What Happened to American conservatism?

Centerpiece said:
Civil Rights… Buckley/Goldwater… Dixiecrats switched to Republican…. Southern Strategy…. Roe v Wade…. Moral Majority takes over Party…. Reagan and Welfare Queens…. Newt and Contract on America…. Reagan kills Fairness Doctrine brings on Rush and Fox… then God Forbid a black man in the White House….
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Sounds like a new “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

This is turning into a really great thread btw. Lots of very interesting posts.
 
donbosco said:
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A, THE, Bircher / N.C. Connection: “…
in 1958 Robert Welch of Chowan County North Carolina founded the John Birch Society. The organization was named for a ‘missionary’ killed by Chinese Communists - the circumstances of which are cloudy as they occurred during the days of the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II in China as greatly complicating the narrative, Birch was also an undercover US Army Air Forces Intelligence Officer and OSS operative.



Raised up in Hertford, N. C., Robert Welch eventually came to believe that ‘Reds’ were everywhere-For example, he accused Presidents Truman and Eisenhower of being party members. Welch’s paranoid style haunts what passes for political discourse even today, often poisoning our attempts at progressive dialogue. When a modern conservative proclaims with vigor that “America is not a democracy! It is a republic!” they are working from the “Bircher” script. Of course the US is not a democracy in the purest sense but rather an aspirational ideal as framed by the better angels of our Constitutional Democratic Republic. Historically Bircher obfuscation has been their main play in covertly and overtly asserting the supremacy of State’s Rights as a way to nullify the advances of the Civil and Equal Rights Movements of the past 60 plus years.



Rich from candy trade (yep - THAT Welch) his millions financed his fanatical crusade. A child prodigy, Welch entered UNC at 12 years old and was a graduate of the Class of 1916. He went on to attend the US Naval Academy and Harvard. From its founding in 1958, Welch closely controlled the John Birch Society which at its apex counted 100,000 members, until his death in 1985. The JBS was anti-United Nations because as an organization it represented global collectivism and international cooperation with communists and socialists. The JBS campaigned vigorously for the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren for his support for the Supreme Court’s pro-Civil Rights decisions. Welch and company seem to have genuinely believed that 60+% of the employees of the Federal Government were Communists. The JBS led the targeting of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a Leftist enemy of America. Welch was clearly a harbinger of today’s trumpist GOP lunacy, radical extremism, and dirty politics. That Tar Heels in the Center and on the Left have been in a battle with the despotism of the likes of Jesse Helms, Madison Cawthorn, Virginia Foxx and the constant anti-progress, anti-intellect, and regressive actions of our state General Assembly is bound up in the same ways of seeing that birthed Welch’s twisted worldview.



“…Trumpism is not a reversion to an older, more gothic form of conservatism but an apotheosis decades in the making. Trump may have been our country’s first post-truth president. But the post-truth environment of conspiracy we are living in today has been a long time coming. We owe it in part to the truth-optional habits on the right that Robert Welch and the Birch Society exemplified—and in part to the same Republican elites who were complicit every step of the way." The John Birch Society Never Left



So a Chowan County candy baron bears much of the blame for the steady development of the truthless worldview that plagues our nation and threatens so acutely the very foundation of the system that has, for just shy of 250 years, been the developing dream of egalitarianism and human and civil rights. Welch passed on in 1985, he was 86, but his ideas are stronger than ever. With 2024 behind us and an uncertain future ahead it remains to be seen if the Bircher Ideal will ultimately win out.”

Wrote that a few months back.

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Hertford is in Perquimans county.

In any case, UNC has been the proud home to not 1 but 2 very influential right-wing "thinkers": Welch, yes, but also Sam Francis, who got his PhD from UNC. Francis was a speechwriter for John East and theorized the political potency of a sort of alienated, anti-PMC white middle class. I dare say who's more influential right now.
 
superrific said:
Neither of those economists thought fiscal responsibility was irrelevant. I don't think the GOP did either. They just liked tax cuts more.
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In 1976 and 1980, the Howard Bakers, George H. W. Bushes, and Gerald Fords definitely thought balanced budgets mattered. By 1980, the Ronald Reagans and Jack Kemps worshipped tax cuts and blaming deficits on “welfare queens” driving Cadillacs.
 
American conservatism was always about white supremacy. Not to be confused with different strains of racism like anti black, anti any version of Hispanic, anti any version of Asian.

It's always been about white ppl...and the dumbing down of white ppl is now live and in HD and on mobile phones.
 
donbosco said:
That's interesting. I don't think of Lincoln as conservative.
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Ah... too woke.
So, Teddy R., Dwight? Too woke also?
Surely Teddy R. has to be labeled conservative, no?
Let us not conflate conservative with Conservative with Republican with MAGA. Perhaps that's fodder for another question for our guest, David Brooks.
"What is the relationship or connection between Lincoln - Teddy - Dwight - Goldwater - Nixon - Reagan - Bush - Trump? And: bonus question for final Jeopardy: _______________ (fill in the blank)
 
eternalheel said:
American conservatism was always about white supremacy. Not to be confused with different strains of racism like anti black, anti any version of Hispanic, anti any version of Asian.

