Nothing left but the dog whistle: Trump, “real America” and the death of the conservative movement
by Heather Digby Parton at Salon
http://www.salon.com/2016/09/23/nothing-left-but-the-dog-whistle-trump-real-america-and-the-death-of-the-conservative-movement/
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What conservatives found out was that all those years of carefully and patiently educating their voters in the nuances of small government, traditional values and strong national defense, to the point where they could elicit ecstatic cheers by merely uttering the words “tort reform” or “eminent domain” turned out to be for naught. The voters really only heard the dog-whistles.
This has been a rude awakening for conservative intellectuals who’ve spent their lives developing their elaborate ideological framework only to find their millions of supposed adherents never really cared about it. Zach Beauchamp at Vox interviewed one such leading intellectual, a professor of political theory at George Washington University named Samuel Goldman, about the state of the movement in the age of Trump. Goldman admits that the conservative movement is “doomed,” or at least it is no longer viable as a majority, and rightly attributes the problem to the fact that conservatives no longer attract anyone but white people:
The answer has to do with the adoption of a fairly exclusive vision of American nationalism — which sees America not only as a predominantly white country but also as a white Christian country and also as a white Christian provincial country. This is a conception of America that finds its home outside the cities, exurbs and rural areas, in what Sarah Palin called the real America.
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