Those racist Republicans

Most Democrats apparently believe most Americans are racists.

That is the conclusion that flows from a November 3rd Rasmussen poll, wherein 55 percent of Democrats agreed that opposition to Barack Obama’s policies has been motivated primarily by racism. And since Rasmussen and other polls tell us that a majority of Americans disapprove of Obama’s performance as president, simple math suggests that lots of Democrats have a pretty dim view of their fellow citizens.

Of course, Democrats would respond that it isn’t ordinary Americans that are the problem but Republicans who seek to tap racist currents in American culture in order to destroy our first black president.

There is, however, a rather obvious problem with the “conservative/ Republican=racist” charge (apart from the ease with which it can be flung and the degree to which it is immune to falsification)—the Republican embrace of black conservatives.

Virtually every conservative I know would list black columnists like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams among their favorites and most would likely consider Clarence Thomas to be their favorite jurist (or at least second to Antonin Scalia). Many conservatives would have also welcomed Colin Powell as the Republican nominee for president not too many years ago and would be even more enthusiastic about Condi Rice two years hence.

Republican Tim Scott just became the first black senator elected from the South since Reconstruction, with overwhelming support from white conservatives in South Carolina. And Mia Love just became the first black female Republican in Congress because of white conservative voters in even whiter and more conservative Utah. If prominent black neurosurgeon and author Ben Carson decides to run for president in 2016, that decision will likely be met with overwhelming approval by the Republican rank and file.

So why would presumably racist Republicans read, admire, and vote for black columnists, judges, and political candidates? Is it that their intrinsic racism is somehow suppressed in those cases but given free rein when it comes to Barack Obama? Going further, why are pundits like Sowell and Williams among Obama’s fiercest critics, despite their shared race? Are they just racists of a different sort, perhaps even “Uncle Toms” who slavishly carry out orders from the Koch brothers out of some craven form of racial self-hatred?

It gets even trickier when you figure in that most white liberals undoubtedly voted a few weeks back against Scott and Love. Shouldn’t that constitute, using leftist logic, prima facie evidence of precisely the kind of racism that liberals claim to see in conservatives?

In the final analysis, how about another possibility that might better conform to the problem-solving principle of William of Occam, however uncongenial to the racially obsessed leftist mind—that conservatives approve or disapprove of political figures not because of the color of their skin but because they agree or disagree with their political views? And conservatives will logically support a black (or white) president because he is conservative and oppose a black (or white) president because he is liberal?

Indeed, we might even trot out the possibility that conservatives who hold to the ideal of a color-blind society might be more likely than liberals to disregard skin color when assessing political candidates, assuming that those candidates have the “right” ( i.e., conservative) views. There is, after all, no logical difference between liberals who vote against black candidates because they are conservative and conservatives who vote against black candidates because they are liberal. But in the weird world of liberal racial logic, the former is part of the long-standing struggle against white racism, the latter taken as firm evidence thereof, even if it consists of cases where whites enthusiastically voted for blacks. Heads I win, tails you lose.

So what it comes down to, then, is nothing more than ideology, more precisely, efforts on the part of liberals to use the race card to discredit conservatism as an ideology.

When you begin with the assumption that conservatives are fundamentally evil, it is easy to connect the next liberal dot, which is that they must also be racist. Whether liberals truly believe this or not is ultimately beside the point, because the point is to make conservatism itself anathema. Support things liberals oppose, such as limited government, fiscal responsibility, and market economics, and you are, by definition, a racist (and probably a sexist and homophobe as well).

Liberals use the race card so often because it is cost-free (except for diminishing the significance of cases of genuine racism) and because conservatives have no way to actually disprove such charges. And besides, since there can be no rational basis for opposing the wonder that is Barack, what else but racism can explain opposition?

The race card is crude but effective—since the only white people who aren’t racist are white liberals, the only way to protect oneself against the charge of racism is to become a liberal, too.

And then there are those additional benefits: You can dispense with logic and facts because, as a liberal, you are certified to use the race card against anyone who is using facts and logic to make you look silly.