When President Biden condemned violent white supremacy, leading Republicans complained. Why?
By
He’s “calling us
racists,” Rand Paul complained. “According to the left,
supporting border security and celebrating July 4 could make you a white
supremacist,” Tucker Carlson claimed. “I was offended” by “the racism
thing,” Karl Rove added.
These complaints
are disingenuous.
First, consider
President Biden’s exact words. After alluding to the racial justice protests
over the summer, Biden turned to warn of “a rise of political extremism, white
supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.”
It seems clear
that Biden was referring to the people who recently attempted a coup at the
U.S. Capitol, where the presence of white supremacists has been well
documented.
“Members of Several Well-Known Hate Groups Identified at Capitol Riot,” read a ProPublica headline. A New York Times headline offered help “Decoding the Hate Symbols Seen at the Capitol Insurrection.”
Biden was not
talking about rank-and-file Republicans who voted for Trump but are not members
of hate groups. That’s not at all consistent with his message of unity. These
talking heads are just stoking outrage among Republicans to gain cheap
political points.
However, I think
this issue is worth breaking down a little more.
Historically,
racists almost never see themselves as racists. And actual racists often hide
their racism to attract more followers to their cause.
For example,
former Klan leader David Duke once explicitly said that he was moving from a message of
hating non-white people to a message of love and pride for white heritage in
order to attract more followers. He combined this tactic with accusations of
“reverse racism” to anyone who disagreed with him.
Racism rebranded
to sound less racist in order to recruit more racists is still racism.
In the early
1970s, Richard Nixon introduced the “Southern strategy” to bring white
Southerners and others upset by Democrats embracing civil rights legislation
over to the Republican Party. However, because it was no longer publicly
acceptable to openly espouse racism, they employed “racial dog whistles.”
“By 1968 you
can’t say [the N-word] — that hurts you, backfires,” Republican strategist Lee Atwater later explained. “So you say stuff like,
uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff…. Now, you’re talking about
cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic
things and a by-product of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
Today, alt-right
personality Jordan Peterson takes an even trickier approach. He says he is in
favor of individual autonomy. Where’s the bigotry in that?
“The collective
doesn’t suffer,” he says. “Individuals suffer.” Therefore the only type of
injustice that is wrong is injustice perpetrated against individuals, not
entire groups. Peterson is essentially arguing that the very thing Atwater
described — policies that benefit white people over other groups, or hurt
people of color disproportionately — is fine.
Republicans’
response to Biden appears to be a newer tactic: stoking resentment about the
mere accusation of racism.
Paul, Rove, and
Carlson all know the difference between a Trump voter who opposes abortion and
wants tax cuts and coup plotters with white supremacist tattoos. But they’re
telling Republicans that Biden’s condemnation of the latter group meant the
entire Republican Party.
Meanwhile, someone put two pipe bombs in the U.S. Capitol. I would
like to assume that most Americans in both parties oppose hate groups and
violence. Working against both could be an easy bipartisan win when we agree on
little else.
To do that,
we’ll need a lot less resentment theater.
OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is pursuing a PhD in sociology at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.