​Something interesting about hate is how much it relies on dishonesty, both internally and externally.  I think we naturally recoil at it – we have to learn to overcome our revulsion to its wrongness, to its irrationality and illogic, to the obvious pain it causes.  We face a choice and must either fight or embrace it, or ignore it (which is maybe another way of embracing it).

Today we see so clearly the many paths it travels, the murky ways it winds around the minds of our fellows and warps their thinking.  We see the phantasms is creates for them and which they try – often seemingly earnestly – to pass off upon others.  When I was young, I remember hearing a conservative critique about Black Entertainment Television (BET).  Why is it OK for there to be a BET but not a WET, a White Entertainment Television channel? 

Now, this was 30 years ago, and even then, as a teenager I knew enough of black history and the civil rights movement to know the obvious answer (which I won’t bother with here because it’s not even worth it).  This was not coming from an explicit white nationalist.  This was standard, basically mainstream – if a tad provocative – conservative thought.  You can still find this critique, and many worse examples on the mainstream right today.   The theme is always the same: to diminish, to deny, to denigrate the black experience of racism in America. 

The corkscrew turns of excuse-making and misdirection, of blame-shifting and all manner of fallacy spill out in a toxic mess of something called conservative ideology.  But it’s really just hate at its core.  Economics, psychology, criminal justice, genetics, evolution, education, religion and any other popular political subject gets bent into service.   

There is no science or research to back up any of it.  No lived experience.  No data.  Nothing expressed in art or poetry.  It is hate that is too ugly to be named outright.  And so it must be dressed up.  It must be hidden behind euphemism and implication, pseudoscientific hand-waving and misapplied academic imprimatur.   Over the years many tactics have been tried, and many have succeeded in subtly shifting the discourse. 

Something obvious to black Americans and minorities who experienced racism first hand didn’t need to learn to see it.  Those on the radical left who studied racism and bigotries could learn to see the connections.  But the assault was so broad and cacophonous, so subtle and hard to pin down.  Did they really mean that?  How could you know what is in a man’s heart?  It was hard to prove. 
 
Liberal tradition encourages pluralism and open-minded thought.  Bad ideas ought to be discussed.  Hold them in the light of truth so as to expose their flaws!  But there is a weakness to this tolerance.  Once an idea is shown to be clearly wrong, it is time to move on.  What hate is, what causes it and what perpetuates it has been clear enough for quite some time.  It is a hierarchy in which an arbitrary marker of some group is determined to be superior to another and thus deserving of more rights.  This has been, and remains one of humanity’s great evils.  We have codified it in law with the concept of Protected Classes: groups historical discriminated against on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, or other characteristics. 

And although, sadly, too many of us are denying even this truth, most still agree that this is wrong, that this is hate.  But hate isn’t honest.  Hate wears masks.  Hate deceives the wearer into believing the unthinkable: that they don’t hate.  “I am not a racist”, are words not uncommonly found coming from people who are indeed quite comfortable with racism.

So, as we see the modern conservative movement awash in open displays of brutal hatreds towards all manner of protected classes – President Trump seems to have a go at each one on an almost daily basis.  (As he has himself stated “I am the least racist person in the world”.)

It is my contention that the right wing has always given safe harbor to hate.  Even in its most charitable description, an ideology of free markets and limited government, it is essentially an ideology of protecting a system in which property owners can consolidate their wealth free from government interference.  History is clear that this leads directly to more and more accumulation of capital in the hands of fewer and fewer hands.  Capital, no more so than in the absence of government regulation, equates to power.  And given our country’s peculiar history of slavery and settler colonialism, Christianity and Jim Crow, we are literally talking about the consolidation of White Christian Power. 

There are stories you can tell about competition and free will and trickle-down theory and any number of other fantasies about “opportunity” and the “land of dreams”, and I’ll grant you that while some of it is debatable, much of it is complete bunk from a scientific perspective.  Conservatism has always been about telling a story to justify why those on top should feel OK being on top because those on the bottom deserve being there.
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But we’re all seeing more clearly than ever how much this was just a part of the lie.  The only difference now is that the movement felt the need to come out and say it out loud.  They want their White Entertainment Television and they don’t want to be ashamed about it.
Oh, and don’t complain.  They might just send you away.

