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.

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.