fueled by a hatred of its adversaries.
If progressives and Democrats insist on being nice to the likes of these — to courting them, or trying to win them over in the name of some deal-making “for the good of the country” — they will find themselves flattened on the side of the political road.
It is a conservatism that is hostile, violent, and fueled by a hatred of its adversaries.
If progressives and Democrats insist on being nice to the likes of these — to courting them, or trying to win them over in the name of some deal-making “for the good of the country” — they will find themselves flattened on the side of the political road.
Stay safe out there. That goes for our other allies in the cross hairs of the radicalized hateful GOP Magats.
8 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
A stalwart educated, property and business owning black man born at the turn of the last century - whose wealth was inherited from his former enslaved grandfather -
Turned on his beloved GOP.
Yet here we both are today! 
Great post! 