The Origins of MAGA Thuggery (and Why It Matters) - AfAm Group

[JustAnotherGen]

Tim Wise posted this on Medium today- quick 6 minute read.

https://timjwise.medium.com/the-origins-of-maga-thuggery-and-why-it-matters-e9995dae88bd

It's not in our heads - and wish we could wake up a lot of well meaning folks to what is coming down the pipe.

It was a time when, although race and racial resentment heavily influenced their rhetoric and policy choices — and had since Goldwater — it was typically buried under at least a few layers of plausible deniability.

In this era, the ostensible problem with Democrats and liberals was that they supported “big government.” And although this complaint was tied to racialized perceptions of who reaped the benefits of government (as opposed to who largely financed it), it often manifested more as a libertarian desire for a smaller state than as a politic of pure racial resentment.

Think Paul Ryan rather than Marjorie Taylor Greene.

We know this. We saw in in 1994 with the GOP's Contract on Black Women in America, and in 1976 with Reagan's 'supposed' Welfare Queen.

But as this story demonstrates, the new conservatism has been a long-time coming. Trump harnessed it but did not release it from the stables whence it came.

It is a conservatism that is hostile, violent, and fueled by a hatred of its adversaries.

If progressives and Democrats insist on being nice to the likes of these — to courting them, or trying to win them over in the name of some deal-making “for the good of the country” — they will find themselves flattened on the side of the political road.

Stay safe out there. That goes for our other allies in the cross hairs of the radicalized hateful GOP Magats.

[Atticus]

1. OMG, THIS! nt

[JustAnotherGen]

2. I freaking love Tim Wise eom

[czarjak]

3. The Civil Rights Act triggered poor, white Democrats into becoming Republicans. My Daddy was one...

Racism, the same yesterday, today, and probably forever without change?

[JustAnotherGen]

4. And my Grand Daddy into being a Democratic Party Member

A stalwart educated, property and business owning black man born at the turn of the last century - whose wealth was inherited from his former enslaved grandfather -

Turned on his beloved GOP.

Yet here we both are today!

[calimary]

5. I long ago lost the instinct to "be nice."

At least when it comes to the GOP.

[abqtommy]

6. Today's reTHUGS and MAGATs have nothing to do with conservatism. They're FASCISTS

and The Lie and Thuggery/Terrorism are fundamental to their behavior. They don't care who they kill to achieve their goals and the rest of us all have to work together to make
sure they don't succeed. Thanks for this excellent post.

[spicysista]

7. Tim Wise is always on point!

Great post!

[JustAnotherGen]

8. Yes he is

And Facebook's algorithms are screwing over his beautiful mind's posts.