The right’s widely varied response to Donald Trump’s presidential bid may be the political story of the year so far, but many liberals have ignored it in favor of arguing that Trump’s worldview is a pure product of conservatism. For example, in a Sunday article for Daily Kos, Chauncey DeVega claimed that Trump is “the logical result of at least five decades of Republican political strategy” and defined Trumpmania as “a mass political temper tantrum on the Right caused by a potent mix of authoritarianism and racism.”
“Much of the rhetoric, policies, and goals of the Republican Party and Donald Trump in 2016 are disturbingly similar to those of…the Ku Klux Klan,” declared DeVega. “This should be no surprise. The Republican Party is the United States’ largest de facto white identity organization. Conservatism and racism is now one and the same thing in the American post civil rights era.”
According to DeVega, the alleged Klan parallel is not the only “ugly ghost of the past” for the current GOP: “The right-wing’s paranoid fixations on ‘Islamic terrorists’ are a contemporary version of the Cold War era Red Scare. ‘Muslims’ are now the new ‘commies’…Racism and bigotry, both overt and covert, are the name brand of today’s Republican Party. Its voters find such values appealing. They are not rejecting Donald Trump. Instead, they are embracing him.”
In the last presidential election year, DeVega easily topped even that level of race-related invective. Apropos of an exchange between Juan Williams and Newt Gingrich during a Republican debate, DeVega called Williams “a repository for the fecal matter of white conservative bigotry” and added, “Juan Williams smiles while cashing his checks at the prospect of his political coprophagia [i.e., feces-eating] at the ass end of conservative politics.”
