Never fear Mr. Luce’s lack of candor and failure to confront the Republican Party’s ‘rapprochement’ with racism, since Goldwater, and the exodus of the Dixiecrats from the Democratic Party, into the Republican Party:this after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. The Silent Majority allied to the Southern Strategy of Nixon, were the keys to his winning in 1968.
The perception that the Republican Party had served as the “vehicle of white supremacy in the South”, particularly during the Goldwater campaign and the presidential elections of 1968 and 1972, made it difficult for the Republican Party to win the support of black voters in the South in later years.[4]
Add to this political toxicity the ‘Welfare Queens Driving Cadillacs’ of Reagan’s 1976 campaign. And his 1980 speech at the Neshoba County Fair where he embraced States Rights, not many miles from where Civil Rights Workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were brutally murdered. Then there is Bush The Elder and his Willie Horton campaign, masterminded by the unmourned Lee Atwater. Given this history of a pervasive political toxicity why is Trump , the protege of the vile Roy Cohn, a surprise?
Not to forget the contribution of the New Democrats, Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Welfare Reform with the highfalutin title of ‘Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act’, the Crime Bill, ‘Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act’ and NAFTA as part of their Reganite political agenda, that simply reified the Republican’s political toxicity. Mr. Luce as Pundit operates in a self-serving and history-less political present!
Kneeling during the playing of the National Anthem is described in the blandest of terms by Mr. Luce
The practice began last December when Colin Kaepernick, the African American former San Francisco 49ers star, knelt in protest at the alleged targeting of blacks by law enforcement agencies. More than two-thirds of NFL players are black.
Trump is the undeniable proof of the political/ethical collapse of the whole of America’s political class, not just a Republican Party awash in its own destructive, mendacious history. Trump is a strutting Caudillo, created by the most unwelcome guest in American life: Network Television.
Committed Observer
https://www.ft.com/content/c571fe0c-a183-11e7-b797-b61809486fe2
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