​Listening to a never-Trump podcast is always a gamble.  It’s mostly going after how awful Trump is, and maybe interesting enough insight into center-right concerns.  There seems to have been more self-interrogation earlier on in the MAGA takeover of the GOP, but lately it feels rare. 
 
On a recent episode discussing possible Kamala Harris VP picks, a brief list of policy preferences was presented.  Shapiro, the centrist Democratic Governor of PA, seems a favorite.  His antagonism of teachers’ unions, and support for school vouchers, fracking, and Israel loom large.
 
But taking apart any of those issues unpacks the fundamental racism of conservatism, and not only why it has given us MAGA, but why even the most moderate conservative positions cannot be extricated from racism.
 
None of this is going to be explicit racism.  But if when seeing inequality, pain and the mistreatment of people of color, one turns away and ignores it, or worse - creates fictions to explain it way, or make excuses for why immediate and intensive intervention is not only not require but too dangerous to try, one is preferencing the advancement of white supremacy.
 
Let’s look at these issues in order.  Antipathy for teachers’ unions and support for school vouchers are based on the same premise.  School reform is needed because schools are failing minorities.  Minorities are both poor because they don’t get quality educations because unions are protecting lousy teachers, and since they are poor, they can’t afford to live near good schools.  Vouchers can be used by the poor to go to non-union schools, get quality educations and rise out of poverty.  The “soft bigotry of low expectations” does the old right-wing triple-Lindsy of turning the critique around to say it is the left, actually, who are the racists because they don’t care about black poverty.
 
It’s a rickety story built on multiple failings both of logic and fact.  Poor kids start out without school-ready skills.  Their parents have little education themselves, and work for low pay that breaks families and introduces high levels of stress.  Housing markets force families into neighborhoods where generations of burden nurture the portion of people with anti-social behaviors.  Schools in these neighborhoods do their best, but making up for large scale social failures would require hard-to-imagine levels of academic intervention.  Yet the simplest intervention - in theory if not policy, would be not into schools but into a labor market that seems to require poverty in the first place.  For every poverty wage job, you definitionally get a poor household.  If all labor paid non-poverty wages, poverty would practically cease to exist. 
 
Yet for conservatives, supporting unions and fair wages is a non-starter.  From trickle-down, to growth theory, to (misapplied) ideas about operant conditioning and the reinforcing/punishing contingencies of “bettering oneself” through acquiring new skills and or hard work to achieve success, conservatism tells a story seemingly designed to avoid collectivism and the abstraction of capital from individual production to social production.  Deeper social theory here might productively lead to various strains of democratic monarchism (accumulation of wealth as a social good) and a conception of libertarian free will (pull yourself up by your bootstraps).  This story looks at persistent American racial inequality and is fine with a permanent underclass of low wage workers who historically have been disproportionately minority and there is no reason to think they won’t always be.
 
Fracking support seems a blend of pragmatic political maneuvering and avoidance of carbon regulation and government job creation.  The right has soft spot for blue collar workers who have become dependent on gas extraction. This is likely rooted in deeper racial affinities (fellow whites in the working class) and a story about the labor market providing good jobs without government involvement. 
 
No case needs to be made for how devastating climate change is, particularly for the global south and its largely non-white populations.  Fracking, responsible for a relatively small portion of total CO2 emissions, is a significant contributor nonetheless.  If people need jobs the government can create them in various ways, including incentivizing businesses to invest in these communities.
 
Yet this requires an acknowledgement both of the serious harm caused by climate change, as well as a belief that the government should fund interventions.  Yet a government of this sort would require increased taxes, and thus violate conservative notions about wealth and will such as mentioned above.  It would also require valuing the lives of poor Americans whites vastly more than the brown peoples who will bear the overwhelming brunt of climate death.
 
Regarding Israel, it will not be surprising to find a messy set of assumptions and values.  Israel was founded as a safe place for Jews.  The Greatest Generation fought against fascism for democracy, and Israel was a sort of prize at the end.  Arab neighbors are ungrateful at best and fascist or simply pathological at worst.  Israel must defend itself from the barbarians, even if it has to bend the rules to do so.
 
Where to begin?  Jews have come to be coded white, and among religious conservatives members in good standing of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  A bit of noble savage gilding takes place over the ones who started of good with the Old Testament but kind of lost their way when they failed to recognize Jesus as the Son of God.  This gets dark fast with the more fundamentalist types who have their own wicked fantasies about the final end for Jews.  But even leaving that aside, to see the settlements, the segregation, the vicious campaigns that target journalists and civilians, and to not feel horror, one can only but value the life of Jews and Arabs quite differently.
 
