Liberals have also been implicitly playing a race card by imagining and demanding a tribal allegiance among African-Americans that conservative blacks are said to somehow be betraying. To insist that the reason Republicans like Cain is because he is a “minstrel” dancing to their tune is playing the race card. If Republicans like a white person for sharing their opinions, is the white person “dancing to their tune”? How about Thomas Sowell? Do his decades of densely reasoned conservatism qualify as a mere dance? Should one even be expected to substantially engage with his work before making such allegations?

Okay: Cain’s views are hardly as well reasoned as Sowell’s. But then neither are those of most of the people currently elevated by Republicans as serious figures. We ought to be assessing people by the content of their character—and that means allowing that Herman Cain has as much right to be a dumb Republican as any white person.

Liberals have not only failed to acquit themselves well with their self-righteous deployments of race allegations—they have encouraged conservatives to follow their lead. Conservatives, unsurprisingly, have acquitted themselves equally poorly. The clip of Clarence Thomas making his “high-tech lynching” claim looks worse by the year. The one from last week of Cain on Fox News—when asked whether racism is behind the charges, all he came up with was “I believe the answer is yes, but we do not have any evidence to support it”—now joins it as a quintessential demonstration of flabby reasoning and sociopolitical cynicism.

But liberals should keep in mind that they’re the ones who have enabled this kind of thing. They may have cloaked their conspiracy theories with scientific terms like “institutional racism” and “legacy”, but the hollowness of their logic and the density of their paranoia is the same.