The GOP Myth of a "War on Whites"

If there is any unifying theme to the Republican Party base - over and above greed, of course - it is the resentment of others and a longing for the days when whites, no matter how ignorant and trashy, had a place of privilege in society, especially in the South.  While not all Southerns supported unconditional white privilege - my New Orleans grandmother thought "poor white trash was the lowest of the low - in general being white gave one a boost up on all those deemed "other" and non-white.  Now, that unquestioned privilege is eroded and one's success and place in society isn't automatically enhanced by one's skin color.  This loss of undeserved privilege is at the heart of the claims of white supremacists' and GOP politicians' whining that there is a war on whites.  Similarly, the white Christofascists are hysterical over the fact that they are increasingly unable to ride rough shod over the rights of others be they gays or non-Christians.  A column in the New York Times looks at the disingenuous myth that a war on whites exists.  Here are excerpts:

When Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, claimed earlier this week that Democrats were waging a “war on whites,” he lifted the lid on a simmering resentment that is very real and very resilient and feeds on anxiety — and fear — about a changing America, and the possibility of those changes upending historical architectures of privilege.

On Monday, Brooks was on Laura Ingraham’s radio show to talk about Republicans’ deportation policies. She played a clip of Ron Fournier of The National Journal on Fox News saying:

“The fastest-growing voting block in this country thinks the Republican Party hates them. This party, your party, cannot be the party of the future beyond November if you’re seen as the party of white people.”

Ingraham asked Brooks to respond to the clip, and he did:

“This is a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party. And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that whites hate everybody else. It’s part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare, all those kinds of things.”

This is a paranoid delusion wrapped in a staggering deflection inside an utter lack of personal — or party — accountability.

Republicans have been digging a trench between themselves and racial minorities for decades.

The racial divisiveness became part of the party plan in the 1970s with the “Southern Strategy,” when Richard Nixon’s political strategist Kevin Phillips told The New York Times Magazine: “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.”

Then Nixon declared a war on drugs in 1971, which is one of the longest-running, most disastrous programs — in both wasted money and wasted lives — in the history of this country.

[T]he antidrug campaign has become increasingly focused on arrests for marijuana — a substance that is now legal in some states and whose potential legality is picking up steam in others — and among those arrested exists an unconscionable racial disparity. . . . African-Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses at a rate that is 10 times greater than that of whites.”

The racial divisiveness . . . . continues as Republicans trade racial terms for culture-centric euphemisms. Newt Gingrich, in 2011: “Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works,” although most poor people of working age work. Paul Ryan, earlier this year: “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.”

[I]n the Obama era — despite what Mo Brooks says — Republicans are not only solidifying their division with blacks but solidifying a divide with Hispanics as well.

Whites are not under attack by Democrats; Republicans like Brooks are simply stoking racial fears to hide their history of racially regressive policies.