1/ Republicans and Reactionaries, a thread.

There will be post-mortems ad infinitum on how Trumpism rose and fell, but those narratives will always be incompete or deliberately evasive if they don't reckon w/the fact that the GOP itself made Trump possible.

2/ It's undeniably true that we have always had fringe, extremist movements in the USA, whether Know-Nothings or Birchers. What kept them on the fringe was their comparative *political* irrelevance.

3/ Since the Goldwater campaign in 1964, however, the Republican Party began adopting elements of extremist/fringe ideations, slowly at first and then with gusto.

4/ It started with Goldwater's paeans to "State's Rights," which have always been a stalking horse for institutionalized racism. After Buckley's pro forma denunciation of the JBS, it then accelerated with incorporation of anti-UN ("anti-globalist") notions.

5/ Well-documented in the literature, the craven Southern Strategy of the late '60s through mid '70s -- another overt/covert appeal to racism (cf, the notorious Lee Atwater "n****r n****r" interview) -- continued the GOP's embracing of the hard(er) Right...