ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I am interested in an historical question: Is Trump a logical outgrowth of conservative doctrine and rhetoric about race? To answer it, I read and parsed every article of every issue of National Review on the subject of race between November 19, 1955, its first issue, and December 31, 1968, just after the tumult of election of Richard Nixon and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. I adopted a broad spectrum of racial rhetoric. At one pole were arguments that racism violated the basic humanity and natural equality of all people. At the other pole were race-conscious, race-explicit, tribal claims about the biological essences and intellectual and physical capabilities of different races. Much of National Review’s race coverage fell in the middle of this scale where various kinds of coded, camouflaged, and otherwise indirect claims about race exist. This chapter analyzes three such middling arguments: spin, equivalency, and redefinition.
