I yield to no one in my disgust with the contemporary liberal style of debate and even discussion — regarding conservatives as either stupid or evil, or both, and even un-American. Just last night, for example, President Obama accused Republicans of threatening the “very core of what this country stands for.”
It is now commonplace, moreover, for his enablers and defenders to label just about any criticism of the president or his policies as racist. On Meet The Press, for example, David Gregory recently accused Newt Gingrich of racism based on his “language a lot of people think could be coded racially-tinged language, calling the president, the first black president, a food stamp president.” (Gingrich’s initially incredulous response: “Oh, come on, David.”)
Joan Walsh of Salon says the same thing about Rick Santorum, and Chris Mathews, his leg presumably still tingling, agrees.
“They stopped talking in this dog whistle like the white racists were going to hear it because everybody hears you now,” Matthews said. “They know what the whistle sounds like. Is Newt just out-of-date or is he deliberately using this dog whistle in a way he thinks he knows exactly what he’s doing. He doesn’t care what we think?”
….
“[I] haven’t heard food stamps discussed since the last racist guy tried to play the card,” Matthews said. “I mean, I can’t remember the last time it was talked about. [It has] a particular tinge to it.”
These cries that conservative criticism of just about anything the Democrats do is racist have increased so dramatically of late that it is tempting to attribute them, oddly, to the election of our first black president. Since race trumps everything in the liberal mind, criticism of a black president must be based on the fact that he’s black. In a superb article that is now over a decade old, however, Brian Anderson, provides chapter and verse of why we should resist the temptation. Liberals, it turns out, have been calling conservatism inherently racist for years.
An excerpt:
Not a week goes by without a prominent liberal stooping to this tactic. “[Liberals’] efforts to . . . stereotype their adversaries as racists have become so routine as to seem unremarkable,” laments The National Journal’s Stuart Taylor, Jr. Out of hundreds of examples, a few drawn from the last half decade will have to suffice. President Clinton compared the promoters of the California Civil Rights Initiative—the ultimately successful 1996 ballot measure banning discrimination on the basis of race or sex in state programs—with segregationists. Christopher Edley, a Harvard law professor who served as President Clinton’s key advisor on race, referred to Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom’s measured 1997 bookAmerica in Black and White as a “crime against humanity” for its anti-preferences stance. The late columnist Carl Rowen accused conservative opponents of affirmative action of “apoplectic spasms of bigotry”—as if Bill Bennett and Bull Connor were interchangeable. “Conservative legal groups,” asserted Atlanta’s black mayor Bill Campbell a few years back, are “a homogenized version of the Klan. . . . They may have traded in their sheets for suits, but it’s the same old racism.”
Today’s liberal left discovers racism not just behind opposition to racial preferences but behind most conservative ideas and policy recommendations. When the Newt Gingrich-led Republicans wanted to cut taxes and pursue welfare reform in the mid-nineties, the New York Times excoriated Gingrich for his “race-based, anger-charged politics” and compared him to southern segregationist George Wallace. Harlem’s Democratic congressman Charles Rangel attacked Republican tax cuts as pure race hatred. “It’s not ‘spic’ or ‘nigger’ anymore,” Rangel growled. “They say, ‘Let’s cut taxes.’ ” More recently, speaking on ABC’s This Week, feminist and high-paid Gore consultant Naomi Wolf casually accused George W. Bush’s advisors … of being “racist.” Wolf’s evidence? The truthful observation that some members of the underclass, because of their dysfunctional worldview, ignore the economic opportunities blossoming all around them.
By 2001, when Anderson wrote, it had already
become a habit of left-liberal political argument to use such invective to dismiss conservative beliefs as if they don’t deserve an argument and to redefine mainstream conservative arguments as extremism and bigotry. Close-minded and uncivil, this tendency betrays what’s liberal in liberalism.
Thus Obama and his acolytes did not invent this style of argument, but they have taken it to new depths.
