Roy insists the Republican Party and conservatism are “wedded to and marred by white supremacism.” In one sense, he is right. The Republican Party is in a very real sense scarred by racism, but it’s not actual racism. It’s the Left’s successful labeling of Republicans as racists, which has led to their stigmatization and consequent delegitimization.

Shelby Steele in his book “White Guilt: How blacks and whites together destroyed the promise of the Civil Rights Era” makes the case that the black power movement has sought to delegitimize whites to maintain its moral authority and gain power. This is true for liberalism as a whole in its quest to defeat conservatism, and it has been powerfully effective.

Instead of recognizing what the Left has been doing and fighting it with their own social psychology counter-strategy, conservatives have allowed themselves to be stigmatized. They have unwisely accepted the premise (consciously or unconsciously) that they’re somehow guilty for America’s racist past, and have set out to prove they aren’t racist. They have failed.

This “white guilt” is a “powerful, powerful force,” Steele wrote. “Not because people feel guilty, but because people are stigmatized, and again have to prove the negative all the time, and living forever under threat of being stigmatized.”