Fascinating subject, isn't it?

It's one gigantic schadenfreudengasm to watch fifty years of chickens come home to roost at the Republican Party aviary. Events are so far beyond anybody's control now that I can only watch in horrified bemusement.

Nixon's Southern Strategy, as so memorably outlined by Lee Atwater, marks the beginning of the GOP's modern outreach to RWAs, and in that sense it is the start of an era. But the history of Right Wing Authoritarianism is as truly ancient as the nostalgic fabulist history of the American "Conservative Movement" today is truly false.

There's a cottage industry springing up of people writing talking-keyboard histories of how the GOP got here, and an emerging common thread is how the GOP became entangled with the RWAs in the process of creating an astroturf-populist message to get enough votes to stay alive as a party in the face of unfavorable changing demographics, starting in the late '60s.

There are other interpretations. One piece I read recently marked the stock market crash of 1929 as the beginning of the modern schism among Republicans, between those who saw and became reconciled to the need for the New Deal (known as "RINOs" today), and the hardcore consiglieres who'd always protected the interests of the wealthy and powerful.

Which is true, and connects up with the post-war push by business interests and the wealthy to undermine and reverse the New Deal. I personally would mark the late 1940s as the founding of the "Conservative Movement", with the work of Leo Strauss who prescribed a conservative civic religion to bring the masses to heel under their traditional masters.

Which is basically how you'd describe what conservatism has become: A religion, a science-denying lunatic and apocalyptic cult. The leaders of the astroturf "Movement" have been following Strauss's prescription all along.

And so, two decades into the Conservative Era, Nixon moved to bring a gullible constituency under the sway of the "Movement" with dogwhistle racism. After another nearly half a century of spending billions of dollars and untold effort warping the Republican Party far to the right, the whole farce and facade is poised to come crashing down.

On the question of whether Trump is a bigot, I think it's irrelevant. He's deliberately appealing to bigots, but that's just one of the standard tactics of a wannabe fascist dictator. The scary thing isn't that Trump might be a bigot, but what he'll do with an army of millions of bigots?

Remember, the man keeps a copy of the collected speeches of Adolph Hitler beside his golden throne of a toilet.