One of my least favorite liberal tics is to grant there was some time when American conservatism was some sort wrong but noble affair, and to appeal to various horrible things as some deviation from those principled norms. The American conservative movement (which while not identical to the Republican party, it has been latched onto its face planting its eggs in its body Alien-style for decades) has carried the banner of white nationalism, bigotry, contempt for the poor, corporate immunity, environmental destruction, rigid unequal gender roles, homophobia, xenophobia, "law and order" policing, state discrimination, the military state, perpetual global war, support for worldwide dictators, American "empire" in its various manifestation, etc.
He's exactly right. This does not mean that all Republicans have always been like that; an awful lot of the Democratic Party was like that even up into the mid-2000s. But the Republicans own conservativism now, and those are its values. Pretending otherwise is fooling ourselves.
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