Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

livefree_ordie, So you are capable of posting something other than a relatively nonsensical fiction-filled rant. Congratulations. Much appreciated. Yes, every decent American must have at least respected Jimmy Carter's integrity. He wasn't a George Santos for sure. Santos aside, i remember reading years ago, an American political conservative plus was that they were better organized than the other side. Your Carter mention actually led to this neat little evolutionary one from the Miller Center:

The Presidency and Grassroots Conservatism

The Watergate scandal immediately hurt the Republican Party electorally. In 1974, Democrats picked up forty-nine seats in the House of Representatives and five seats in the Senate. Two years later, a little-known governor from Georgia, Jimmy Carter, won the presidency by making a promise to never lie to the American people. The “Watergate Babies” in Congress pushed to reform a political system that had given the president too much power and vowed to reassert the power of the legislative branch to prevent future abuses of authority by the executive branch. As president, Jimmy Carter faced a cynical electorate. Many Americans felt that Watergate was not just about Richard Nixon. Rather, they felt it exposed a federal government that had become too powerful in the lives of individuals. The New Deal and its Great Society successor had drastically expanded the authority of the federal government and the responsibility of the chief executive to provide solutions to public problems. Yet corruption, high taxes, and frequent bureaucratic overlap began to frustrate the American people, particularly during the 1970s when inflation began spiraling while wages remained stagnant.

But, as scholars have noted, this political and economic environment benefitted grassroots conservatives, who had been building a movement for the past two decades.1 Nixon’s resignation made people distrust government even more and helped to usher the conservative movement into a position of power. Modern conservatism, a political ideology famously articulated in Barry Goldwater’s manifesto The Conscience of a Conservative (1960), gained intellectual, financial, and political strength in the wake of Watergate. The crisis in the presidency became an opportunity for well-organized and well-funded conservatives to take over the Republican Party and win the presidency with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Though an effective spokesperson for the movement, Reagan’s ascension to the White House was a culmination of decades of organizing by many. Moreover, his presidency brought the challenge of governing to the man who famously declared government the problem, rather than the solution. This section allows students to examine the development of modern conservatism and how conservatives tackled the process of governance once in power.

Building a Conservative Movement

Over the past decade, political historians have examined the individuals, institutions, and networks that conservative activists built during the post-WWII period as an alternative to the dominant political and economic establishment.2 Throughout the Sunbelt and in suburban neighborhoods, businessmen, housewives, evangelicals, anticommunists, and libertarians began to organize in local and national politics. As historian Kim Phillips-Fein writes, it was both a diverse social and political movement, in which a “small group of committed activists and intellectuals ultimately managed to win a mass following and a great deal of influence in the Republican Party” by articulating messages of “anticommunism, a laissez-faire approach to economics, opposition to the civil rights movement and commitment to traditional sexual norms.”3 This section encourages students to consider the ideological and institutional organizations that grassroots conservatives built during the 1960s and 1970s to build a network of conservative activists that transformed the Republican Party and brought Ronald Reagan to the White House.

SECONDARY SOURCES:

https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/teacher-resources/recasting-presidential-history/presidency-and-grassroots-conservatism

"...by articulating messages of “anticommunism, a laissez-faire approach to economics, opposition to the civil rights movement and commitment to traditional sexual norms."

Creating and manipulating the fear factor of the first remains an integral part of the conservative handbook. Trickle down still screws the conservative working stiff. Opposition to civil rights is obviously still well alive within the GOP and actually goes hand-in-hand with their opposition to the rights of the young who feel unsuited with the sexual identity assigned to them at birth. Many of whom, of course, are subjected to vicious and debilitating harassment and bullying because of it.

Seems little has changed in the political sphere except American conservatives have been manipulated to move even farther to the authoritarian right. And their leaders lie more openly now.