Thomas blamed progressivism for everything from the rise of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao to racial segregation and the eugenics movement that Hitler borrowed from America and Britain to excuse his Final Solution.
In fact, Thomas is following an old tradition that was explained a century ago when arch-conservative propagandist Joseph Goebbels famously said, “Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty.” It’s the foundation of the modern saying, “Every accusation is a confession.”
My father fancied himself a conservative back when I was a kid during the Eisenhower and Kennedy era, but in his mind that simply meant that one doesn’t radically or rapidly change society without first thinking through the consequences in detail, and then, when you do decide to make changes to the rules of society, you move forward in measured increments. Conservatively.
At least that’s how Dad explained it to me, and how both Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his then-VP Richard Nixon explained it in their own ways.
Eisenhower, writing to his brother in 1954, warned that any party that tried to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, or other social programs would “disappear,” noting that only “a tiny splinter group” believed such a rollback was even possible. Nixon, two decades later, was just as blunt about the need for pragmatic, incremental governance, famously observing in a 1971 message to Congress that “we are all Keynesians now.”
In other words, the conservatism of that era wasn’t about blowing up the New Deal with its programs of Social Security, the minimum wage, labor protections, funding scientific research and education, etc.; it was about tending it carefully, changing it cautiously, and conserving what worked.
Today’s modern conservative movement, though, isn’t conservative at all, and hasn’t been since the Reagan Revolution: it’s reactionary and, through the two Trump presidencies and the Project 2025 embrace of Orbánism and Putinism, has now become fully fascistic.
It all began in a big way when, in 1954, the Supreme Court reversed their 1898 Plessy v Ferguson “separate but equal” decision with Brown v Board of Education, mandating that Black children must participate in racially integrated classrooms.
Petrobillionaire Fred Koch, who’d made his initial fortune in the Soviet Union, was offended and threw major funding into the virulently anticommunist John Birch Society, which was running billboards across America calling for the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren over the Brown decision.
While that impeachment never happened, the movement grew (my dad introduced me to the JBS when I was 13, saying, “You should hear what the crazies are saying”) and soon JBS’ morbidly rich funders decided that paying taxes to fund programs that would benefit “poor people” (aka Black people) was also an abomination just as bad as white kids having to sit with Black kids in public school classrooms.
In 1980, Reagan rode that racist message (along with sabotaging Jimmy Carter by cutting a deal with the Ayatollah to hold the American hostages until after the election) to the White House with millions in dark money support from those same petrobillionaires.
Reagan’s first official campaign stop had been to speak at an all-white county fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the brutal murder of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, in 1964. The subject of his speech was “states’ rights,” which everybody knew was code for “let the Southern states continue their segregation programs.”
On the 1980 campaign trail, Reagan told the story of the “strapping young buck” in line at the supermarket upsetting all the hard-working white people when he whipped out his food stamps to pay for his “steak and beer”; it was the male counterpart to Reagan’s Black “welfare queen” myth. Cut off his food stamps, the logic went, and he’ll be forced to look for gainful employment…even if there were no jobs within miles and white employers wouldn’t then hire Black people.
But Reagan didn’t just talk about stopping affirmative action: he took steps to push America back to the white supremacist 1950s. As The Washington Post noted:
“In the 1980s, the Reagan administration began to roll back civil rights protections and legally designated targets for affirmative action hires, thus bringing the politics of reverse discrimination to the White House. Under the now familiar banner of ‘Let’s Make America Great Again,’ Reagan campaigned vigorously against affirmative action in 1980, promising voters he would overturn policies that mandated, in his view, ‘federal guidelines or quotas which require race, ethnicity, or sex . . . to be the principle factor in hiring or education.’”
Clarence Thomas, of course, worked for Reagan back then, doing everything he could to sabotage affirmative action programs. He began hanging out with billionaires in a classic example of, “I’ve got mine, screw you.”
Once the petrobillionaire’s agenda — gut social programs and regulations that protect working class people and children, all to pay for over $38 trillion in tax cuts for themselves — got rolling, other billionaires from other industries jumped on board, funding think tanks, publications, radio and TV stations and networks, universities, and a massive legal effort to pack the courts with Clarence Thomas-type judges and justices.
Because the New Deal — which they were explicitly trying to repeal, root and branch — was so popular, they had to lie to the American people with an intensity and ferocity that America hadn’t seen since the “Horse and Sparrow” days of the last Gilded Age:
— Tax cuts for billionaires would “trickle down” to workers.
— Unions hurt and rip off their members.
— Regulations stunt economic growth and thus kill jobs.
— Social Security is going broke.
— “Free Trade” will “lift all boats.”
— For-profit schools and prisons do a better job.
— America can’t afford a national healthcare system.
— Corporations are “persons” and should have rights under the Bill of Rights.
— Giving millions to a politician or president isn’t bribery; it’s “free speech.”
— When young people get free college, they don’t value it.
— More CO2 is good for plants and climate change is a hoax.
— Government isn’t the solution to our problems; it is the problem itself.
— Corporate monopolies “increase efficiency” and are thus a good thing.
Once the system got up and running, it began to run on autopilot, fueled into hyperdrive by Clarence Thomas’ deciding vote in Citizens United (at the same time he was taking big bucks from the same billionaires the decision freed to bribe judges and politicians). It was spread across America by Limbaugh and an Australian billionaire who made his initial fortune complaining about Black American GIs “raping” white Australian women when US troops were stationed there during WWII.
And now we have a low-IQ nepo-baby psychopath sitting in the White House because he promised a roomful of petrobillionaires and Elon Musk that he’d cut their taxes, kill off green programs, and let Musk dismantle any agency that was investigating him or his businesses. Trump’s so certain of his royal prerogatives that this past weekend he posted on his failing, Nazi-infested social media site a clip of Frank Sinatra singing My Way.
Like other conservative/fascist movements across history, from Mussolini to Stalin to Hitler to Putin to Orbán — all grounded in first defining an “other” who must be feared and stopped — today’s GOP has morphed into something that Eisenhower and even Nixon wouldn’t recognize.
And now he’s threatening to start World War III, all because neither he nor his nepo-baby son-in-law nor any of the 13 billionaires in his cabinet know the first thing about how to actually negotiate on the world stage.
Although Pope Leo XIV says his remarks weren’t specifically directed at Trump, his claim that the world is “being ravaged by a handful of tyrants” certainly hits the mark.
This is not conservatism, this new “one man above all” ideology that drives today’s GOP. It’s raw, naked evil. And it’s about damn time that Democrats and Americans of goodwill begin to call it out for what it is.
