1. This article on Palin made me think about Goldwater, and how, ever since 1964, @gop leaders (and especially Arizona senators) have done a delicate dance with the racism of the white people they need to vote for them. theguardian.com/us-news/2018/a…
2. Both Goldwater and McCain positioned themselves as men who were decent people, people who in their personal interactions treated everyone with respect and were not racists. They were not segregationists, they were not Steve King immigrant bashers.
3. When they took policy positions that POC and progressives saw as racist, these @gop leaders would claim it was simply a matter of principle. "It's small government I stand for, not racism." motherjones.com/politics/2008/…
4. Yet as that Mother Jones article and Goldwater's "hunt where the ducks are" strategy in 1964 show, these @gop leaders were very willing to cater to white racism (despite their own personal beliefs) to get votes. In hindsight, this was a leadership fail.
5. I'm sure both McCain and Goldwater understood this as a mixture of genuine principle and political expediency. As conservatives, they believed that federal action couldn't do much to mitigate racism. Plus, the racist voters they needed liked it when they said that.
6. The @gop argument of "we hate racism, we just think the federal government does more harm than good when it tries to do anything meaningful about it" has been pretty much the party line since Goldwater. Decades of history and social science has exposed it as complete bunk.
7. The mechanisms of racism are indeed quite complicated and there's no simple solution, but the Goldwater/McCain @gop argument that "if we just leave it alone it'll fix itself" has done untold damage to American politics and society.
8. Since Goldwater, countless mainstream @gop politicians have capitalized on the public impression that they were "good, not racist people," while holding policy positions that, just coincidentally (?), were really popular with racist voters and perpetuated structural racism.
9. One irony, of course, is that McCain himself was viciously race-baited by Karl Rove in 2000. His position of "support some sorta racist policies to get elected so I can do good in DC" ended up nurturing a base that turned on him at the end of his life.
10. McCain & Goldwater (& Reagan & Bush) embodied a smiley version of white identity politics--a "color-blind conservatism" that was nice in private, but which took a passive aggressive "aw shucks, nothing can be done" approach to the persistence of racial inequality in America.
11. Palin and Trump embody a far edgier version of white identity politics, a version which Goldwater & McCain knew full well was a major component of their political coalition, and which they failed to confront head on, either out of political expediency or genuine principle.
12. Their hope (which I believe was genuine, though misguided) that "racism will dissipate on its own" allowed them to tell themselves that their delicate dance with the demons of American racism was temporary political calculation, not long-term moral cowardice.
13. I, for one, think they made the wrong call on that, and wish they had chosen a different path. I'll fully admit that this is easy to say in hindsight. But it's not like plenty of people weren't calling this out in the 1990s or 2000s.
