Ever since the Republican party decided, what the fuck, lets move our racist freakshow out of the back room and onto Front Street, times have been tough for our Never Trumper "allies". Now that the GOP is fully outed as a fascist shitpile of bigots and imbeciles -- the obvious demon child of Gingrich, Limbaugh, Atwater and a hundred other monsters and makers-of-monsters -- to maintain their self-image as the righteous victims of the Fascist Right (rather than its midwife and enabler) Never Trumpers have had to resort to warming their hands around the meager embers of nostalgia.
And fake nostalgia at that.
Sad, really.
For example, this incepted fairy-tale "memory" of that time that Bill Buckley did that thing that:
“Modern conservatism was built by purging the right’s reckless conspiracy theorists—but now they’ve taken over…The Birchers are back. And they’re winning.”
— Tim Miller (@Timodc) April 13, 2022
Epic @Tracinski https://t.co/tFme3RtFqt
This fairy tale has everything Never Trumpers love.
A Mighty Conservative hero heroically risking the Very Future of the Movement and the Party by seizing the Enemy Within and casting them out! Heroically!
The hazy and extremely convenient passage of a long stretch of extremely inconvenient history. In this case more than six decades. So if (as the saying goes) a "week is a lifetime in politics", that comes to...let me see...carry the one...and wow! That's more than 3,100 political lifetimes. Which sure sounds like a whole lot of time. Certainly long before any of these Never Trumpers became loyal Republican mouthpieces. Hell, all of this happened decades before Tim Miller was even born, and I pretty sure that during this interregnum some really important stuff happened. But, like every good Never Trump fairy tale, the icky past is something to be skipped over and not dwelt on.
Instead we leap straight from the heady days of the opening of Disneyland in California, the debut of "The Mickey Mouse Club" on ABC and the deployment of the first few U.S. troops to a tiny Asian country called Vietnam...
...to today!
From The Bulwark:
Did the John Birch Society Win in the End?
Modern conservatism was built by purging the right’s reckless conspiracy theorists—but now they’ve taken over.
A foundation of the folklore of the American right is the story of how National Review’s William F. Buckley, in the early- to mid-1960s, cast the John Birch Society—and by extension the entire kooky, conspiracist wing of the right—out of the conservative movement...
See, its stuff like this -- "...but now they've taken over" -- that gives me trust issues. Because the actual history of modern Conservative movement is so much darker and more problematic than the tidied-up expurgated bedtime story that these people tell their grandkids.
For example, based on the headline this article may appear to be somewhat similar to the title Bulwark's fairy tale --
William F. Buckley and the Birchers: A myth, a history lesson and a moral
William F. Buckley claimed he had banished far-right paranoia from the conservative movement — but look at it now.
-- the story it tells -- the actual history of Buckley and the Birchers -- is strikingly different.
The story goes like this: in 1962, the leading conservative intellectual William F. Buckley Jr. used his magazine National Review to condemn the far-right John Birch Society. The denunciation isolated the Birchers and their wild conspiracy theories within America's conservative movement and led to their downfall.
The story is a myth, reliant on half-truths and omissions to make it convincing. Yet in articles and books, Buckley repeated it again and again. As the Republican Party grapples with QAnon believers and Trump loyalists, the myth that Buckley saved conservatism from extremists has been repeatedly cited as fact to explain how the party of Lincoln can save itself.
The truth is far more interesting. It shows that extremism in America's conservative movement has ebbed and flowed since the 1950s, yet never disappeared. Buckley claimed to have vanquished the Birchers, acting as the gatekeeper of American conservatism. Yet when Barry Goldwater became the first conservative presidential nominee of a major political party in 1964, it was the Birchers, not Buckley, who played the key role. The Birchers had a profound impact on American conservatism, a fact Buckley wished to expunge. He wanted to make conservatism respectable. To acknowledge the influence of the Birchers would be an admission of failure...
Buckley knew perfectly well that Birchers were reliable and energetic worker bees, doing a lot of the of the heavy lifting that was getting Republicans elected. He was just uncomfortable with the P.R. problem of having them "in leadership" so solved it in a P.R. way: by dramatically escorted a couple of them out of the Conservative movement's front door while welcoming their help on the ground and behind the scenes. All of this is extensively documented,and since they are not unlettered men and women, it strains credulity to believe that Never Trumpers are unaware that most of their Glorious History is revisionist bunk.
But when the cause a group has been championing turns out to have been a hollow fraud, it is not uncommon to see them lapse into a cultish reverence for the imaginary deeds of their fictionalized forebears/ To revise history to make themselves, if not the winners, then at least the noble losers who won a mighty, moral victory.
For example:
The Lost Cause
The Lost Cause is an interpretation of the American Civil War (1861–1865) that seeks to present the war, from the perspective of Confederates, in the best possible terms. Developed by white Southerners, many of them former Confederate generals, in a postwar climate of economic, racial, and social uncertainty, the Lost Cause created and romanticized the “Old South” and the Confederate war effort, often distorting history in the process. For this reason, many historians have labeled the Lost Cause a myth or a legend. It is certainly an important example of public memory, one in which nostalgia for the Confederate past is accompanied by a collective forgetting of the horrors of slavery...
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