Beware of any "conventional wisdom" that Glenn Youngkin is a harbinger of a kinder and gentler Republican Party than the Party of Trump

 

        Before the "conventional wisdom" solidifies into a trope that Glenn Youngkin is the future of the Republican Party because he is "conservative" without being Trumpy, let's remember the core of each man's campaign for their first political office.

        Trump launched his campaign by asserting the lie -- with all its racist overtones -- that Barack Obama was born in Kenya.  In so doing, he brought into the Republican mainstream the proposition that "real" Americans -- i.e., White Americans --  were under threat from a Black person in the Oval Office who was not a true American.  Trump kicked over the rocks which previously had covered up so much racism, based not just on hate, but also on fear of displacement.

        Youngkin based so much of his campaign on another lie, a lie which went directly to a racist appeal based on hatred and fear:  That "Critical Race Theory" was being taught in the public schools and that it endangered White children because it would make them feel bad and, inferentially, would embolden non-White children to hate White children. https://davidfishback.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-critical-race-theory-controversy.html It was a lie on both counts, and someone as educated and worldly as multi-millionaire former Carlyle Group CEO Youngkin had to know this.  But he was perfectly willing to demagogue the issue to achieve power.  

         So let us not forget that Glenn Youngkin as a politician is essentially a Donald Trump with better manners.  Playing on racial fears of White Americans has been a tactic -- often a successful tactic -- with a long and sordid history in the American story.  And it has always been a destructive tactic, which brought us to Civil War in the mid-1800s and, until the mid-1960s, wiped out most of what Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass hoped to achieve at the end of that war.  The Republican Party strategy now is to win and maintain power by destroying the Second Reconstruction begun with the mid-20th Century Civil Rights Movement.  

        Glenn Youngkin is not only part and parcel of that strategy, but is a dangerous practitioner of it.  And perhaps more dangerous than Trump, because he is not so transparent. 

        Do not be fooled by what may become a media trope of "moderation" in the coming weeks and months.