If you ask me, there’s still a layer of denial here. The issue is not that wolf-crying cost liberals their credibility in persuading people. What it really did was poison the entire topic of racism for anyone outside their own bubble of partisan motivated reasoning.

There’s no easy rhetorical fix for that, because the very mechanisms for shaming racist behavior and comments seem to have broken down after a decade of relentless sabotage by self-described opponents of racism.

During this election, it proved nearly impossible, even during the primary, for non-liberal thinkers — say, Charles Krauthammer or the editors of National Review, or others whose judgment your average Republican voter might normally trust — to make what should have been an easy case to the marginally involved Republican voter.