The GOP’s "Post-racial" Fantasy World

For a party that increasingly uses "dog whistle" sound bites to stir up support among the growing number of white supremacists in the GOP base, many of which are members of supposedly Christian "family values" groups, it defies belief when Republicans criticize Democrats for focusing on race.  These Republicans claim that we are now in  - or should be in - a post racial society even as their actions indicate something very, very different - and very racist.   Never let it be said that hypocrisy isn't one of the main attributes of today's GOP!  A piece in Salon looks at the GOP's real view of "post racial" means and it is pretty ugly.  Here are excerpts:

Rand Paul is not alone. It’s not just the Kentucky senator complaining about folks at MSNBC [Rachel Maddow et al.] who “misrepresent” his past viewpoint opposing the Civil Rights Act by replaying videotape of him refusing to support it. It’s a malady affecting the GOP as a whole as its racial incoherence reaches a new high.

On the one hand, there’s Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, blasting Democrats for waging a “war on whites”—it’s only Republicans who are “beyond race,” as he made plain in a follow-up interview.

Then there’s the Maryland GOP, which has its hands full with a wealthy, self-funded county council candidate, Michael Peroutka, who’s a past leader of the League of the South, a group that thinks the wrong side won the Civil War, and whose president, Michael Hill, recently openly fantasized about creating their own three- to five-man death squads. The squads’ “primary targets will not be enemy soldiers; instead, they will be political leaders, members of the hostile media, cultural icons, bureaucrats, and other of the managerial elite.” There’s even a videotape of Peroutka leading a meeting of the League of the South in singing “the national anthem,” as he introduced it—yes, “Dixie.”

Peroutka himself uses exactly the same sort of rhetoric that Brooks uses—he’s not the racist, he explains, the Democrats are! They’re the real haters, the real dividers of America—despite the fact that Michael Hill, founder and president of the League of the South recently wrote:

It is clear, then, that God intended men to live separately with their own languages, kith and kin, and nations. Therefore, nations (i.e. peoples) have a Biblical mandate to exist and thereby to protect their interests from those who would destroy them either by war or more subtle means.

Because of a resurgence of godless multiculturalism and universalism (the new Tower of Babel), white Western Christians are threatened with extinction as a separate and identifiable people because of their own weakness and lack of Biblical understanding about the God-ordained principles of nationhood. While all other “nations” (i.e. groups based on race and ethnicity and “blood and soil”) are encouraged to preserve themselves and their cultures, white Christians in the West (the descendants of Japheth) are told that we must give up everything we have in order to placate those different from ourselves and who bear some alleged grievance toward us (i.e. slavery, “racism,” hatred, etc.)

It’s the language of theocratic white nationalism–which is a great deal more specific. It’s surely not the case that every Republican is a secret white supremacist à la Michael Hill—far from it.  . . . Yet, it is true that strikingly similar arguments are made by Republicans of all different stripes—including those in the League of the South—absolving themselves of any racial animus and shifting blame to everyone else instead. And those same arguments persist right alongside recurrent racist incidents.

That’s why Rand Paul’s racial incoherence is not just the image problem of one leading presidential contender, it’s why Mo Brooks is not just an isolated congressperson, and why Michael Peroutka is not just an obscure local candidate. They are all actors in a much broader drama . . .

The GOP’s continued dependence on Nixon’s racist Southern Strategy is an inescapable fact of life—even affirmed by insiders like Lee Atwater—although sophisticates like RealClearPolitics senior analyst Sean Trende have tried to argue that the South’s shift is driven by economics, not race. 

America’s overt anti-racist consensus is so powerful, however, that Republicans simply can’t handle that truth, which is why they’ve developed elaborate conceptual workarounds that allow them to pretend that they’re the real anti-racists, no matter what.

Brooks’ claim that Democrats were fomenting a “war on whites” can be read as a perfect illustration of Corey Robin’s thesis in “The Reactionary Mind,” that “all rightwing ideologies, from the eighteenth century through today, are historical improvisations on a theme: the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.”

Today’s conservatives are particularly keen on feeling the felt experience. They all want to impeach Obama—but no one’s really sure what for. There’s just this felt experience that he deserves it somehow—a felt experience that him being in the White House steals something essential from them—the “real Americans.”

It might seem bizarre that an advocate of Southern secession would claim to be anti-racist, but that’s exactly the line that Peroutka would take, when questioned—showing just how far this feigned posture of wounded innocence can go. The “American View” website, sponsored by Peroutka’s law firm, even contains a 1956 article defending segregation, which begins, à la Rand Paul 2010, “Whereas liberty is a prerequisite to happiness, the unrestricted right to discriminate is in turn a prerequisite to liberty,” and goes on to say, “We see no reason why men should not discriminate on grounds of religion, race, or nationality, if they wish.” Such are Peroutka’s anti-racist bona fides.

The rhetorical strategy here is quite clear: If you can rebrand the party of racial equality as the party of racial animus, then you can blame them for anything. And since the GOP can’t rebrand itself, rebranding the Democrats as “the real racists” is the only option they have. Peroutka may indeed be so extreme that even calling him “ultra-conservative” is a form of camouflage, but the rhetorical strategies he uses are more or less commonplace throughout today’s GOP. Their racial incoherence reflects a broader rhetorical, moral and ideological incoherence that’s extremely difficult to pin down, precisely because its so omnipresent, though rarely in such malignant forms as those discussed above.

It's all very, very ugly.  And it should be frightening for gays as well since these extremists hate us almost as much - or more in some instances - than they hate blacks.