Historical Illiteracy

One of the bloodsports on Twitter is watching Kevin Kruse dismantle Dinesh D'Souza.  D'Souza continues to make the ahistorical argument that because Democrats were the party of segregation and the white South, they are still the party of segregation and the white South.  Usually this argument ends some time around the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the early Sixties.  Similarly, we have E.J. Dionne fighting back against the idea that the GOP and Putin couldn't possibly be aligned, because Reagan won the Cold War all by himself, or some such twaddle.

D'Souza is simply a troll, but his argument seems to have some currency on the Right.  This completely ignores the nature of political parties in the New Deal Era (1933-1965).  They were broad based coalitions crossing ethnic, idelogical and racial lines. What happened when Truman embraced civil rights - however tepidly - was the fracturing of the party in 1948.  Kennedy lost electoral votes in the South because he was Catholic and percieved to be soft on segregation (which he was until King forced his hand).  After LBJ rewrote the Civil Rights legislation, the election of 1968 saw both the rise of George Wallace and the beginning of Nixon's Southern Strategy.  That strategy appealed to white Southerners on the basis of "law and order" which fundamentally meant keeping blacks in their place.  After 1968, the only Democrats to win the White House were a pair of Southern governors elected under unusual circumstances (Watergate/Ross Perot), because the South was largely lost to the Democratic party.

So D'Souza's argument is just fundamentally stupid and historically illiterate.

Similarly, the idea that Putin is somehow a Leftist because he is Russian is complete nonsense.  Putin is a revanchist nationalist who supports white supremacy throughout the US and Europe.  He hopes to create fissures in the West along the lines of bigotry towards minorities - Muslims in Europe and the US, African Americans in the US.  He's staunchly anti-LGBT and he reflects the fondness towards authoritarianism that has seemed to infect the American Right.

The GOP not only harkens back to an imagined past, their arguments are from that time as well.