I might, for example, have written a column trying to downplay Bell’s radicalism, or explain it. But why should I? He was a radical. And Obama embraced him. (The fuller story, for those who care, is that Obama was not himself deeply into “critical race theory”; he did permit such views to be published in the Harvard Law Review, but several people from Harvard whom I interviewed back in late 2007 said he wasn’t an adherent.) But what the right doesn’t get is that most Americans don’t find it alarming. He was one law professor, 20-plus years ago. In the meantime, we have a thousand days and nights of watching Obama be president. And people—that is, the two-thirds who occupy the mainstream moral universe—have not seen a stealth Afrocentrist. They’ve seen a pretty reasonable and conciliatory guy whom they basically like.

Those same people forgave Obama for Jeremiah Wright. No, it was not, as the right still says, that the media downplayed it. Wright was an inescapable controversy for days. People had plenty of Wright-related information available to them as they made their voting decisions in 2008. They had plenty of Bill Ayers-related information, and they’d heard that Obama said small-town voters “cling” to guns and religion. And yet, in the face of all this, American voters made him their president…

The right wing is out of touch with middle America. Right-wingers are always donning tricorn hats and invoking old patriotic slogans and claiming that they speak for middle America, and they do it with conviction, so they manage to fool large chunks of the media into thinking that they represent America. But America wants little to do with them and their hectoring sermons, their ludicrous conspiracy theories, their ceaseless and turgid imprecations upon everybody they don’t like. I half-wish Obama would go on television and reassure the rest of America that Bell, while well to the left of the president’s own politics, was still an honorable man and a good American, but I suppose it’s better to let this lying dog sleep.