@ana_safavi asked:
What changed is the focus of law enforcement.
100 years ago, all-white police forces mostly put black men in jail.
The laws mostly shielded white men and gave them legal superiority. The law of coverture gave men legal dominance over women.
Before the New Deal & Civil Rights legislation [white] men could pretty much do whatever they wanted.
They could grab land (the frontier)
Before modern rape & sexual harassment laws, they could grab women.
Before regulatory agencies, they could manipulate markets, fix prices, launder money, and pollute rivers.
MAGA means take us back to those days.
The sons of rich men went to Harvard. Before minimum wage and the 40 hour workweek, working people had no way to break out of poverty.
The New Deal changed that by setting up regulatory agencies to stop the cheating and price fixing that kept the rich rich and the poor poor.
Those agencies started targeting wealthy white men who cheat.
They didn’t like it.
“Conservatives” have been trying to dismantle tho regulatory agencies, targeting social security, for example. They denounce social security and other similar laws as “welfare state” and insist that regulatory agencies infringe their “liberty.”
The women’s rights and Civil Rights movements sent conservatives into a panic.
In the 1970s and 80s, the GOP was the party of “law and order,” but what kind of law and order did they embrace?
This law review article explains that Nixon and Reagan’s Tough on Crime policy was a “backlash against the Civil Rights Movement.”
Nixon and his pals saw the Civil Rights and Women’s Movement as a time of chaos and disruption.
Hippies smoking pot! Black people demanding compensation for centuries of injustice!
“The whole problem is really the blacks,” said Haldeman. “The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while appearing not to.”
The difference between Trump and previous GOP leadership is that Trump has made the subtext text. Trump calls it what it is: White supremacy.
This is has many Republicans rattled.
I was moved by this passage in MaxBoot’s book:
(Boot was long time Republican spokesperson and Wall Street Journal editor)
Trump campaigned on a promise to destroy the “deep state,” meaning laws and agencies that curtail [white] men’s “liberty”
When Trump said in Michigan in 2017 that all our laws are stupid, he meant the laws that prevent him from doing whatever he wants.
In 1980, Libertarian Party VP candidate, David Koch advocated abolishing the FBI, CIA, and IRS.
So the targeting of these agencies by the far right is not new.
You can dismantle the agencies slowly. Or you can bring in a human wrecking ball.
Trump is a human wrecking ball.
Barr and Trump’s other pals are openly (and gleefully) destroying the agencies they hate.
McConnell & pals closed their eyes to Trump’s Russia connections because they know their interests Russia are tightly aligned.
“What!?” you say. Click here.
Trump is making it hard for them to close their eyes to Trump’s Ukraine’s scandal because of the sheer brazenness. Trump’s brazenness has GOP leaders stumped. Some see it as a virtue: No dishonest hiding of motives.
Notice the use of “integrity” here:
They like what he’s doing.
They’re uncomfortable with how he’s doing it.
Savadandy asked:
Poor Southern and rural whites also supported the Confederacy. Trump gives the working class part of his base what they want more than economic advancement: A fight against their “enemies”
Those who embrace far right wing politics usually .believe that nature naturally forms a hierarchy. They think human society also forms a hierarchy.
Trump (and the Confederacy) kept minorities in their place from a belief that white men belong at the top of the hierarchy.
Trump’s base loves him because he tells them they are the top of the hierarchy.
