Conservatism as a political (profitable) position is by its nature a minority position, commanding at best 35-40% of the population - business owners, older people with assets, and some eager youngsters who equate it with more freedom and less government. In order to create an electoral majority in the US, the GOP has taken a series of steps away from basic "don't do much, do it slowly" conservatism by inviting in groups of people it was thought would be reliable voters and not complain too loudly about the non-stop tax (and service) cuts as long as their pet issues stayed in the foreground In the aftermath of the Civil Rights Acts, Nixon took huge advantage of such a group - Southern working class white Democrats who took race inequality as a matter of nature, having grown up in the dead-end culture of the unreconstructed Confederacy. This "Southern Strategy" enabled Nixon to assemble electoral majorities twice, despite riding Johnson's bungling of Kennedy's war to the heights of insanity. The heights of a B-52-fueled bloodbath for absolutely nothing. Nixon was a little paranoid and over-concerned about winning elections. This led him down a path that prodded the nation to enact a swathe of so-called "sunshine laws: and other good-government legislation at many levels. We even elected an honest man to the office of the presidency for once. Meanwhile, Southerners exposed to larger culture naturally became less racist and harder to rope in with simple tactics. Ronald Reagan, the cold and nasty former spokesperson for war and the NRA who came across as kind, funny, and friendly on TV, cut a deal with the most radically intrusive political interest group possible: so-called Christian fundamentalists, or evangelicals. What we now call the Christian Taliban. He would add an anti-abortion plank to the GOP platform - and mean it - if they would vote for him and other Republican candidates consistently. And they did. On both counts. They are a small voting bloc but they always turned out and voted. Always. And the GOP kept pushing that "family friendly" garbage every chance they got, with a long-term goal of using a series of Supreme Court "Justices" who were happy to lie to Congress at their confirmation hearings. He got two terms that way, and drove the economy into a fiery deficit-spending fueled hell (now the First Great Recession) that thwarted his successor, the relatively sane and competent George H. W. Bush, from gaining re-election. Reagan set in motion the destruction of the American middle class, with severe anti-union policies, encouragement of "moving jobs overseas", and the aforementioned radical deficit spending which sucked everything in the economy but the military dry. After eight more years of Reaganism under a center-right Democrat from Arkansas ended "welfare as we know it" - which was a program designed to keep mothers and children healthy. He also set into motion a series of diplomatic processes that somehow ended a 400-year old war between England and Ireland. The Irish economy proceeded to grow at a 15% per year rate almost indefinitely. Despite being one-saxophone black, Clinton left no marked improvement in the state of the nation. George W. Bush offered some hope of success for people who wouldn't know what a blow job was if it slipped into bed with them, but mostly won over Al Gore by cheating via the now fairly corrupt and partisan Supreme Court. If Reaganism was a hard push in the wrong direction, that appalling assault on democracy and decency was the tipping point. He essentially went into office with the same cabinet as Nixon. All the president's men were back in power and this time they had blueprints. The response to the appalling drought of attention and responsibility that led to 9/11 was a bill that assaulted general freedoms on as many fronts as possible, and created the darkly creepily and not in a Goth Night at all way "Department of Homeland Security." That administration also ran the economy into a brick wall. Homeowners who still had both jobs once again were losing their houses to crashing market values. This was the Second Great Recession. The country elected a well-spoken Black man to repair the economy and - well, it was really getting too late to try to heal the now two-generations-deeper racist rifts that had become tied to what were thought of as "basic economic principles" - largely simplistic, patently false bumper-sticker level slogans - that had to be honored or the country would simply collapse. Obama had no hope at all of somehow mending racism in a country that did not consider lynching and burning the President in effigy a crime. Then came another step - the last possible step - in the Republican coalition-building. One that led to another electoral majority, against a weak candidate who almost fell to an actual center-left upstart in the primaries. A truly disgusting, deplorable, appalling tarnished and sick psychotic from Queens via heavily edited "reality show" business experience walked onto the stage and insulted everybody the worst among us wanted to see insulted. He pushed women around, he bullied and sneered at decency in all its forms. Adding the people in this country whose idea of "good government" is the police shooting random people in cold blood, even murdering them with their bare hands if possible to the already potently evil mix of radicalized religious fundamentalists and still-unreconstructed racists across the nation and most importantly - really the point of this brief history - most importantly, the economically disenfranchised half-literate but fundamentally decent "white working men" to the basic "conservative" base who wanted nothing more than more cuts in taxes and regulations was the last chapter this story could endure. These working men, and women, were disenfranchised because of the very policies that had been pushed since the time of Reagan. The factories were gone. Factory work is not "fun", it's often dirty, wearying, and mind-numbing. But it is good honest work for someone willing to turn up for forty-plus hours and "do things" commensurate with their skills and ambition. Most factory work offered a steady path of jobs with more responsibility, even management for those so inclined, and if nothing else a real middle class living that could raise a family in cleanliness and health, sending the kids to State college even if they showed promise. And those jobs all came with the full suite of what we think of as "benefits" - health care, ever-increasing vacation time, often further education reimbursement, etc. Those were good jobs, if that is a thing that matters to you. With those jobs long gone, parts of American society were beginning to resemble a nation crippled by war reparations, unable to ever crawl out from under massive debt, vast swathes of its geography characterized by lack - lack of good food, lack of good schools, lack of access to high-quality local heath care, and of course, a lack of any kind of good jobs to turn a hard-working shoulder to. A lack of functional infrastructure. A lack of political influence at the grass roots level. A lack of any way to improve their lot. The psychopath from Queens was perfectly happy to rail against everyone they suspected might have had a hand in their economic spiral - and add a few more to the grievance list. A pathological, compulsive liar, he happily promised anything that they seemed to cheer for. This is how we got to where we are despite not losing a world war. A right-wing, racist, fascist police state with no restraint of any kind and no parts of the worlds of government, business, education, military, or press seem to have the slightest idea or any power to do anything about. 1/30/26 
© Huw Powell
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