How Donald Trump Made Republicans Half-Aware of Racism
Buckley was a defender of white supremacyand segregation in the 1960s, and then a defender of apartheid in the 1980s. Buckley’s publisher, William Rusher, argued for the GOP to recast itself as an ideologically conservative party by bringing southern whites into the fold. Buckley helped turn a party that once had congenial relations with academic experts into a raging populist force. “I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Manhattan phone book,” he famously declared, “than the entire faculty of Harvard.”
.. If you comb through Buckley’s writings on race, the emphasis falls less on a principled defense of racial apartheid in the United States and South Africa (though he did offer that) than on resentment against its critics. Buckley was simply far less interested in racial oppression than in the hypocrisy, obnoxiousness, and potential overreach of its critics. That spirit defined racial conservatism then, and defines it today. To read the pages ofNational Review, or The Wall Street Journal editorial page, racism against nonwhites is a virtually nonexistent problem. Conservatives are instead fixated on the way the racial debate has been turned against conservatives or white people.
.. The Trump constituency factored into conservative calculations all along. Conservatives courted them, defended them, and understood all along that their votes would supply the margin needed to implement conservative ideas, even if many of those ideas (like supply-side economics and neoconservative foreign policy) had little natural appeal to those voters. They even understood, as Lowry very explicitly laid out, that those voters would doom the orthodox conservatives if they formed a splinter party. The one thing Buckley and his successors failed to imagine, though, is that those people would actually one day take over.
