The Atlantic - Latest Comments in If You Got A Racist Mind

Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

Anuncie — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 09:15:46 -0000

Thanks for this article, very interesting, i like this.
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Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

Carrington — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 11:32:05 -0000

Nicely put.

Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

Carrington — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 11:24:33 -0000

It's a recurrent trope with totalitarian regimes -- ordinary citizens become so enmeshed with their leaders' brutality that they can only dig themselves in deeper.

Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

David Tomlin — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 07:35:30 -0000

There were also blacks at Normandy - at least a battalion of them.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/06/05/2009-06-05_allblack_battalion_that_landed_in_normandy_france_on_dday_to_be_honored_on_anniv.html

Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

pjcamp — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:51:22 -0000

200,000 black soldiers served in the Union army and navy. 65,000 served in the Confederate army. The Union troops fought in every single campaign in 1864-5, including the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor and the Petersburg Crater.

Buchanan is a putz.

Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

brucds — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 19:26:07 -0000

I have a soft spot for Goldwater based on his outspokenness on various "anti-religious right" issues later in his life, but he voted against the Civil Rights Bill on "Constitutional" grounds. I don't think the guy was racist but he was totally tone deaf and clueless...also more than a bit scary with the bellicose shit.

Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

Sean B. — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:15:53 -0000

My wingnut niece posted a quote from Lincoln, circa 1864, which goes as follows:

"We all declare for liberty;but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor."

Given her politics, I suspected this was not intended as a history lesson, but some sort of analogy comparing slavery (to which Abe was clearly referring) to some current issue that gives wingers the liberty vapors (take your pick, from the presence of Obama on down to any issue he has taken up), which is of course not just a false analogy, but a brutally ingnorant one as well. I also suspected that she didn't dig up this nugget of a rhetorical device on her own, given her devotion to the heroes of right-wing punditry, and voila...a quick Google search of the quote revealed that it is being bantied about by the Levins and Hannitys of the planet as yet another misappropriation of terms in their fight against "tyranny" and "socialism" and all other nefarious titles that once had meaning and resonance until said wordsmiths started barking them out with the frequency of a dog being teased through a fence.

I bring this up since the Civil War and revisionist Confederates have been a frequent topic on TNC's blog of late, and found it to be another disappointing example of this, made all the more disappointing when it comes from a family member.

Your 21st century GOP: Now with more angry white people!

P.S. Did I mention the billboard I drove by the other day which proclaimed "Martin Luther King was Republican"?

Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

sv — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:13:27 -0000

I was about to say that I think it's unfair to lump Goldwater in there, on the same list with Buchanan, but then I realized that you merely said that he was "there with" those other conservatives, which is true. I agree that Buchanan is an interesting figure, and you are probably right about why his colleagues value him as a contrarian. I don't agree with that judgement, i.e. I think they could find a contrarian who wasn't so doggone WRONG about so much, but hey, it is interesting to watch, so it brings in the ratings. And his 'absolute enthusiasm for raw politics' is probably what just really clinches it for him with them. Seems like that Chris Matthews-style love for politics itself is almost a requirement for this game. I don't hate it as much as i once did; it has its place. But, I can't actually watch more than a couple minutes of it, either.

Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

AlchemyToday — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:40:55 -0000

I don't know if shocking's the right word, but it's sort of amazing that Buchanan has gotten away with this stuff for so long. Hell, here's the text of an ad he had when he ran for President in 2000:

TV Newscaster (in background): "...has signed an executive order saying that English is no longer America's national language..."

[Man chokes on food, picks up phone and dials 911.]

911 Recording: Thank you for calling 911, please listen for your language. For Spanish, press 1. For Korean, press 2. For Bengali, press 3...

Announcer: Do you miss English? Immigration is way out of control.

911 Recording: ...For Swedish, press 5...

Announcer: Bush and Gore are writing off English for good. What can you do? Vote for the third party that puts Americans first. Vote Buchanan for president.

911 Recording: ...for Swahili, Press 12.

I mean, I could see if he had guest spots on Lou Dobbs or something. I guess there's some strategy in a left-leaning news network featuring one of the most odious rightwing personalities... he's got a Midas touch for turning any policy he supports into an anachronism.

Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

Ulysses (not yet home) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:06:57 -0000

What has to be understood as the historical context of the Republican party is that their embrace of "conservatism" is simply a flag of convenience that they fly in order to manipulate an electorate. The Republicans party is no more or less than the propaganda arm of the robber baron class. They simply do not have any connection to conservative principles except as it enables them to maintain legislative dominance.

The implementation of the Republican "Southern Strategy" of the early 70's (referenced by Brent) was an entirely cynical act designed to capitalize on the fairly virulent racism of the times. Economic elites in the north knew that because of Viet Nam, Watergate, and everything else happening in that era, there was no possible appeal to THEIR beliefs that might hold any sway with even a trivial percentage of voters. But racism?, now there's a belief with legs. By cobbling together a patchwork of miscellaneous (and sometimes contradictory) beliefs and mortaring them together with racism, the Republikaaners have held political dominance for a generation.

