re: #217 HappyWarrior

Other countries may have versions of conservatism that aren’t intrinsically racist. But that is inconceivable in the context of US politics. Conservatives were the driving force behind the civil war with their insistence on expanding slavery in the territories. They lost the war but ended up mostly winning the peace, which was enough to keep their obstruction of progress to normal conservative levels for nearly a century.

Civil rights victories for blacks in the 1950s and 1960s put an end to Jim Crow etc. Movement conservatism was born in the racist backlash to that, and has never repudiated that origin.