I may be mistaken, but once I saw Obama win his 2nd term, I started to sense a backlash. It was a dividing line, although it didn’t become really clear until the following election.
Its like a certain proportion of the country (about a third) decided “That’s enough, we have to stop this.”

Trump didn’t bring these people out. They put him in office. All of his other issues and campaign promises were secondary. All that really mattered was taking the country back to its segregated past, and to stop those people (the LIBS) who were moving it forward.

Yeah. I know. They’ll claim race had nothing to do with it. Bullshit. Maybe race didn’t have everything to do with it, but it had mostly to do with it.
Like I said. Its where all the circles in the Venn diagram intersect.

I’ve been aware of the world around me for a long time now, and I have knowledge of things that happened long before I was born that affect us today. Young folks are perfectly capable of understanding what is happening to them now, but us old folks see how it fits in to the overall flow of the time line. At a certain age, you start seeing the patterns.

But over the next eight years I saw the forces of Trumpism on the ascendant, even before there was a Trump. By the time he was out of office the country was divided. We were divided on a lot of issues; political, cultural, social, economic, religious, but the place “where all the circles in the Venn diagram intersected” was always race.

Next thing you know, he was ostracized. Stopped getting invited to parties. Phone calls not returned. It was sad. Eventually it got to him and he voted for Trump. Because he had to.

These hidden racists can vote for a black man, they can marry someone of another race, they can even adopt children of a different race, but that bias is always there. And whenever they meet someone of that race who is bad, or disappointing, or an enemy, there is the moment of “Aha, I knew it all along!”

Racism is everywhere, its a human condition. Blacks can be racists, Liberals can be racist, some people even harbor an unconscious racism against their own race! But its there, to some degree or another, in most, if not all, of us.

I know this, but I can’t explain it to anyone who doesn’t know this, so I normally don’t even try. But I do know this, American Conservatism is racist. Yes, I know that there are black Conservatives, I know that there are racially progressive Conservatives. I know that there are Conservatives who are sincerely and genuinely outraged by people calling them racists.

But if you study Conservatives intensely, if you look closely, no matter what issue or policy you pick as an identifier, the place where all the circles in the Venn diagram intersect is always race.

How can I justify this conclusion? I can’t, not logically, so I don’t even try. But I was born and raised in the South, and I’ve lived all my life there. I am a ‘person of color’ myself. I am bicultural and bilingual and I have faced these issues all my life. So I know this.

I liked Obama too. But not because he was black. I liked him because he acted white. He was smart, articulate, intelligent, educated…..’cool’. He came across like he was white. His being “a brown-eyed-handsome man” was just the way I congratulated myself for being so un-racist.

So I know this. Trust me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP-iYrOr4Ok

https://twitter.com/TheGoodLiars/status/1531019935308304386

Oops, RL, I didn’t see our earlier post.