Tuesday, August 29, 2017

The Right-Wing Imperative, the Republican Party, and Trump



By Steven Jonas

Trump's racism, misogyny, Islamophobia, xenophobia and homophobia: anything new, for a Republican? No, not in terms of policy. But the attempts have always been made to cover these things up, to introduce "deniability." The strategy/tactic goes back 50 years, under the hood of the "Rightward Imperative." Trump has just undressed Repub. doctrine in public, taken the hood off as it were, bringing it all out into the open. 

In the wake of Charlottesville and the Trumpite response to it, the question can be asked, how far back does racism go in the Republican Party? In 1962, a young Republican lawyer named William Rehnquist was personally found, by a U.S. Assistant Attorney and an FBI agent , to be attempting to interfere with the voting rights of minority persons in Phoenix, AZ. He was not charged. Rehnquist, who became a prominent supporter of Barry Goldwater of Arizona in the 1964 Presidential election, denied that the incident ever took place, although there is written evidence that it did.

In neither of his subsequent confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, on his nomination to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon in 1971, nor his nomination for Chief Justice by Ronald Reagan in 1986, was he questioned about the incident. If he had been, and he had denied that it happened, a future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court apparently would have been committing perjury. But his support for Goldwater, the Republican Presidential nominee in 1964, was entirely consistent with his racist activities in 1962. For one thing, Goldwater had famously voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Beginning shortly after he was first elected President in 1968, as is well-known, Richard Nixon began implanting what he openly termed the "Southern Strategy" into the marrow of the Republican Party. It entailed moving the Party in the direction of making racism central to their policy-making (while all the while denying that that is what they were doing), so that, following the Democrats' enactment of strong civil rights legislation and subsequent policies, the Repubs. could take over the South politically. Then, in his confessional after he was released from prison, John Erlichman, Nixon's top domestic policy advisor, admitted that the so-called "Drug War" really had nothing to do with drugs but rather with being able to actively discriminate against and imprison significant numbers of African-Americans without appearing to do so: a furtherance of racist policy, but still at least in part sub rosa

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Source: OpEdNews.com

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