When liberals call Republicans “deniers,” it typically has to do with climate change. New York’s Jonathan Chait alleges big-time GOP denial on a non-scientific matter. “Republican voting support is increasingly coterminous with white racial resentment even as conservatives firmly believe in their own racial innocence,” wrote Chait in a Tuesday post. “Conservatives deny the existence of racism in the Republican Party as a matter of doctrinal sanctity, just as Soviet authorities had to officially deny the existence of poverty in the USSR.”
Chait elaborated, “Conservatives have built an alternative history in which racism, rather than migrating to the Republican Party as white Southerners revolted against the Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights, remained in the Democratic Party all along. Racism, they insist, is a practice of the race-conscious left, not the right…Republicans constantly liken President Obama and his policies to segregationists or to slavery, and cast themselves as the heirs to the civil-rights movement.”
While Chait has no use for the economic and fiscal proposals advanced by Paul Ryan and other House Republicans, he acknowledged that their ideas “have no intellectual connection to racism.” Nonetheless, “the trouble for Republicans is that building a real-world constituency for these policies does rely on racism. Conservatives stopped the momentum of the New Deal in the mid-1960s only when they associated it with support for the black underclass. Republican politics has grown increasingly racialized over time, a trend that has dramatically accelerated during the Obama era.”
Chait noted that even though Ryan denounced Donald Trump’s attacks on Gonzalo Curiel, Ryan “will endorse [Trump] anyway because Trump will sign Ryan’s bills into law…Somehow, once again, Ryan’s agenda found itself in the anomalous position of depending on a racist in order to prevail.”
