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This is a good piece on fissures within the GOP but I think it mischaracterizes the Trump presidency as “populist” & repeats a story about how conservatives & the GOP expelled the far-right in the mid-1960s that is actually far more complicated. /1 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/senate-house-republicans-rift/2021/02/02/08348d40-6567-11eb-8468-21bc48f07fe5_story.html
I don’t think the sharp opposition between “hard-edge populism” & “conservative orthodoxy” holds. Many of the Trump administration’s achievements were boilerplate conservatism. Its own website trumpets things like “massive deregulation,” tax cuts, etc. /2
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/trump-administration-accomplishments/
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/trump-administration-accomplishments/
The claim that Buckley and “key GOP politicians banded together to marginalize anti-Communist extremism and conspiracy-mongering” of the JBS has been widely repeated lately but the history is more complicated. /3
This tweet by @ThePlumLineGS citing a paper by @sam_rosenfeld and @daschloz on the "porous" boundary between conservatives, the GOP and the far-right is relevant in this context. /4 https://twitter.com/ThePlumLineGS/status/1354836475880341511?s=20
This is a separate point but I find it interesting that Gaetz, like Roy Moore did In his failed Senate campaign, disses McConnell. What are their actual policy differences? MM supported taking health care away from millions, a tax cut for the rich, conservative judges, etc. /5
And, by the way, Ronald Reagan hardly tried to "marginalize" the John Birch Society when he ran for CA Governor in 1966. Indeed, he refused to repudiate the group./6 https://www.newspapers.com/clip/69251226/
This despite CA Republican Sen Thomas H. Kuchel's demand the previous year that all "forward-looking" Republican candidates for Governor " must repudiate the John Birch Society. /7 https://www.newspapers.com/clip/69251314/
Indeed, Reagan apparently played footsie with the JBS during his 1966 Gubernatorial campaign. /8 https://www.newspapers.com/clip/69251425/
Here is one columnist's judgement in Oct 1966./9 https://www.newspapers.com/clip/69251517/
There is _a lot_ of scholarship, with much more forthcoming, on the porous boundary between conservatives and the far-right in this period, and so I think we should be cautious in asserting that the far-right was expelled from the conservative movement in the mid-1960s. /10
