@hightor,
Goddamn that is a brave piece of writing. A couple of months ago, as part of an interview for recently diagnosed sleep apnea, the doctor asked, "Do you ever get depressed?" I responded, "Are you kidding? Trump is the President". The doctor nodded and inquired no further.
Quote:The nemeses of the Trumpist movement are liberals — in both the classical and American sense of the world — not America’s traditional geopolitical foes.
Yes. For some significant portion of the right, liberalism has long been conceived as a fundamental enemy of America. John Birch/libertarians and the religious right held this as central. Both of those cultural elements gained a big foothold in the Reagan period but Russia/communism still was the Big Bad Thing.
A major shift and expansion for anti-liberalism came with the fall of the Soviet Union/communism and the loss of that hugely important symbolic figure/entity that had anchored one side of their Manichean framing of the world. And right at this point, in 2000, we saw Pat Buchanan's campaign placing liberalism as THE force working purposefully towards the destruction of America. The rise of talk radio and then FOX and other right wing media only magnified this worldview out into the parts of American culture that were poorly equipped to evaluate it.
And if you read Bill Barr's speech at Notre Dame, you'll find this conceptual framing - liberalism as manifest evil - made explicit.
