Obama—secret orchestrator of the “tea partiers are racists” charge; and why conservatives are such wusses in the face of that charge

I had given Obama some credit in 2009 and 2010 for disagreeing on a couple of occasions with the statements made by his most rabid followers in the media that the tea partiers are racists, meaning that their passionate opposition to insane government spending was really just a front for their racial opposition to a nonwhite in the White House. I was wrong to give Obama any credit. It turns out that he was playing the good cop in a good cop / bad cop scenario. Worse, it turns out that from behind the scenes, the good cop was spurring on the bad cops.

Roger Simon at Pajamas Media quotes from U.S. News journalist Kenneth T. Walsh’s new book, Family and Freedom: Presidents and African Americans in the White House:

But Obama, in his most candid moments, acknowledged that race was still a problem. In May 2010, he told guests at a private White House dinner that race was probably a key component in the rising opposition to his presidency from conservatives, especially right-wing activists in the anti-incumbent “Tea Party” movement that was then surging across the country. Many middle-class and working-class whites felt aggrieved and resentful that the federal government was helping other groups, including bankers, automakers, irresponsible people who had defaulted on their mortgages, and the poor, but wasn’t helping them nearly enough, he said.

A guest suggested that when Tea Party activists said they wanted to “take back” their country, their real motivation was to stir up anger and anxiety at having a black president, and Obama didn’t dispute the idea. He agreed that there was a “subterranean agenda” in the anti-Obama movement—a racially biased one—that was unfortunate. But he sadly conceded that there was little he could do about it.

Simon then goes on to say that liberals use the racism charge to protect their moribund liberal system including unsustainable entitlements. Instead of honestly facing that difficult issue, they try to discredit the critics by calling them racists. While this is true, it’s only the surface of the problem. Liberals have always called non-liberal whites racists, whatever the issue; this didn’t start with the tea party.

Simon also shows his typical liberal-conservative inadequacy by the way he discusses conservatives’ response to the racism charge:

So this is now already a relatively old debate. And the same arguments keep coming up again and again. The left keeps accusing the right of racism and the right keeps denying it, demanding evidence, which is never forthcoming. Not once. But that doesn’t stop the left. They continue the accusations—and the president, at least according to Walsh, believes them.

Simon evidently believes that the right’s response to being called racists—deny the charge, demand evidence, and wait, while the charges continue, is enough. It never occurs to him to stop acting like an innocent defendant and go on the attack, to indict the liberals in the strongest terms for their outrageous use of the ultimate smear when there is zero evidence for it; a smear aimed at nothing less than eliminating all opposition to liberalism and turning us into a liberal dictatorship.

I have many times discussed conservatives’ pathetic impotence in this area, and offered my explanation for it. The reason the conservatives are so passive toward the liberal false racism charge is that they themselves subscribe to the prevailing liberal belief system in which non-discrimination is the ruling principle and discrimination—“racism”—is the ultimate evil. They therefore think that “racism” is, in general, a legitimate charge, and that it is only when they are called racists that the charge is being used illegitimately. They don’t want to bring the racism charge itself into disrepute, because that would be to challenge the fundamental assumptions upon which the liberal system is based.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 03, 2011 09:21 AM | Send