From Pine View Farm

The Seeds of Dysfunction 0

Michael in Norfolk considers the state of today’s Republican Party and considers how it became what it is today. Here’s a bit of his article:

Instead (of the Republican Party of his youth–ed.) we have a sectarian party dominated by evangelicals, white supremacists and the obscenely wealthy who manipulate the former two to act against their own best financial interests. Increasingly, “family values,” racial division, homophobia and wild conspiracy theories are used to dupe the gullible and ignorant. How did this all happen? Personally, I think there were two causations that stand out – although they were not the sole factors – the first being Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to court racist southern whites and the second was Ronald Reagan’s embrace of evangelicals and the falsely named “Moral Majority.”

My two or three regular readers know that I agree completely with him about Nixon’s Southern Strategy.

I’m not so sure that the Moral Majority and its ilk deserve to be considered a separate cause. White Southern Protestant fundamentalism and racism have always been intertwined. Just to pick one example, the Southern Baptist Convention seceded (you will pardon the expression) from the national group in 1845 in support of slavery.

If the two causes Michael identifies are not bother and sister, they are at least first cousins–and incestuous ones at that.

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