Republicans Still Think Racism is a Winner
Republicans are falling over themselves to pander to their "white supremacist" base with their usual dog whistle racism.
Richard Nixon is dead, but he is cackling in his grave. He spent eight years in the middle of his life being a respectable, stodgy Republican as vice president to the respectable, stodgy Dwight Eisenhower, the last responsible Republican president. He started and ended his career as a greasy, corrupt dirty trickster who undoubtedly was a crook, his own protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.
He taught his fellow Republicans how to use dog whistle racism to keep the new, “white supremacist” base of the Republican Party in a lather and win elections that way. Now, 26 years after Nixon’s death, his political heirs are eagerly attacking African American intellectual production that they are not remotely qualified to evaluate in order to encourage their “white supremacist” base to turn out in the 2022 elections. They do not seem to have much learned the lesson of having lost the popular vote in the last four presidential elections. Donald Trump gave them the false impression that overt racism is a political winner in the United States. They stupidly see Trump as a success.
Intellectual giant Lauren Boebert here takes aim at Critical Race Theory, showing only that she knows nothing about intellectual production in the social sciences, humanities, and law since at least the 1990s. Anyone familiar with the academic disciplines that actually produced Critical Race Theory would know that the term has a very different meaning than the one she uses here, in a desperate attempt to look well informed when she plainly is not.
If she were, she would know that scientists do not much study “race” any more because geneticists, anatomists, anyone who has studied the question from a properly scientific perspective, has concluded that what we are pleased to call “race” has no meaning in terms of actual, observable differences among humans. There’s no there there. By trying to make the study of “race” at all scientific, Boebert here hearkens back to the ugly days of eugenics, which lacks all intellectual and moral credibility after it became a favorite idea of the Nazis, the apogee of western conservatism.
I doubt anyone has bothered to ask Rep. Boebert, mostly because it is so obvious that she has no idea what Critical Race Theory is about.
Although “race” has no scientific content, it undoubtedly does have a huge gobbet of historical, sociological, cultural, and legal effect, which is what Republicans want to obscure with their cheap attacks. Anyone who really wants to address the problem that African Americans suffer attacks, including murder, by law enforcement officers in gross disproportion to their percentage of the population would do well to start with Critical Race Theory.
But Rep. Boebert, as a good Republican “white supremacist,” doesn’t care about that.
This is sheer stupidity. Pure grandstanding to pander to the “white supremacist” base. The worst sort of Republican willful ignorance.
Everything that is wrong with Rep. Boebert’s ill informed, ham fisted attack on Critical Race Theory goes double for attacks on the 1619 Project and its author, Nikole Hannah-Jones.
The core problem with both of these intellectually lame efforts is that they entail a resolute refusal to listen to the experiences and perspectives of African Americans themselves. “White supremacist” Republicans want to hear only themselves and people who agree with them about everything.
A useful analogy would be that Republicans want to hear only from Derek Chauvin, the police officer whom a jury recently found guilty of murdering George Floyd, and ignore Mr. Floyd entirely.
We can call this the Trump approach. Trump has become famous, after four years of playing at being president, mostly for requiring blind loyalty that he entirely refuses to reciprocate.
That Trump offered a “1776 Commission” as a riposte to the 1619 Project tells us all we need to know. It is highly unlikely that we have ever had a president who was as entirely uninformed about the history and traditions of the United States as Donald Trump. He exhibited staggering ignorance of the specifics of our Constitution, or even what a constitution is or why anyone would want to have one.
Trump is “conservative” in the worst possible sense. He stands as the death rattle of the worst aspects of our nation’s history, which indisputably includes a substantial amount of racism, Republican whining to the contrary notwithstanding.
The smart people in the republic will embrace both Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project and work on eradicating racism, resolutely opposing Trump and his Republican toadies all the while.