The East Wing, seeds of MAGA, and other thoughts

Trumpism didn't emerge from a vacuum. It's been growing inside the GOP for decades.

The East Wing of the White House. Credit: Joe Flood

Before I get to my main subject, I want to chime in on the destruction of the East Wing of the White House. Democrats should lean into it hard. It’s a metaphor for what Donald Trump is doing to the country. He’s destroying institutions, programs, and guardrails with little input from others and no restraint from anybody.

He unilaterally decided to destroy a recognizable public building to build a monument to himself, a gaudy 90,000 square foot ballroom, while laying off public employees, starving children who depend on USAID for food, kicking people off Medicaid, and doubling health insurance premiums. I think most people will be shocked and dismayed to see what’s he’s done despite objections from the National Trust for Historic Preservation and without consulting oversight authorities. Americans revere the White House as more than just a building, but as a symbol of our democracy. Trump just trashed it.

Those images could be the spark that fires up a lot of apathetic Americans and makes them see more clearly the damage Trump is doing. He literally put a wrecking ball to the White House and Republicans who could check him lack the courage to do so.

Now, back to my regularly scheduled post.

I read and follow a lot of traditional conservatives, most of whom have become ardent anti-Trumpers. I respect most of them because they have held onto their values instead of selling out to the lure of Trumpism. One annoying complaint, though, is that they resent having been called racists and fascists for years before the racists and fascists took over their party.

Jay Nordlinger, a former writer and editor at National Review who I enjoy and respect, recently posted, “For years and years, we American conservatives -- who defended classical-liberal values, such as limited government, separation of powers, individual rights, and pluralism -- were damned as ‘racists’ and ‘fascists.’ How you like the Right now, a-holes?”

Now, Jay’s point is that when accusations are made unfairly, they lose their power when actual racists and fascists show up. But Jay misses a significant point. The racists and authoritarians have long been present in the GOP coalition and the people like him and others who, as he says, “defended classical-liberal values” ignored and even coddled them for years.

The populist right didn’t come out of nowhere. They’ve been part of our politics for decades, if not centuries. In the South, they spent most of the 20th century as Southern Democrats, but after World War II they started gravitating to the GOP. By the end of the century they were firmly embedded in the Republican Party whether Jay and his intellectual compatriots knew they were there or not.

During my lifetime, I watched the shift happen. My earliest memories are of Democratic primaries fought between the conservative and progressive wings of the Democratic Party in North Carolina. Integration was the driving issue back then, just like immigration is today.

The conservatives were largely right-leaning populists, animated by race and arguing for states’ rights. By the early 1970s, they began supporting Republicans like former Democrats Jesse Helms and Strom Thurman. Many kept their Democratic registrations for decades, but voted reliably for Republicans, especially in federal elections.

In small towns and rural counties like the one where I grew up, the issue of race divided the white community. The opening of a segregationist academy influenced social circles, as the sides of the issue retreated into two camps. I grew up with the public school kids, with more limited contact with the families who went to the new private school.

The first indications of the political split we see today emerged. The more educated professional class living within city limits supported integration. Those opposed came from more working class and rural backgrounds. A coalition of progressive whites and African Americans kept Democrats in power for a while, but, over time, kids who left for college increasingly never returned home, building lives in more urban/suburban areas.

During the 1970s, the segregationists lost the battle over integration, but held onto their resentments. Populist movements like the Moral Majority emerged, wrapping right-wing politics in religion. They were white evangelicals who focused on social issues and led former Democrats into the GOP. The Moral Majority never reached out to black evangelicals despite shared cultural values and biblical interpretations.

Instead, they were motivated by ads like George H. W. Bush’s “Willie Horton” and Jesse Helms’ “Hands” ads. They cheered Helms as he opposed the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday and bashed King as a communist. People at conservative think tanks and publications did not protest the implicit racism or the racists that these actions were meant to appease. Instead, they looked the other way, often throwing around accusations of communism or Marxism to define their Democratic opponents.

As the one-party South divided sharply into a two-party region, the old Dixiecrats and Jessecrats left the Democratic Party for good. The right-wing populists found a home in the GOP willing to tolerate their worst instincts and often appeasing them. They made the party staunchly anti-abortion and anti-LGBT. Their opposition to immigration is rooted as much in racism as any economic or ideological belief.

The seeds of MAGA were planted decades ago and they grew like weeds in a garden that the ideological warriors at places like the Heritage Foundation, National Review, and the John Locke Foundation refused to tend. Today, they’ve strangled the classical liberalism that once flourished in the Republican garden with roots that are too deep to extract.

The accusations of fascism may have been a bit over-the-top, but no more so than ones of communism directed at people like me who wanted less discrimination and more equality. The accusations of racism, though, derived from a Republican Party willing to excuse or defend bigoted behavior in the interest of political gain. I watched people who once voted reliably Democratic become loyal Republicans over issues of race, homophobia, and xenophobia, not any interest in defending classical liberal values. Today, they are soul of MAGA.