Morning in America (Redux)
Race wasn’t the crack in the foundation. It was the mortar that held it together.
The Unifier Was Race
There were swastikas in congressional offices this week. In leaked Young Republican group chats, leadership-level conversations poured out every racial slur in the English language, some even alluding to genocidal violence. These weren’t street-corner provocateurs. They were insiders in the party’s future apparatus.
We shouldn’t treat this as a fluke, a prank, or a single rotten branch. This is continuity. The same machinery of racial othering that steered the GOP after the civil rights era is now surfacing in raw, unfiltered form. What’s changed is not the logic.
It’s the permission structure.
I’ve long been sympathetic to the so-called sane center, to outlets that strive to preserve a sense of decency in a brutal era. But when they romanticize a pre-Trump GOP or refuse to reckon with its structural reliance on race, they become part of the cover-up. The reckoning they avoid is precisely the one that leads here.
The Present Isn’t a Rupture but a Reveal
The swastika on the Hill. The vile chat logs. Horrifying, yes, but also a mirror. They reflect how the GOP built its modern foundations out of reaction to the racial and cultural revolutions of the 1960s.
Take The Bulwark, for instance, a smart, well-resourced platform often critical of Trump’s excesses. Yet I’m frustrated by how often it frames moments like this as aberrations, rather than as outgrowths of a system that encoded racial messaging into its political DNA.
We don’t need more pearl-clutching about “how far the party has fallen.” We need media that traces the genealogy of this fall, one that follows the throughline from the polite racism of the suburbs to the open fascism of the group chat. “This is an outlier” has been the conservative dodge since the 1960s. Keep excusing the flood, and sooner or later, the levees burst.
Backlash Wasn’t a Reaction. It Was a Strategy.
The lens offered in Myth America, especially Eric Glickman’s essay White Backlash, is essential: what we call “reaction” is often preemptive, deliberate, and organized. Backlash isn’t chemistry, but choreography.
In 1966, CBS Reports claimed that “Black Power caused White Backlash.” History tells the opposite story. As early as 1963, before the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, Gallup found rising White discomfort with racial progress. Glickman reminds us: White Backlash predates Black Power. The phrasing was flipped to conceal agency, to make racism sound reactive rather than engineered.
When White moderates chastised civil rights activists for “going too far,” Martin Luther King Jr. replied with surgical clarity: “The civil rights movement should not be blamed for revealing this hatred, just as a physician is not blamed for using their skills to diagnose cancer in a patient.” The violence and fear were not spontaneous eruptions; they were built into the architecture.
This isn’t nostalgia for the 1960s, it’s recognition that what looked like chaos was actually design: a transfer of White resentment into policy and identity.
The Moderates’ Last Stand
The struggle inside the GOP wasn’t invisible. It was open, moral, and recorded in real time. As Claire Malone recounts in her FiveThirtyEight deep dive, Michigan governor George Romney, yes, Mitt’s father, was once the liberal conscience of the Republican Party. He called segregation a “moral cancer” and, in 1966, appeared on Time’s cover as the emblem of a “Republican Resurgence.”
But Romney’s refusal to court racists cost him. When he warned against the “Southern Strategy,” the deliberate plan to lure White Democrats enraged by civil-rights progress, party power brokers mocked him as naïve. Nixon, with the blessing of segregationist Strom Thurmond, crushed his presidential hopes in 1968. That was the fork in the road.
Malone calls it the moderates’ last stand. Romney warned that the party’s reliance on Southern racism was like “an abscess” that would keep reforming. He was right. Fifty years later, the infection broke the surface again, in tweets, in rallies, in encrypted slurs.
The GOP didn’t stumble into racial politics; it chose them. It debated them. And then it voted to institutionalize them. Every generation since Nixon, Reagan, and Trump has refined the grammar of that original choice.
Reagan Is a Straight Line to Trump
Reagan could have spoken about “states’ rights” anywhere. He chose Neshoba County, Mississippi, a short drive from where Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered for registering Black voters. Standing on that ground, he declared, “I believe in states’ rights.” It wasn’t defiance of desegregation; it was an invocation of racial code. That speech wasn’t an anomaly. It was a template. History remembers the tone, but forgets the venue.
The “welfare queen” myth did more than mock a caricature. It racialized poverty itself, turning economic policy into a moral trial of Black womanhood. It told White voters that compassion was being stolen, that virtue had a color, that cutting aid was not cruelty but common sense.
That language of criminality and moral decay flowed seamlessly into a new lexicon: “fraud,” “voter fraud,” “ballot integrity,” “law and order.” Different decades, same script.
Claire Malone’s investigation shows how the playbook solidified. In 1981, the National Ballot Security Task Force, funded by the Republican Party and staffed by armed officers, patrolled heavily Black and Hispanic precincts in New Jersey, intimidating voters and poll workers. A court later ruled the effort racially motivated and bound the RNC under a consent decree for decades.
Paul Weyrich, one of the conservative movement’s architects, said it out loud: “I don’t want everybody to vote.” He didn’t whisper it; he built a party around it. Today’s “election integrity” crusades are the grandchildren of that strategy.
Historian Julian Zelizer, in The Reagan Revolution, notes that Reagan’s presidency didn’t dismantle the welfare state. It just repackaged it. But the repackaging was done with racial seasoning, turning social programs into moral battlegrounds. The center-right, eager to hold onto nostalgia for “the Great Communicator,” still praises his tone and pragmatism while ignoring the racial dog whistles woven through both.
The Center’s Long Silence (or Worse: Evasion)
I understand the ache of once believing in Reagan’s optimism. I know the psychological vertigo of realizing that the golden era you were raised to admire was gilded with selective amnesia. But silence, especially from those who know better, becomes complicity when the behavior you refuse to name resurfaces in fluorescent chat boxes.
Outlets like The Bulwark can’t keep saying, “We reject Trump,” while dodging the racial logic that made Trump possible. At some point, not doing the damage control is itself the damage.
Trump is not the disease. He’s the symptom in human form, the culmination of decades of coded fear and careful exclusion. His rhetoric isn’t a break from Reagan’s “Morning in America”; it’s what that morning looks like when the sun burns off the fog.
If you believe in integrity, in civic solidarity, in a government that works for all, you must reckon with the roots before the fruit poisons the tree.
Flags don’t show swastikas in congressional offices without a system behind them. Group chats don’t leak genocidal fantasies by accident. These things exist because we allowed the logic that justified them to survive and to flourish.
Call It What It Is
Race was the mortar that held together the post–Great Society GOP. A tower built on resentment, balanced precariously atop the ruins of a more inclusive vision. It’s cracked, but still standing, propped up by denial, nostalgia, and media centrism too polite to name what everyone else can see.
It’s time to stop pretending the unifying force was faith, or patriotism, or fiscal discipline. The unifier was race.
And the tower will not fall until we say so out loud.
Afterword
History isn’t destiny, but it is design. And design can be rewritten. That’s the work now, not nostalgia for what never was, but courage to build what still could be.
If the old consensus was a mirage, then the new one must be made of mirrors clear enough to see ourselves in full light.
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Because the unifier doesn’t have to be fear of the other’s liberation, it could be the truth.
Excellent!
It’s a call for reformation, great read!