re: #445 Renaissance_Man

I remember reading a debate on Redstate three or four years ago, when they allowed as many as three variations on a conservative point of view in their posters, and they had more than 20 comments on any given diary. The upshot was a debate between a second or third generation immigrant who insisted that immigrants could be every bit as American as anyone else, and another poster whose position was that as soon as there was nobody left who could trace a direct genetic link to the founding generation, America as a nation no longer existed, and it would then become something else with the name America. In essence it came down to whether America was an ideal that people could buy into, or whether it really was a genetic trait that was passed down through blood.

I remember thinking at the time just how much like the Nuremberg Address his argument sounded. And also that such ideas of racial purity had to be just a bizarre aberration that were only tolerated because of the poster’s other conservative bona fides.

Yeah, the point is that what was fringe gains more and more traction based on the same memes and what was loony ten years ago is much more common today.

These things build up steam and reach a certain critical mass.