Republicans over the past half century have repeatedly used racial bigotry to help them gain and sustain power. Nixon’s southern strategy, Reagan’s campaign against welfare queens, GHW Bush’s Willie Horton ad, and GW’s indifference and electoral shenanigans were aimed at marginalizing blacks, Latinos, and anyone else who did not fit their blinkered image of America.
Now that they are out of power, they’ve just taken to whining.
Here is just one among many examples, this from Senator John Kyl at the Sotomayor hearings:
You seem to be celebrating [the superiority of being a minority judge]…You understand it will make a difference… And not only are you not saying anything negative about that. But you are embracing [it].
The Sotomayor hearings were a veritable festival of sniveling angst around the possibility that Judge Sotomayor might be sympathetic to the rights of minorities. And we can’t have that because, you know, if anyone needs affirmative action it is white males who will suddenly become a protected class if a Latina women gains appointment to the Supreme Court.
Of course this strategy has its virtues. It allows these privileged, pampered twits to throw around words like “fairness”, “impartiality”, and “the law” while tapping into the latent racism that surreptitiously percolates beneath the psychic surface of many of their supporters.
The strategy is likely to pay off. The claim that white people are being treated unfairly can appear plausible when lots of people of any background are suffering. Republicans know that resentment is indiscriminate—it doesn’t care whether the target is deserving of ire or not. It will be very easy for some to blame the black President, the Latina judge, or illegal immigrants for the ills that beset people who are out of work.
So it is important to remember that wealthy, white men still overwhelmingly dominate Congress, the Supreme Court, the board rooms of corporate America, and any other institution where power resides.