The voters who allowed them to fullfill their southern strategy were "yellow dog Democrats" in every election since Roosevelt. They did not then and do not now share "values" with the architects of present day Republicanism. However what they were NOT willing to do was passively stand by and allow Blacks an equal place in society. By cloaking THAT sentiment with the label of "conservatism" the Buchannons of the world found the winning formula employed by virtually EVERY Republikaaner candidate since.

From Reagan's "welfare queens" to "Willie Horton", with a side trip to Bernie Epton's (Harold Washington's opponent) "before it's too late", right up to your pick of Buchannon's fulminations, the conservative label in Republican hands, has been coded racism for a generation. His (and their) act is simply the convulsions of the dying. Requiescat in pace, ....soon, please?

Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

Brent — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:10:23 -0000

You are putting words in my mouth, misinterpreting what I'm saying, or maybe I wasn't clear.

Well, I interpret you as saying that Pat Buchanan doesn't really represent conservatism. That having him on MSNBC is really just more of a sop to liberals who can see thus see conservatism as a punching bag rather than as a viable and legitimate ideological framework. What I am saying is that I don't think that is correct.

That debate, what conservatism is and will be and its relationship to the GOP, is occurring right now. Not Pat so much, but the constituency/ideological framework he represents is a very important part of that discussion and it is way too early to know how it will end.

The support for the kind of white racial resentment and a particularly virulent disdain for Affirmative Action and immigrants goes well beyond the fringe of racist nationalism into some very powerful coalitions within the Republican party. You write that "there are a lot of people who identify as conservatives, but not as Republicans" but that cuts both ways. There are a lot of conservatives who don't identify with the GOP because they feel it is too liberal for not standing more unambiguously with "patriots" like Buchanan.

You are correct that the demographic realities make the political environment less and less viable for this sort of ideology to continue but I don't agree that that makes Pat any less a real conservative than any of the other people you name. On the contrary the evidence is that there is a crucial electoral block of self-identified conservatives who consider him more a real conservative than say Charlie Crist.

In the end, perhaps we are really just disagreeing about semantics but its important for me to emphasize that, even if one disagrees, there is nothing at all "stupid" about thinking that Pat Buchanan represents a very important voice in modern conservatism.

Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

Josh Jasper — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:09:55 -0000

Wow. He sort of trotted out every possible racist trope he could. "White men built this nation", blacks are better at athletics and such, and implicitly not as smart as whites, and even meandered into the absurd contention that "middle class workers" were best represented as *white* middle class workers because apparently no woman or non white person could ever have failed to experience a working class reality.

Does anyone imagine that Buchanan yucks it up over brewskies with factory workers who all happen to be white men because they're somehow more racially suited to the task than anyone else? The moron wants to appeal to the "white middle class" as the best political strategy for the GOP. But the middle class is vanishing faster than the white majority.

We all get that he's a racist, but his call to race based class warfare is what really interests me about the man. He's part of a political structure that's about the most poisonous thing a middle class person could want. Wages have been flat for the past 8 to 10 years for the middle class, and his answer is "more capitalism!" But you can't un-see the elephant of how unrestrained capitalism gut-punched the world economy by hyper inflating worthless paper as if it was high value. The tea party conservatives Buchanan sees as the future of the conservative movement are a mob wandering around not even sure what they're angry about.

Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

Josh Jasper — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:51:05 -0000

Buchanan fails to enrage me any more. He's what I'd write if I were writing a cartoon parody of a racist windbag on TV. He doesn't enrage me any more than Fred Phelps' homophobia enrages me.

What got me was his unceasing insistence that racism was the correct policy for the GOP. All I can think in response is "Go, lemmings, go!" as they hurl themselves off the cliff into irrelevancy.

Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

Lee — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:37:41 -0000

I know UVA, the entity, actually owned slaves.

Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

Josh Jasper — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:34:48 -0000

I call bulls*t. You never cared at all. People like you with your "I'm taking my marbles and running off the moment anyone says anything I might find scary about men and privilege line were never allies for the causes you disparage without even listening to what's going on.

Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

AlchemyToday — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:24:03 -0000

The obvious question for Buchanan here is, "Is any Latina qualified for the Supreme Court?" It's not controversial to say that Sotomayor is the most qualified Latina in the country (going by modern standards of judicial experience, law school pedigree, etc) for this gig. Does that mean that nominating any Latina is an unallowable affirmative action move that should be used to racebait conservative whites?

As far as Estrada goes, he had zero judicial experience... Sotomayor was and is far more qualified to sit on the Appeals and Supreme Courts. Estrada, by any measure, is much more of an "affirmative action candidate" than Sotomayor if we're going to indulge Buchanon's stupidity.

Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

Doctor Jay — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:22:06 -0000

We are in the midst of a sea change that is every bit as big as the Reagan Revolution. Maybe bigger, but that's hard to say. If those on the right such as Pat Buchanan, Jeff Sesions and James Inhofe act as though they are faced with an existential threat, that's because they are.

They might even agree that there is a threat, but not what the danger is. This is not a danger for America, just for them. They will become irrelevant soon.

They have been pushing back at this growing trend for quite some time, some time ago, I read where I think Grover Norquist said that Republicans played for keeps, while Democrats only played for lunch. This is the behavior of someone faced with an existential threat. They've talked themselves into the notion that (affirmative action, abortion, gay marriage, pick one) is going to destroy America. It isn't, but it's going to destroy them. Why?

Well, some people would literally rather die than change. Often they consider that virtue.

Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

kekemen — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:20:06 -0000

Exactly. EXACTLY.

Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

sporcupine — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:12:51 -0000

Any response on the substance of the claim "White men built this nation?" I've got a hunch about the labor on the Capitol, the White House, and the University of Virginia, but I don't know how to back it up.

Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

sporcupine — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:07:41 -0000

They're raising children and grandchildren to continue the worry and the fuss. These fools won't win many more elections, but we've already seen that they lose sorely, with tea parties and birth certificate petitions and calls for Bin Laden to attack. They'll go on embarrassing me and the country right up to 2040 and long past. What a tiresome bunch of rocks to have to haul around with us while we're trying to do stuff worth doing.

Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

ellaesther — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:02:01 -0000

I certainly agree on the "Uncle Pat" front. If the racist asshole is really your uncle, ok, you deal with it. If he's not, please stop distracting from the poison of his ideology with cutesy nick-names! The dude's not cute -- he's a sick fuck!

Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

Brent — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:01:08 -0000

Yes Dan. I am aware of the demographics and of the dynamics brought to the fore in the last election, but you are still confusing what the Republican party should do, with what it is doing and will be doing. Saying that a viable Republican party will need to free itself from Buchanan's sort of thinking is not an argument that it has done so or will be able to successfully do so.

Listen, I went to Pat Buchanan's high school. And at the time I went there it was undergoing its own demographic transition. A school that had, for decades, been a small enclave for Irish catholic republicans was, in the early 80s, becoming much more diverse ethnically and politically. But that Irish Catholic Republican clique was still very much a part of the school's identity and it was very much in the tradition of Pat Buchanan's ideology. In fact, I went to school with William Buchanan, his nephew.

I bring it up because those same cats I went to school with are out there in the world now. Some are running campaigns and holding government policy positions but most of all, they are solid voting Republicans and none of them would disagree with Pat Buchanan on too many things. The idea that Buchanan is some sort of irrelevant anomaly now just doesn't hold water with me and I don't think that is because I am a "stupid liberal."

Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

irishpirate — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 12:56:57 -0000

Seems like Zell Miller made a "funny" that Pat would enjoy.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/glennthrush/0709/Gorilla_Glue_might_keep_Obama_at_desk_Zell_says.html

"I wish I was in the land of cotton........"

Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

Taliesin — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 12:49:34 -0000

One of the things that struck me most about that clip was the litany that Pat embarked on near the beginning of his time, naming the victims of reverse discrimination (I'll use his terms here, not mine) as if they were actual martyrs. And that, to me, revealed a key underpinning of his method of thinking–that he equates reverse discrimination as an failure equal to the original sin, and he allows himself to believe this by rationalizing to himself that he is not supporting a status quo, a what used to be, but a platonic ideal of fairness, absolute merit, and excellence.

Holding that ideal sacrosanct, he can wail against the considerations of race and not self-identify as a bigot. One would like to ask him, by the same token, how he feels about people who got into college on legacy as opposed to affirmative action, and if everything else they subsequently do in life should also be thrown aside as fruit from a poisoned tree.

Rachel was right, Pat did date himself. And it's sad that somebody who professes to care about this country can be so shuttered to the fuller story of its history. This was certainly not a country built entirely by and for white males of European descent, and though blood never equals blood, the injustices suffered by Ricci and the rest of Pat's roll call are incomparable to those affirmative action was designed, however imperfectly, to address.

Re: If You Got A Racist Mind

Brent — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 12:41:58 -0000

Of course that is what they need to do. The question is whether they can successfully do so. Your original comment seems to rely on the assumption that the future will involve a viable Republican party that has somehow shaken off the racist rump of its base and the Pat Buchanan's of the world. Indeed, you argue that its delusional and "stupid" to think otherwise. But how exactly do you envision a party essentially jettisoning what amounts to, conservatively, 20-25 percent of its voting base and competing with a much wider Democratic coalition? More importantly, what evidence do you see that the party is seriously attempting to do so? Are they out there denouncing Limbaugh or Hannity or are they kissing their rings and pleading for their acceptance? When do you expect this transition to begin exactly?