Cries of "racism" poisoned our politics

A progressive viewpoint is that virtually all conservative politics since at least Barry Goldwater, one of only six Republicans in the Senate to vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, captured the party’s presidential nomination that year is white reaction and resistance to minority gains in American society. The landslides for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, though they each won 49 states in their reelection campaigns, including California, New York, and Illinois, were said by Democrats to be the product of a tacitly racist “Southern strategy.” When California Gov. Pat Brown faced Reagan in the 1966 gubernatorial election, he reminded a group of schoolchildren that an actor shot Abraham Lincoln.

This view is no longer confined to partisan attacks or left-wing academic works. It pervades mainstream media coverage of GOP politics. “President Donald Trump is wielding America’s racial tensions as a reelection weapon, fiercely denouncing the racial justice movement on a near-daily basis with language stoking white resentment and aiming to drive his supporters to the polls,” reads the lede of an Associated Press article. “President Trump’s unyielding push to preserve Confederate symbols and the legacy of white domination, crystallized by his harsh denunciation of the racial justice movement Friday night at Mount Rushmore, has unnerved Republicans who have long enabled him but now fear losing power and forever associating their party with his racial animus,” begins a news story in the Washington Post, headlined “Trump’s push to amplify racism unnerves Republicans who have long enabled him.”

At any point over the last 50 years, however, liberals committed to this interpretation of American politics would have gladly substituted the names of any previous Republican president for Trump’s in making a similar indictment. Now, in a time of intense political polarization, combined with news cycles running at Twitter speed, the cumulative effect is as likely to cause such accusations to be tuned out as to discredit the accused.