New York magazine’s Frank Rich identifies Ben Carson as the third of the Republican party’s “Great Black Presidential Hopes,” but in a 4,300-word piece for the February 23 issue, Rich argued that Carson is more significant than Alan Keyes or Herman Cain because he’d be running “in the context of both restrictive voting laws and the retro civil-rights jurisprudence of the John Roberts” Supreme Court.
“Carson lends credence to the right’s continued effort to sanitize and rewrite America’s racial history to absolve the GOP of any responsibility for injustices then or now,” wrote Rich, who decried specifically his “willingness to serve as a front man for the GOP’s movement to strike at the heart of democracy, the right to vote.”
Rich declared that “this year and last in America were meant to be elevated by the anniversary celebrations of two great milestones of democratic progress, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Martin Luther King’s 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery. It has instead been one of the worst spells for racial conflict in recent memory…‘Give us the ballot,’ said King at Selma. It’s a remarkable historic development that a half-century later the party of Lincoln’s affirmative-action program would yield an African-American presidential hopeful who has enlisted in the effort to take it away.”
From Rich’s article (bolding added):
There have been three Great Black Presidential Hopes in the GOP’s entire history, Carson included…[Keyes and Cain] were praised to the skies by their Republican cheering section up until—and sometimes past—their inevitable implosions...
…Carson lends credence to the right’s continued effort to sanitize and rewrite America’s racial history to absolve the GOP of any responsibility for injustices then or now. In the context of both restrictive voting laws and the retro civil-rights jurisprudence of the John Roberts court, Carson’s contributions to this whitewashing effort matter more than Keyes’s or Cain’s…
…Keyes and [Allen] West, along with other black Republican politicians like the former Oklahoma congressman J. C. Watts, have routinely likened Democratic social programs to a “plantation” and “slavery.” When Social Security, Medicaid, and food stamps are repeatedly demonized with this language, particularly by prominent African-Americans, the institution of slavery, the gravest and most lasting stain on America’s DNA, is defined down to the far lesser crime of governmental paternalism. And it’s a political twofer besides: Branding the recipients of such programs as “slaves” feeds the resentments of those working-class white voters who believe that poor people of color are the primary beneficiaries of taxpayer largesse.
Carson has taken such linguistic sleight-of-hand to a new low by claiming that Obamacare is “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.” The equating of government-run health care, however much one abhors it, to an institution that killed, raped, tortured, and incarcerated its human victims, is so morally repugnant that it amounts to a form of Holocaust denial. And Carson, as it happens, has a comparable take on the actual Holocaust, since he routinely complains that America is “very much like Nazi Germany”…
More troubling still is Carson’s explicit support for the GOP’s voter-suppression strategy, by which the party hopes to help counter its continuing deficit of Hispanic, black, and young voters in 2016…
…National Review, breaking with the conservative pack, has drilled into Carson’s ten years as a pitchman for Mannatech, a legally challenged company whose medical “supplements” have been allegedly marketed as ameliorating everything from ADD to ALS to AIDS. But the bigger scandal is Carson’s willingness to serve as a front man for the GOP’s movement to strike at the heart of democracy, the right to vote. It’s hard to believe now that as recently as 2006, the Senate voted 98-0 to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act that the Roberts court would tear asunder seven years later.
This year and last in America were meant to be elevated by the anniversary celebrations of two great milestones of democratic progress, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Martin Luther King’s 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery. It has instead been one of the worst spells for racial conflict in recent memory, more in keeping with the centennial of Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith’s 1915 silent-film epic sanctifying the Ku Klux Klan and vilifying the freed slaves of the Reconstruction era…“Give us the ballot,” said King at Selma. It’s a remarkable historic development that a half-century later the party of Lincoln’s affirmative-action program would yield an African-American presidential hopeful who has enlisted in the effort to take it away.
