ELIZABETH DREW, NY REVIEW OF BOOKS
The reality is that the Republican Party has stoked and relied on racial prejudice for a long time and now it’s stuck with its racist history. It’s inarguable that the Republicans treated the nation’s first black president as they would not have a white man. How was it conceivable that a Republican congressman shouted, “You lie!” at President Obama as he delivered his first State of the Union address, in 2009? Though there was a sign of the Republicans’ flirting with racism when Barry Goldwater ran in 1964—he voted against the pending civil rights bill—it was Richard Nixon in 1968 who enshrined it in a doctrine, the “Southern Strategy,” which he aimed at blue-collar workers as well as Southern whites. Nixon dubbed these people “the silent majority,” including in particular people who weren’t demonstrating against the Vietnam War. But the term came to stand for a more amorphous collection of people described as “going about their own business” and not demanding government handouts—unlike the you-know-who’s.
The silent majority wasn’t just anti-black, it was one side in a class war against people of more privilege, mainly kids of college age and their weakling, leftist professors—as Nixon saw it. (As it happens, wages were stagnating then, as they are now.) This came to a head in 1970, during a hard-fought midterm election in which, like now, control of the Senate was at stake. In May, construction workers were encouraged by the Nixon White House to beat up anti-war demonstrators in lower Manhattan. Afterward, Nixon was presented with a hard hat, symbol of the construction workers, by the union president, Peter Brennan, whom he later made secretary of labor. Early this year, Donald Trump frequently referred to his followers as the “silent majority.” He’s recently constrained himself from his previous egging on of those who were pushing and otherwise beating up demonstrators at his rallies, but the pushing and scuffling continues. In fact, it’s become a regular feature of a Trump rally.
HUFFINGTON POST
HUFFINGTON POST
JONATHAN CHAIT, NEW YORK
the emphasis falls less on a principled defense of racial apartheid in the United States and South Africa (though he did offer that) than on resentment against its critics. Buckley was simply far less interested in racial oppression than in the hypocrisy, obnoxiousness, and potential overreach of its critics. That spirit defined racial conservatism then, and defines it today. To read the pages ofNational Review, or The Wall Street Journal editorial page, racism against nonwhites is a virtually nonexistent problem. Conservatives are instead fixated on the way the racial debate has been turned against conservatives or white people.
Racism remains a demonstrably powerful force in American life. No such recognition exists in conservative discourse. In National Review and The Wall Street Journal, race is just a card.Republican voters heavily believe that whites have become, on balance, the victims of racial discrimination:
