Quote Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer View Post
This discussion came up elsewhere and a few points were mentioned that I figured were relevant here. The main point being that the title here suggests conservatism had some sort of floor. Conservatism has been treading down the racism route since at least the 1960s with the Southern Strategy. Nixon's war on drugs as a covert war on blacks, Reagan's "law and order" to oppress blacks, their efforts to reach out to those who killed civil rights activists, etc.
Good post, OG.

I think many conservatives did try to "raise the floor", especially after Brown v Board of Education and then the Civil Rights Act. But the racism of "The Greatest Generation" (including my own parents) is a pretty hard nut to crack. Racism had been part of our society, culture, and political institutions for so long, since our beginning in fact, that it took multiple generations to change attitudes....let alone the awareness of power structures that enabled it.

I can remember when Country Clubs and high-end hotels were Restricted (no blacks, no Jews) and schools were racially segregated. My Indiana high school used a mandatory busing program, just so it could retain federal educational funds for being 'racially diverse'. Racists (like my dad) were angry about forced integration in public schools, and he stopped going to basketball games (even to watch me dance at half-time) because there were "too many jungle bunnies" on the team. But if a legislator supported red-lining policies in Real Estate or Insurance that kept blacks from being neighbors, he supported that. He could hide his racist segregation beliefs under the cloak of freee market capitalism, and the Republican Party welcomed him with open arms.

There are no "'principled, genuine, conservative principles", its always been about aristocracy, a strict social hierarchy where the law is used to protect the top but not bind them, and bind but not protect those farther from the top. Lewk and his alt-right friends have simply been more direct and blunt than a majority of republicans have been for the past few decades.
Lewk sounds a lot like my dad (who died in 1979). I used to think that restrictive and sclerotic ideology would fade and die with older generations....but I was wrong.