"The GOP has been doing a racist strip tease for decades now, and Trump is just skipping the tease."

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COMMENTS: 
*  Great article. It forgot the other code words. "Southern Pride" = White Southern Supremacists, "Moochers" = Blacks, and "Religious Freedom" = Homophobes.
*  In California, the Hispanic population now equals the White population, and in 20 years Hispanics will be the racial majority. Unless the GOP has a Reformation, it doesn't have long to live.  Conservatism IS fear, fear of change, fear of the future, fear of the Other, fear of not hangin' on to the past . . . the GOP is the Party of Stuck in the Mud.
*  Trump continues to validate what many already knew about the Grand Odd Party. Keep talking Trump.
*  with registered GOP down to 21% of voters, the party is the party of 3 rs= Rednecks, Religious fanatics, Rich fat cats.
*  With Hispanics slowly becoming a majority and blacks disillusioned with the GOP, they are a dying party. The old white boys and racists, along with the filthy rich cannot win elections for them anymore. That's why they've cheated and looked for ways to get around this situation by fear mongering, voter suppression, gerrymandering, and other illegal tactics. They're doing it to themselves which is even sweeter.
*   Voter ID is not a problem until it's code for voter suppression. And that's exactly what's been happening. No secret that some of these GOP run states have used voter ID to suppress the votes of Americans who they feel they can not win their votes.
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Trump Has Exposed GOP Racism
By Spencer Critchley, July 13, 2015

In 1968, Richard Nixon realized he could not become president unless he made a deeply cynical move: convincing southern racists to vote Republican.

The trouble was, they hadn't done that since the Republican Abe Lincoln freed the slaves. But Nixon calculated that the Democratic "Solid South" could now be broken open: after the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and '64, and the Voting Rights Act of '65, racists, feeling betrayed and furious, were looking for a new home.

So, in what became known as the Southern Strategy, Nixon invited racists into the GOP. Ever since, the racists have been essential to the party's "winning coalition," the collection of targeted groups that can add up to electoral victory.

Not all Republicans are racists, of course. But without racists, I don't think the GOP can win elections.

Not the kind of thing you want to talk about openly, though. So Republican politicians have become fluent in a kind of code, which they use to communicate with the ugly part of their base without offending polite society. In 1981, GOP consultant Lee Atwater offered a guide in an interview:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

More recent examples: "taking back our country," voter ID, border security and birtherism.

But now, along comes a cartoon racist like Donald Trump, who ignores the code and drops the veil from the GOP's structural racism. In response, Republican politicians pronounce themselves shocked to see such blatant bigotry, naked and unashamed.

It's a tough sell. The GOP has been doing a racist strip tease for decades now, and Trump is just skipping the tease. Only a few years ago, Senator Lindsey Graham could safely flirt with anti-immigrant racism on Fox News. Now, he's forced to go on CNN and publicly disown Trump's very similar comments, calling him a "wrecking ball for the future of the Republican Party with the Hispanic community."

So embarrassing.

But it may point to a possible upside. Thanks to gauche clowns like Trump -- not to mention Cliven Bundy, Steve King and others -- the GOP, like the Democratic Party of the 60s, might be forced to reform itself, if only to end the pain.

Because the party is finally experiencing the agony of racism in a form it can't ignore: bad PR.
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