Elites swimming in the swamp: whose racism is it anyway?

Elites swimming in the swamp

by digby

I have taken a fair amount of grief over the years from fellow liberals for saying that racism is still an animating feature of conservatism. I got a lot of blowback back in 2005 for my writing on Katrina in which I analyzed the delayed response through the prism of white fear of the black mob and the history of slave revolts and then more recently in the virulent racist undercurrents in the Tea Party movement. It has been very unpopular among a certain set of liberals to submit that despite the huge improvements in race relations over the past couple of generations, wiping out this primal characteristic of American culture was still a work in progress.

I don’t know how most liberals feel about that today — I suspect they are less sanguine than they sued to be — but after perusing a dozen or more mainstream news sites researching the Trayvon Martin case, it’s clear from the comments that some conservatives are very angry. I don’t know how many people these commenters represent — I assume it’s a small minority. But the level of vitriol and paranoia that comes up over and over again is shocking. Keep in mind, I’m not talking about right wing fever swamps (which are too toxic to even read at the moment) but mainstream news sites.

It’s tempting to just throw up your hands and say that the “young people” are color blind so there’s no need to address this. However, it’s quite clear that many of the racist comments I’ve been reading are coming from young people as well as old. I’m sure that less and less racism is being passed down with each generation, but it’s obvious that some of it is. And the conservative movement is in the midst of creating a new paranoid delusion about reverse racism that’s quite pernicious — and dangerous. There’s good reason to think that it could catch on with young conservatives.

So, for the sake of young African Americans, it’s necessary to keep working at this. But what’s to be done? I keep coming back to this piece by conservative Josh Barro from last month in which he addressed the fatuous complaint from high levels of the conservative movement about President Obama’s comments on the Trayvon case:

Conservatives, almost universally, feel like they get a bad rap on race. They catch heat when they point out improvements over the last several decades in race relations and in the material well being of minorities in America, even though those phenomena are real. They catch heat when they contend that government programs intended to help the poor have led to problems with dependency in minority communities, even though those critiques are sometimes correct. They catch heat when they criticize Affirmative Action, even when in some cases (as at the University of California) Affirmative Action was clearly disserving minority communities.

Why do conservatives catch such heat? It’s probably because there is still so much racism on the Right to go alongside valid arguments on issues relating to race and ethnicity. Conservatives so often get unfairly pounded on race because, so often, conservatives get fairly pounded on race.

And this is the Right’s own fault, because conservatives are not serious about draining the swamp.

In recent months, both Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have gotten questions at public events that referred to President Obama being a Muslim. Neither candidate corrected the questioner. Santorum later told a reporter that’s “not his job.” PPP polls in Mississippi and Alabama have found that about half of Republican voters believe Obama is a Muslim, and others aren’t sure.

For years, Republicans have done a dance with the Birthers in the Republican base, trying to avoid associating themselves with the Birther position without alienating activists who believe the President was born abroad. Donald Trump has worked to keep Birtherism alive and in the news, and in January, Mitt Romney went to appeared in Las Vegas to accept his endorsement on live television. Republican rejections of Birtherism tend to focus on the issue being “a distraction,” as RNC Chairman Reince Preibus puts it, rather than pointedly noting that it is a nutty, racist conspiracy theory.

There has been a clear strategic calculation here among Republican elites. Better to leverage or at least accept the racism of much of the Republican base than try to clean it up.

The problem is that elite conservatism is not just accepting it — they are exploiting it. And it’s because of that that it’s awfully hard to take their allegedly legitimate contributions to the dialog regarding “dependency” or affirmative action as anything more than extensions of their racist exploitation.

The onus is on the conservative movement to drain their toxic swamp before they can be taken seriously on this issue. They have no credibility until they do it. Unless, of course, they are actually racist themselves, in which case they’re no different from those anonymous commenters.

Update: As I was putting this together I noticed that Barro himself has dealt with these commenters in a more recent column. I agree that they are probably a small minority. But it pays to keep in mind that they are still members of the privileged white majority, too many of whom are more than willing to let them have a major role in one of the two American political parties.