The white supremacist right is penetrating the mainstream right with increasing ease.
The Conservative Political Action Conference is the premier gathering of right-wing activists and politicians in America every year, and it serves as a bellwether for the direction of the conservative movement. This year Nazis showed up.
According to an NBC News report, “a group of Nazis who openly identified as national socialists mingled with mainstream conservative personalities, including some from Turning Point USA, and discussed ‘race science’ and antisemitic conspiracy theories.” (Hitler’s Nazi Party was officially called the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party.”) The reporter of the article has video of one of them giving a “heil Hitler”-style salute in the lobby of the hotel where the conference took place and of other members of the group reportedly used the N-word.
This is a critical frog-in-boiling-water moment for the right: The mainstream organs of American conservatism are apparently acclimating to Nazis in their pot. That this group was able to mingle with participants at a high-profile conference, wasn’t kicked out of CPAC, and wasn’t appropriately condemned is a sign of how contiguous mainstream conservatism has become with white supremacist politics today.
Same.
Literally never been true a day in your life. Politicians all want the same thing: money and power (they use each one to acquire the other). Exceptions exist, but are exceedingly rare; Bernie Sanders is an exception. In the days you’re talking about, Democrats and Republicans agreed on critical points like “We need to tax the absolute shit out of Americans”; what they disagreed on was where and how exactly to spend those dollars. It’s never been the case that the majority of Congress had a real interest in helping you or me out.
All the “real” Republicans quit the party to stay clear of Trump. Only the worst remained, so now it’s the party of the worst.