Steven Jonas – The Repubs.’ New – Old – ‘New-Trumpian’ Base: The Religious Right, Part 1

Special to The Greanville Post |Commentary No. 72: “The Repubs.’ New – Old – ‘New-Trumpian’ Base: The Religious Right, Part 1”

 

Dateline: January 5, 2017

In the 1980 Repub. primaries, Ronald Reagan won a convincing victory over George H.W. Bush.  Reagan was considered a “new” Republican, in the Barry Goldwater mold, while George Herbert Walker Bush was considered an “old” Republican, in the Nixon mold, but with the latter’s many rough edges burnished away.   Bush was indeed an old Republican, but from a line of true right-wingers, very unlike Ike “Let’s Continue on with the New Deal but Just Modify it a Bit here and There” Eisenhower.  In fact, a G.H.W. Bush grandfather, George Herbert Walker, was a very early (1923) foreign contributor to Adolf Hitler and the German Nazi Party.  GHW’s father, Prescott Bush, was a banker for Nazi Germany, who continued doing business for them after Nazi Germany declared war on the United States following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  Indeed, Franklin Roosevelt, who of course knew the Bushes socially, had to call Prescott in February, 1942 and threaten him with arrest and imprisonment under the Trading with the Enemy Act if he did not stop doing so.

None of this information was ever made very public, however, and GHW Bush sailed along, both politically and in government, becoming CIA Director under President Gerald Ford, 1976-77.   Of course, among other things, this Texan was “Texan oil” while Reagan, the former “B movie” movie star and spokesman for Chesterfield cigarettes and General Electric, later Governor of California, was, in part, at least, backed by California oil (as well as a group of very wealthy, right-wing, California businessmen, brought together behind him by his second wife’s (Nancy) far right-wing physician father).  And in the primaries Reagan was moving steadily Right, never letting Bush outflank him, beginning what I have for some years now called the Rightward Imperative of the Republican Party.  It had started when Nixon developed what was called “The Southern Strategy” (politically taking over the South when the Democrats pushed through civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s) and the “War on Drugs,” both racist enterprises aimed at cornering the racist/white supremacist vote for the Repubs. (a strategy that has worked very effectively for them down to this very day). 

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