It's always been about white ppl...and the dumbing down of white ppl is now live and in HD and on mobile phones.
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This^^^
Winner winner chicken dinner.
Admins: Shut down this thread. It's over. Turn out the lights.
 
eternalheel said:
American conservatism was always about white supremacy. Not to be confused with different strains of racism like anti black, anti any version of Hispanic, anti any version of Asian.

It's always been about white ppl...and the dumbing down of white ppl is now live and in HD and on mobile phones.
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So long as you equate being Irish, Italian, Greek, Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Slavic, Russian Orthodox, Jewish, Spanish, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Scandinavian (when all those Johnsons were coming over, they weren’t exactly welcomed), etc., with being not white, I agree.

American conservatism has been about many things - cheap labor being first-and-foremost. As soon as one oppressed group of Europeans began assimilating (say the Germans - too many were Catholic; then maybe the Irish or the Poles), bring in another group of “them.” The latest group will hate the new immigrants because they’re driving down wages.

The powers-that-be will play each group off the other to drive down wages.
 
“… which condemned the Brown v Board of Education decision and the order to desegregate school….”

Of course this was the tipping point. The watershed moment. I should add this to my timeline in an earlier post. It should be:
Brown v Board… Buckley/Goldwater… Civil Rights…. Dixiecrats switched to Republican…. Southern Strategy etc.

Brown v Board Started it.
Obama in the Whitehouse was the last straw.
MAGA grew out of it all and matasticized into what we see today.
David Brooks says goodbye to his Old Party which isn’t so Grand anymore.
 
heelinhell said:
If only a thoughtful conservative board member would post on this thread and engage in a discussion.

Am I a Diogenes searching for a serious conservative...or am I just a hapless Vladimir waiting for Godot ?
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How is it in their self interest? While I've never seen it expressed openly, it seems like the core of conservatism that if it is not directly in their self interest, it's not worth doing.
 
Conservatism was Once Upon a Time pragmatic and somewhat moral restraint, for example Eisenhower's speech warning of the Military Industrial Complex, which of course happened and became outrageously, impossibly worse than he feared. Back further, it was moral guard rails of the Adam Smith variety. I am certainly not going to digress on any of that, which today is as gone as the brontosaur. As I wrote in my here be dragons thread, I am devoutly limiting my own processing of all that is going on for reasons of my mental health, but I have been sent some brilliant links that I have chosen to read. The following is a superb Big Picture/historical contextualizing essay (I know there has been a flurry of such articles and books on this everywhere), but I invite you to make the time for this one.

www.theideasletter.org

A Modern Counterrevolution - The Ideas Letter

The Trump II administration’s onslaught of executive orders and emergency declarations, and its effort to expand presidential power, is both extraordinary and in the lineage of U.S. governments past, Harcourt…
www.theideasletter.org www.theideasletter.org
 
an0maly said:
Conservatism was Once Upon a Time pragmatic and somewhat moral restraint, for example Eisenhower's speech warning of the Military Industrial Complex, which of course happened and became outrageously, impossibly worse than he feared. Back further, it was moral guard rails of the Adam Smith variety. I am certainly not going to digress on any of that, which today is as gone as the brontosaur. As I wrote in my here be dragons thread, I am devoutly limiting my own processing of all that is going on for reasons of my mental health, but I have been sent some brilliant links that I have chosen to read. The following is a superb Big Picture/historical contextualizing essay (I know there has been a flurry of such articles and books on this everywhere), but I invite you to make the time for this one.

www.theideasletter.org

A Modern Counterrevolution - The Ideas Letter

The Trump II administration’s onslaught of executive orders and emergency declarations, and its effort to expand presidential power, is both extraordinary and in the lineage of U.S. governments past, Harcourt…
www.theideasletter.org www.theideasletter.org
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Thank you for that link. It will take folks several minutes to read the article, but it is time well spent.

Placing Trump's "counterrevolution " in this historical context reminds us that everything old is new again.

I cling to the hope that the closing sentence holds true this time around...

"There are many ways to revolt, as Marcuse reminds us in the very title of his book Counterrevolution and Revolt, and history shows that when people retain their values, counterrevolutions rarely succeed."
 
donbosco said:
Looks like while Welch was born in Chowan County, his father bought a famous home in the Perquimans County town of Woodville in 1903 (when he was 4). I think the Hertford reference as given in some sources must come from the proximity of the two places.

Famous Home in Woodville; Until the Civil War, this was a Large Prosperous Plantation in NC
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not to be confused with lewiston-woodville about 45 mins away in bertie county.

thanks for sharing this stuff, i was totally unaware of the JBS grand poobah being from ENC. my family has been in ENC for @ 300 years now.
 
4thgenheel said:
not to be confused with lewiston-woodville about 45 mins away in bertie county.

thanks for sharing this stuff, i was totally unaware of the JBS grand poobah being from ENC. my family has been in ENC for @ 300 years now.
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Same goes for my father's family. 300+ years in Hertford / Perquimans County.
 
breepf said:
I don't have any remaining family in the area--probably haven't been to Hertford in 35 years. My grandmother lived at one end of Dobbs Street.
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my roots are hertford county, i have several friends whose families are from hertford the town, though.

its probably even slower/quieter than the last time you were there.
 
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