What Ails the Right Isn’t (Just) Racism
What if the left was right on race?
That’s the question Jane Coaston posed to movement conservatives in Vox. She was mulling claims from the right that the GOP would never have united around a man like President Donald Trump if not for what many Republicans see as decades of unfair accusations of racism against figures such as George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.
Yet long before any such ostensibly unfair or overzealous accusations, the conservative movement was catastrophically wrong on matters as consequential as Jim Crow and apartheid. And many of today’s conservatives would have objected, as to an outrageous, bad-faith slander, had a leftist claimed just a few years ago that Rush Limbaugh and most of the rank and file would eagerly support a big-spending birther who denigrated Mexicans, sought to ban Muslims, and told American-born congresswomen of color that they should “go back” to where they came from.
[Ibram X. Kendi: Am I an American? ]
“What if, in truth, the conservative movement’s inability to self-police itself against racism and establish firm guardrails against racists in the movement has resulted in an American right increasingly beholden to racism and racist arguments?” Coaston asked. “And what if, in truth, it’s the left that has seen this most clearly and that has been pointing it out again and again?”
She argued in part that “the kind of racism that’s most common in movement conservatism is ‘instrumentalized’ racism, the deliberate use of racism and racist tropes for the sole purpose of winning votes and elections.” Those who exploit it do so “not necessarily because they themselves are ‘racist’ on an individual level,” Coaston wrote, “but because they believe that voters will respond—and perhaps only respond—to racism.”
I concur that Trump, as surely as Lee Atwater, marshals racist tropes.. And I doubt that voters, in fact, respond only to racism. Something distinct and deeper is at work. This deeper force explains nearly all of Trump’s most odious and irresponsible comments, not just the racist ones. It helps explain why so many conservatives and Republicans were caught off guard by Trump’s rise and the resonance of his bigotry. And it helps clarify what the left sees and doesn’t see about racism. Once leftists understand it, they will find it easier to defeat the identitarian right.