Roger Milliken and The GOP Civil War

By Hunter Wallace

Read the whole article:

“The speaker of the House was singing last Friday. A reporter had just prodded John Boehner, a man never shy about showing his emotions, to reveal how he really felt walking away from 24 years in Congress and the highest-ranking Republican post in government, amid the fracturing of his party. He responded with a Disney tune: “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah,” he warbled, his gaze threatening to dissolve into tears. “Zip-a-dee-ay.” …

This is one of the best articles I have read in a while. It explains a lot about the rise of the Republican Party in the Sunbelt South. I first heard about Roger Milliken when I read Pat Buchanan’s book on trade policy, The Great Betrayal, while I was in college. This article provides a lot of the backstory to Milliken’s relationship with Buchanan in the 1990s and through him the popularity of protectionism on the Alt Right.

Note: Trump’s position on taxes – a giveaway to the “eastern Republicans” – is a throwback to the Reagan era. Perhaps it could be jettisoned somewhere down the line?

About Hunter Wallace 12378 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

6 Comments

  1. Boehner left because he’s already 65 and wants to run through the revolving door and make those millions while he has some good years left. It really had nothing to do with “GOP civil war,” “tea party crazies,” etc.

    I’m also not really that impressed or excessively interested in the Republican Party civil war. It’s basically a two sided fight between mendacious crony corporatists on one side and lamestream conservative ideological purists on the other side, the former just wants to bilk off of graft and corruption, the other hasn’t realized that the 1980s are over and are desperately trying to make an ideology that was established to and did indeed solve 1980’s problems relevant in a world where lamestream conservatism’s success made itself obsolete and is forcing its adherents to confront the law of diminishing marginal returns.

    Nationalism is the answer.

  2. Roger did nobody any favors that didn’t benefit himself and nobody else. Praised by the SC State Newspaper as true god, but the real truth? He was JP Dithers in drag.

    Roger deliberately shut down the Darlington, SC plant because a union got voted in, and he fought it tooth and nail all the way to the SCOTUS, where his scam of “plant was losing money” was exposed as a cheap attack on the textile union and nothing else.

    I spoke with someone who’d dealt with that ogre: “If he was alive, he’d pack up all the jobs to China, and why? Profits! It was all he gave a goddamn about!” Not the working man or woman no, but to die comfy, be praised by many cuckservatives as a “business genius”, but the real truth be damned…he was an asshole, plain and simple, and any of the politics he got involved in? All to line his pockets, plain and simple.

    I so hope he’s enjoying his little seat along the rive Styx, with Nixon and others at his side. He deserved nothing less.

  3. I grew up in Spartanburg. Roger Milliken exuded a psychic stench of brimstone that permeated everything in that city. I think he drove around town drunk as a skunk just so he could make police officers kiss his ring. He was the most evil man to disgrace South Carolina since Sherman left.

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