krebscycle

I have argued, controversially to some on the left, that it is important to grapple with ideas on their own terms before merely analyzing their motivations. American conservatism is historically intertwined with white racism in such a way that nearly any conservative idea could plausibly be understood as an appeal to racism, but most of those ideas can be expressed and justified in non-racial terms, and deserve to be taken at face value. The trouble with Giuliani’s comments is that they lack the coherence necessary to be analyzed as an idea. Brush away the bilious rage he has emitted, and nothing solid remains behind. Jon Chait (my bold)

Giuliani went too far for Chait, but he still claims “most of [conservative] ideas can be expressed and justified in non-racial terms, and deserve to be taken at face value”.
No. Most of the “ideas” behind Republican &Conservative political speech
are euphemisms for racism or excuses for it or, at best,  dishonest
justifications of privilege.  Take any central ideological plank of the
Republican/Conservative movement, examine it for moral or intellectual
consistency and the mask falls off. Consider, opposition to big Federal
government, a fundamental of conservative thinking since John Calhoun
denounced the “tyranny” of the central government.  And yet just a few
years later, Calhoun’s followers were demanding aggressive enforcement
of the Fugitive Slave act – an act that nullified the constitutions of
the Free States- and they chartered armed gangs to kidnap citizens of those
states without any judicial review.  Ronald Reagan massively expanded
the Federal Government and deficit while conservatives cheered his
attacks on big government. George W. Bush’s record, from Patriot Act, to
Privatized Medicare expansion, to military adventurism was Imperial while his
words extolled limited government. Congressman Tim Huelskamp who says
that his constituents don’t care if the government shuts down because they don’t get any benefits from it is an assiduous lobbyist for fat Ag-subsidies and keeping Fort Riley in Nebraska’s First District at the expense of New York’s taxpayers, to protect against the Cheyenne threat, no doubt.

At some point the fraudulence of the surface
meaning of this rhetoric should become unacceptable and one should try
to understand what it actually means. At some point “deserve to be taken
at face value” is no longer plausible as a broad minded commitment to
democratic debate and becomes complicity or intellectual failure.

 …

Lakoff’s exasperation with liberals. “They don’t understand their own moral system or the other guy’s, they don’t know what’s at stake, they
don’t know about framing, they don’t know about metaphors, they don’t
understand the extent to which emotion is rational, they don’t understand how vital emotion is, they try to hide their emotion. They do everything wrong because they’re miseducated. And they’re proud of that miseducation. Oxford philosophy reigns supreme, right? Oxford philosophy is killing the world.” – RawStory.