"These people must lie about history in order to exonerate conscience."

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COMMENT:  The problem "John" here faces is the one that runs through the GOP like an illness. The first and only liberty that matters to them is preserving the right to their own facts. The trick John tries to pull here is a cliche--Lincoln was a Republican, therefore today's Republicans are followers of Lincoln. There isn't a fact of history that they cannot dismiss or deny because they have their own facts, you see, so they can dismiss the Southern Strategy, and the Dixiecrats, and the Goldwater Republicans, and the dog-whistle bigotry of Conservative media, and the fact that black voters vote overwhemlingly Democrat because they know what John knows--that the GOP is party for bigots like John who want to think like bigots and act like bigots and leglsiate their bigotry but be free from being labelled accurately as what they are: bigots. 

They'll kill their party by fantasizing it to death.

John wants reality to absolve him from any shame. He wants to dismiss any evidence that he is what he is and that the GOP is what it is. He wants to live in a fantasy of himself and his principles. He'll scream like a rat in a trap if he's forced to face any facts about himself and he'll cloak himself in the virtues of better people and fantasizethat he's just like them. He wants his own facts because te real facts make him ashamed of himself. Hence his anger. You see it all the time.
This is why Trump is taking over the GOP. Millions of them are voters just like John. He tells them they can believe anything they want to believe. He'll tell them that immigrants are taking over, that terrorists live in their closets, that science isn't based on facts, that he can build a wall across the sky to keep out UFOs...and most important, that they can all be amnesiac throwbacks and they can stop being ashamed of it.
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This is not your grandpappy’s Republican Party
By Leonard Pitts, Jr., April 15, 2016

This one’s for John. He’s a reader who took issue with my recent column arguing that conservatism has become an angry and incoherent mess.

John was particularly upset that I described conservatives as resistant to social change. Wrote John:

“Tell that to the right side of the aisle who signed in the civil rights voting act in 1965. Which party resisted that? … Who resisted the proclamation that freed the slaves? Southern democrat party of course and who was it's military arm during reconstruction? The KKK. Today that organization is tied into the liberalism more than conservatism. … Your party, the liberals who now call themselves progressives, are the party of Strom thurmond, Robert Byrd, Lester Maddox, George wallace — and … Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.”

Please note what John did there. He responded to a critique of social conservatism by mounting a defense of the Republican Party, as if the two were synonymous. Granted, they are now, but in the eras John mentions? Not so much.

Indeed, when Abraham Lincoln issued that proclamation John is so proud of, it was considered an act not of conservatism, but of radical extremism. And those Republicans who voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were moderates, i.e., the kind of people who have been driven out of a harshly conservative party that now considers moderation apostasy.

The truth, as any first year history student could tell you, is that Republicans were the more socially liberal party and Democrats the more socially conservative for at least seven decades after Lincoln. But in the years since then, they have essentially swapped ideologies.

The reason John engages in this linguistic shell game, the reason he defends the party that wasn’t attacked instead of the ideology that was, is simple: The ideology is indefensible, at least where civil rights is concerned. You must be a liar, a fool or an ignoramus of Brobdingnagian proportions to suggest social conservatives have ever supported African-American interests.

They didn’t do it a century ago when “conservative” meant Democrats. They don’t do it now.

Sadly for John, pretending otherwise requires him to twist logic like a birthday party clown making balloon animals. How addlepated must you be to see common ground between the segregationist Lester Maddox and civil-rights activist Al Sharpton? How cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs are you when you consider the Ku Klux Klan and Strom Thurmond “liberal?”

And yes, you may think this a lot of energy to lavish on one man. But it isn’t one man. I hear John’s “reasoning” literally a hundred times a year from conservative readers. Indeed, a few weeks ago on CNN, a Donald Trump apologist pimp-slapped reality by branding the Klan a “leftist” group. So John is hardly the only one.

These people must lie about history in order to exonerate conscience. Yet the truth is what the truth is. John need not take my word for what conservative means. Merriam-Webster backs me up. He need not even take my word for the history. A hundred history books back me up.

But honest, grown-up Republicans, assuming there are any left, may want to take my word for this: They cannot achieve their stated goal of a more-welcoming and inclusive party while clinging to an ideology whose entire raison d’etre is exclusion. You see, social conservatism only works for those who have something to lose, those who have an investment in status quo.

I’m reminded of an anecdote about a Howard University professor who visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s. He explained to his hosts that some “Negroes” were politically conservative. They were astonished.

“Why?” asked one. “What do they have to conserve?”
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