re: #302 Targetpractice

The scary part being that the old fogies that are dying off are being replaced with “young guns” who are even crazier than they. Men like Paul Ryan and Rand Paul are the face of the GOP’s future.

You want scary? Read The Crisis of American Conservatism: Inherent Contradictions and the End of the Road. It’s a very long think tank piece about history and finding a path forward, but towards the end it talks quite a bit about race in the whole “everything is at the expense of whites” vein (emphasis mine):

There is therefore a growing consciousness among whites, especially among older ones, that Democratic programs not only benefit the poor at the expense of the middle class, but that they benefit blacks and Hispanics at the expense of whites. This consciousness is heightened by current economic realities, because government policies to bring about redistribution of monies from a stagnant or shrinking economic pie impose obvious and painful costs upon the middle class. It is also heightened by changing demographic realities, because the black and Hispanic proposition of the American population is steadily increasing, with these two groups already accounting for a majority of births in the United States each year. […]

An obvious alternative path for the Republican Party in expanding its electoral base leads from the South to the rest of America, i.e. from the Republicans being the white party in the South to the Republicans being the white party in America as a whole. In the 2012 presidential election Romney got 60 percent of the white vote, while Obama received only 38 percent. Of course the Republican establishment knows how dangerous and destructive it would be to have an American party system defined and divided along racial lines, even if not explicitly or overtly so. However, if the Party grows more desperate to gather voters in hard times, its younger political entrepreneurs might calculate that a racial path for the Party might well be the best path to advance their own ambitions, and themselves.

That last bit sounds like the author feels that, while dangerous, a “racial path” might be a viable option. I’m in the middle of reading Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream, so I find that pretty chilling considering that the book (written in 2009) talks about exactly the stuff we’ve been seeing up through today.