b*****d
发帖数: 61690 | 1 While the Republican presidential frontrunner’s support appears as solid
and stable as any celebrity’s, it would be a mistake for political
observers to claim that Donald Trump is infallible merely because his floor
in the polls won’t budge. If it weren’t clear at the time that the reality
television star’s refusal to clearly and unequivocally decline the support
of the KKK, David Duke, and other white nationalist organizations was an
error, it should be today. Save for the famous immigration hawk Alabama
Senator Jeff Sessions, the flood of endorsements you might expect the GOP’s
delegate leader to receive after a series of Super Tuesday victories has
not materialized. What’s more, compelled by conscience and a sense of
responsibility, the last Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney,
delivered a scathing, itemized indictment against Trump on Thursday and
urged every Republican to back the remaining non-Trump candidates in the
race.
It is, however, unlikely that core Trump backers will be moved to rethink
their support for the candidate merely because he has been dubbed, at the
very least, accommodating toward white supremacists. It would be easy to
dismiss this phenomenon as a facet of the cult-like adoration Trump
supporters display for their man, but that is unduly charitable toward the
left, which has abused and diluted the meaning of the word “racism.” Many
conservatives believe that the charge of racism has lost all meaning. And
they have a point.
For the GOP, campaigning against the man who might potentially become the
first black president was an impossibly fraught task, and we’re not talking
about the crank notion of “birtherism” that overtook the fever swamps.
Republicans could not campaign against Barack Obama’s lack of executive
experience in 2008 without that line of attack being dubbed racially suspect
. When John McCain criticized the Illinois senator for his association with
slumlord, convict, and Obama facilitator Antoin “Tony” Rezko, he was
accused of base racial agitation and waging a campaign of guilt by
association-style McCarthyism. The same was said for anyone who dared note
that the president launched his political career in the living room of a
convicted anti-American, far-left terrorist, Bill Ayers. Ditto the Reverend
Jeremiah Wright, whose hateful, un-American sermons were so damaging to the
campaign that the Illinois senator was compelled to deliver a grandiloquent
speech on race in America in which he framed his critics as insufficiently
educated on the subject of ethnicity.
So eager was the press to dub any and all opposition to Obama racist in 2008
that overzealous crowd reactions to McCain’s swipes at his opponent became
suitable evidence of an ugly phenomenon on the right. “McCain: Obama not
an Arab, crowd boos,” a Politico headline blared in October. From then on,
reportage on the conspicuous booing of conservative crowds proliferated. “
Obama can hardly be held accountable for Ayers’s behavior 40 years ago, but
at least McCain and Palin can try to take some responsibility for the
behavior of their own supporters in 2008,” the New York Times columnist
Frank Rich wrote without a discernable hint of irony. So petrified were
Obama skeptics that, even when they’d preface such criticism with “I don’
t want to sound racist, and I’m not racist,” it was dubbed by the left an
admission of their racism.
The efforts of Obama allies to tar Mitt Romney and his supporters as
racially suspect made the 2008 campaign look tame by comparison. Hardly a
day passed when the vilest slurs and most thoughtless innuendo were not
deployed against Romney for having the gall to run for president against
Barack Obama. That’s not an exaggeration, either. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews
asserted that he thought it was “arrogant” and showed a “certain kind of
disdain” when Romney decided to run against a sitting African-American
president. “I don’t want to get into his head on this – I don’t like the
look of it,” the MSNBC host declared.
For Obama backers, identifying racist “dog whistles” became a favored
pastime in 2012. Words like “angry,” “golf,” “skinny,” “Chicago,” “
food stamps,” “apartment,” and even “Constitution,” were ascribed some
darker meaning that supposedly only white nationalists could hear (although
liberal talk show hosts seemed rather attuned to them). Romney was allegedly
racist toward African-Americans, toward Palestinians, toward Hispanics, and
none of this let up even after he lost.
When, in the effort to address long-term urban poverty in 2014, then-Budget
Committee Chairman Paul Ryan was accused of racism for using another one of
those code words, “inner cities,” to describe one of the areas in America
plagued by generational poverty. “Let’s be clear, when Mr. Ryan says ‘
inner city,’ when he says ‘culture,’ these are simply code words for what
he really means: ‘black,’” insisted Representative Barbara Lee, along
with a host of finely tuned dog whistle decoders on the left. It is perhaps
unsurprising that Barack Obama did not meet with the same criticism for
making the same observation while using virtually the same language.
Even members of Barack Obama’s own administration have mobilized racial
anxiety against Republicans when it was politically convenient. When
complaining about having had to address a typically pugnacious House
committee session, former Attorney General Eric Holder told a gathering of
Al Sharpton’s National Action Network members (again, sans irony) that the
spectacle was “ugly,” and standard for a GOP that had treated him and the
president with unprecedented contempt. “What president has ever had to deal
with that kind of treatment?” he asked. In case this was too subtle an
accusation for anyone, Holder spelled it out. In an exit interview before he
resigned, the attorney general was asked if he believed Republican racism
was behind opposition to the Obama administration. “There have been times
when I thought that’s at least a piece of it,” Holder said.
When honorable and decent men like Senator John McCain and Governor Mitt
Romney, not to mention most of the conservative movement, are reflexively
dubbed racists simply for opposing Democratic policies, the result is a GOP
electorate that doesn’t listen to admonitions when the genuine article is
in their midst. Democrats will go about patting themselves on the back for
their successful psychological manipulation of the right to a point at which
the GOP appears set to nominate a toxic figure for the presidency. They
should perhaps postpone the celebrations. Anyone who wins the presidential
nomination of one of the two major parties in America stands an excellent
chance of winning the White House. While Trump would seem unlikely to become
commander-in-chief, any number of unforeseen black swan events along the
campaign trail could yield a victory for the celebrity candidate.
Today, they point and shout “racist” into the void, but Democrats only
have themselves to blame for the fact that so many on the right are no
longer listening. |
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