Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Shameless Racism

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence. He penned an op-ed Tuesday at truthout that does what no mainstream media commentator has had the courage to do, which is call last weekend's Tea Party protests in DC for what they were: a blatant display of racism.

Money quote:
It was a Klan rally minus the bedsheets and torches. These people don't even have enough shame to hide their faces anymore. If more Republicans like [David] Frum don't come forward to denounce such activities from their right flank, that right flank is going to finish the job of taking over the GOP, and hard as it is to believe, this kind of obnoxious craziness is going to seem quaint by comparison to what will be coming next.

Matt Welch at Reason warns:

My last word was that if the Tea Party movement is significantly animated by racism or appeals to white racial resentment, we will certainly find out about it, and it will lose whatever popularity it has now, because racism in this country is genuinely unpopular. And by the same token, if the Great Klan Hunt fails to turn up more than just a fringe scattering of kooks, it may be time for some on the Air America left to begin considering that limited government sentiment is not automatically a form of sublimated racism.

My two cents is that if Glenn Beck emerges as the leader of this thing (and he could make an arguable claim right now), then there will be a hard cap on growth of its popularity, and a flourishing cottage industry of Beck-monitoring that will turn up daily outrages to feed the evil/stupid/insane/racist narrative. This will be great for Glenn Beck; for the rest of the new protest kids, maybe not so much.

I don't disagree with Welch, and I hold out hope that the 9/12ers, birthers, Palinites, and Becksters emerge as unemblematic of conservatism in general. But I am on record as saying that I believe that this fringe element currently identifying as Republicans will split the party in two. The lunatics will likely identify as either the "Christian Conservative" or "Social Republican" party, and will disenfranchise themselves and take themselves out of national power for generations while they continue their grassroots approach starting with school boards and town councils. The remaining Republicans will successfully retain the name of the party (though I don't know how this would be of any benefit after the schism) and will pose a grave danger to the Democratic Party as they siphon off the conservative and moderate wings of the party, appealing to fiscal responsibility, smaller government, a foreign policy that I would describe as "reluctant hawkishness," and accountability at the highest levels of government. It would be a party to which Barack Obama might belong had it already been in existence.

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