None of this is explicit, conscious, overt racism.  Yet the policy preferences and assumptions require a privileging of white people over people of color.  When you look at the toxic bigotry that has always lived in the corners of conservatism, seeing its bloom grow at varying rates of the decades, and that has now burst its seams to take control of the conservative American party, it is no surprise that what feeds the toxic element is not extrinsic to conservatism but rather intrinsic to its notions of government, capital, and apparently race.

The right wing frequently talks in end-times/flight 93 rhetoric about the left.  But what exactly has the progressive/lib/Dem left actually accomplished in the past 4 decades that has got them so riled up? The ACA? Gay marriage? Tax rates have hardly changed. Regulations are hardly different. Unions still weak.
 
Immigration policy about the same.  Sure, we've moved vaguely left in some cultural areas, but nothing groundbreaking.  Rather, the RW seems less to be reacting to changes than to its own overblown and paranoid hype funneled through extremist interpretations of a reality that hasn't changed much.
 
On race, sexuality, immigration, trade, taxes, regulation, etc. - hell, they have an extremist RW SCOTUS and just overturned Roe - the facts have changed less than the magnitude of their collective freakout.
 
Now, surely there is a lot to complain about in modern society.  But so much of it is as much if not more so a result of RW policy.  The 93 Manifesto decries "Ever-higher taxes and ever-deteriorating services and infrastructure. Inability to win wars against tribal, sub-Third-World foes."  Are taxes really higher?

 
Maybe low marginal rates have something to do with why our infrastructure is so shitty?  Forever wars?  Was it the left who was pushing for them?  The rich have gotten richer while everyone else's wages have stagnated.  Again, marginal rates?
 
 
They also complain about trade/globalization and decimation of manufacturing. I'm sorry, which ideology puts the free market/individual property rights above all else? If a corporation wants to close a factory to pay workers in Asia cents on the dollar, wouldn't it be Big Government to stop them?
 
And here we see the split between the Classical Liberal RW and the NatSoc RW.  But this split isn't responding to a left.  It's a social-right/economic-left (latter) vs. social-left/economic right (former).  The NSRW derives much of its fury from the CLRW who they decry as "Rhinos", and is overwhelming focused on social, not economic issues.  Immigration, DEI, Antifa, Abortion, LGBT - these are race/sex/religion issues.  (Immigration gets vaguely tied to "jobs", but due to sparse evidence of economic impact, it is mainly cast as a cultural/racial problem). 
 
So, with the "browning" and de-Christianizing of America, a story about white religious privilege (to be centered, to be in control) is unspooled.  MAGA evokes a bucolic mid-20th century in which white Christian men were in charge.  And yet economically, marginal tax rates were sky high compared to today, with vastly less wealth inequality.   It was, in a sense, a NatSoc dream.
 
Ironically, however, it was in this period that the roots of MAGA were at their most pure in the places like screeds of the John Birch Society and McCarthyism, even as White Supremacy was the law of the land, and the government was building interstates across the country.
 
And antisemitism.  There seems something about the stereotype of the Jew that illustrates perfectly the paradox of the NSRW mind.  On the one hand, it represents a threat to WASP dominance, but on the other an example of economic success.  It represents a cultural threat in the form of lost status, and an economic threat in the form of the exploitation that comes with the exponential power of capital accumulation.  The NSRW has always been about a marriage of cultural hegemony with government preferences.
 
Antisemitism provides a perfect foil for a conservative who wants his cake and to eat it too.  As Jews have historically been left-leaning (for obvious reasons), their stereotyping serves as a model that has been transposed onto "liberals" and the "Democrat" party.  George Soros, the "Globalists", "Cultural Marxists", and "Cosmopolitans" hardly pretend to hide this move.  These could just as easily be replaced with "left-coast elites", "blue states", and "fake Americans".
 
So, can they point to LW policy that is out of control and the cause for all of our problems?  Only so far as German Jews were blamed for the same.  Instead of real debates about economic policy, which are difficult, nuanced, and not always intuitive, a paranoid stereotype that scapegoats individuals is much easier.
 
In 1889, Ferdinand Kronawetter called antisemitism the socialism of idiots.  When the NSRW seems to be attacking the left, this is what is really going on.