"The Right of the 1980s was not obsessed with bigotry. What did happen, however, is that the Christian fundamentalists abandoned the Democratic Party. Until the 80s the fundamentalists were Democrats, since Southern Democrats were the most consistently hatefully, bigoted politicians around. But when the national Democratic Party adopted the civil rights movement white fundamentalists abandoned their natural home for the GOP. Unfortunately they brought with them the stilted, bigoted views that they always held. They eventually, for the most part, came to accept black people as their legal equals but they still harbor a natural tendency to find scapegoats to hate. At the moment their favorite targets are gay people and immigrants. The reasons for the old libertarian-conservative alliance simply don’t hold true anymore. Sure, the Right is attempting to revive that alliance by inflating the “Islamofascist” threat. But the Right is always searching for bogeymen with which to terrify people into supporting them. Given that the political Left is the natural home of libertarians, given that the modern Left is today more libertarian than their fathers were, given that the threat of authoritarian communism is gone, given that the Right has adopted a policy of hateful theocracy, it makes senses that libertarians would return to their first political alliance: one with the Left."
Boogie men are Republicans specialty. So is the actor-as-politician who will fight all these boogie men.
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