The history of the Republican Party is marked by vacillation between its founding principle of opportunity and its domination by the wealthy elite.
Roosevelt’s New Deal regulated business, protected social welfare and promoted national infrastructure on the principle that the role of government was not simply to protect the property of the wealthy, but rather was to promote equality of opportunity for all.
Few politicians did much to move the needle toward anything resembling gender equality, but it was President Nixon who first threw women under the political bus of Movement Conservatism.
By 1929, 5 percent of the population received one-third of the nation’s income. The structural weaknesses of this economy plunged the nation into the Great Depression.
Dog whistles about women who want handouts are simply an acceptable way to say that women are not worth as much as the men who must dominate the government. At the heart of Movement Conservatism is the conviction that America belongs to elite men alone.
Even after women got the vote in 1920, the idea that they stood for home and family helped to keep them from being seen as politically dangerous in the way that working men and male minorities were.
By the 1870s, ex-Confederates had taken their support for Western individualism a step further. They insisted the federal government was actively persecuting Western individuals.
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