Today's "conservative" politics

I’m part of the first Black generation since the end of Reconstruction who will die in a country that is more legally bigoted than it was when we were born.

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[C]onservative “thought” is not what it used to be. And conservative “skill” at expressing those thoughts has now largely devolved into what plays well on Fox News. In my day, you could distinguish between, say, William F. Buckley and David Duke. And, more to the point, even if you couldn’t draw a meaningful distinction between the policies Buckley and Duke would support, Buckley was carefully practiced in saying the quiet part quietly. James Baldwin could hear it, but most white folks could not (or would not).

Conservatives will tell you that [...] a rise of “illiberalism” is squelching free speech across academia, and chipping away at freedom anywhere and everywhere else.

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What conservatives would have acknowledged as racist as recently as 20 years ago is today’s conservative orthodoxy.

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Take the Voting Rights Act, which in 2006 was reauthorized by an overwhelming majority of the House and received unanimous approval in the Senate. Just 15 years later, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act—meant to restore the original Voting Rights Act after the conservative-controlled Supreme Court eviscerated it in 2013—received 219 votes in the House, none of them from Republicans, and couldn’t get anywhere near 60 votes in the Senate.

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And yet, the bigoted trash that gets trundled out on Tucker Carlson every night is what these white wingers actually believe. The fact that their racism is raw and unapologetic doesn’t make it any less real, or any less of a force in American society. This dynamic is especially acute in legal academia, where the bigotry endemic to mainstream conservative thought is given the force of binding law by the U.S. Supreme Court and judges throughout the federal and state court systems. Chief Justice John Roberts has made a career out of limiting the ability of Black people to vote. Clarence Thomas thinks systemic racism is just something Black people are supposed to overcome, while his wife is famous for actively supporting a violent insurrection. Samuel Alito—well, the only thing that mitigates his antipathy towards Black people is that he also hates women, gay people, Muslims, civility, democracy, and the truth.

  Elie Mystal @ Balls and Strikes

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