Modern conservative backlash stems from threatened groups fearing dispossession, not policy disagreement

Evidence

Writing in the 1980s and ’90s, Samuel Francis—a polemicist who would eventually migrate to the very far right of American conservatism—identified this same rejection of democratic processes in the context of David Duke’s campaign for governor of Louisiana: “Reagan conservatism, in its innermost meaning, had little to do with supply-side economics and spreading democracy. It had to do with the awakening of a people who face political, cultural and economic dispossession, who are slowly beginning to glimpse the fact of dispossession and what dispossession will mean for them and their descendants, and who also are starting to think about reversing the processes and powers responsible for their dispossession.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 648

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s core reframing claim about how whites’ ideology of reaction traces to slavery-era frameworks; parallels the book’s treatment of ‘deviation vs design’ origin stories. — connects to: Conservative voices dominate public-spirited rhetoric in America — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”: The work of avoiding…, 165
• QUESTION: How does this quote bear on the Revolutionary-War-cause dispute the reader is tracking — is reactionary ideology itself rooted in the slavery system rather than genuine constitutionalism?