Ronald Reagan owns Cliven Bundy: He’s born of GOP racial and anti-government hostility I

[kpete]

Ronald Reagan owns Cliven Bundy: He’s born of GOP racial and anti-government hostility
It's no shock that conservative heroes always end up being racists. The Republican playbook made them that way
PAUL ROSENBERG

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Under Reagan, the Northern strategy became key, its targets known as “Reagan Democrats.” And Cliven Bundy was the perfect embodiment of everything this strategy was built around.

“I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me!” Reagan famously said. Of course Reagan’s story was a lie, as this 1948 radio campaign ad he cut clearly shows: It was Reagan himself who abandoned his roots — his Elizabeth Warren-style economic populism, his support for unions and a can-do New Deal government. But he always pretended that he hadn’t changed, the Democratic Party had. The implicit claim was that the party that once helped the white ethnic working class had villainously turned against them to help the lazy, shiftless blacks, instead. Hence Bundy’s sense of victimhood from big government and his racist resentment of blacks were, once again, two sides of the same coin — the lousy wooden nickel that Reagan cheerfully sold to millions of voters just like him back in the day.

Wooden nickel, meet bad penny. Sooner or later, the real racist always turns up.

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/25/ronald_reagan_owns_cliven_bundy_hes_born_of_gop_racial_and_anti_government_hostility/

[lostincalifornia]

1. Reagan collected all the benefits from the FAR legacy, and the union movement

And then promptly turned 180 degrees and did everything he could to take it away from everyone else