Scott Walker is a pastier Donald Trump: Wisconsin governor’s ethno-nationalism is just as egregious

[marmar]

(Salon) A few days ago, the Daily Beast published an article by self-styled Reasonable Conservative Matt K. Lewis on “cuckservative,” a relatively new term of abuse that has recently set off some intramural sniping within the conservative movement. As Lewis rightly noted, the term is tribalist and racist. It’s also misogynist, paternalistic and xenophobic — the nasty consequence of racial panic and toxic masculinity, but in word form.

It wasn’t Lewis’s willingness to criticize a bunch of white supremacists, however, that made his piece interesting. (His response, in truth, was an unsympathetic mix of whining and unearned chest-puffery.) What made the column noteworthy instead was the way Lewis tried to load such ethno-nationalist sentiments — or “this white nationalism business,” as he put it — entirely on the shoulders of the cuckservative-slinging Republicans’ favorite candidate. A fellow by the name of Donald Trump.

Lewis granted that “these people have always been around.” But before Trump, he wrote, they were “confined to the nether regions of the Internet.” White ethno-nationalists only became significant members of the conservative crusade because “Twitter allows them to spread their pernicious message, and Trump has given them a candidate to get behind.” But apparently it wasn’t until 2015 that the movement behind the Southern Strategy, Willie Horton and Obamaphones started flirting with racists.

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If connecting Trump and Walker strikes you as odd, you probably don’t know very much about Wisconsin’s governor, who is currently sporting an approval rating of 41 percent. Walker’s name is usually associated with anti-unionism, and few could argue that he hasn’t earned the reputation. But along with turning Wisconsin into a “right-to-work” state — just like he promised a billionaire donor in 2011 — what’s defined Walker’s time in Madison has been a divisive and racially charged approach that has rendered the state’s politics “toxic and ruptured.”

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If people drawn to rhetoric like this were marginal players in the pre-Trump conservative movement, as Lewis claims, then why is it that Walker’s staff, in their emails to one another, sound scarcely different? Via the TNR piece, here’s a summary of some of the worst moments:

One anonymous e-mail, forwarded by Walker’s then–chief of staff, went like this: “THE NIGHTMARE … ‘I can handle being a black, disabled, one armed, drug-addicted Jewish homosexual … but please, oh dear God, don’t make me a Democrat.’ ” Another compares welfare recipients to dogs: They are “mixed in color, unemployed, lazy, can’t speak English and have no frigging clue who the r (sic) Daddys (sic) are.” This message was forwarded around by Walker’s then–deputy chief of staff, who remarked that it was “hilarious” and “so true.”

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http://www.salon.com/2015/08/01/scott_walker_is_a_pastier_donald_trump_the_wisconsin_governors_ethno_nationalism_is_just_as_egregious/

[Gothmog]

1. Why vote for a pale imitation of Trump, when the GOP base can vote for Trump?

Why vote for Walker who is a pale imitation of trump when you can vote for the original trump