Thread by @SethCotlar

A rare conversation where two people from very different places on the political spectrum have a civil conversation with each other about race. player.fm/series/the-rem…

That said, I felt @cjane87 and @JonahNRO often talked around each other because they conceptualized "racism" in different ways. It would have been helpful, IMHO, to have an initial, ground-setting, conversation about what we mean when we use the words "racism" or "racist."

@cjane87 @JonahNRO My guess is that this opening, definitional conversation would've quickly encountered some stumbling blocks. And therein, I'd say, lay the rub for why the conservative movement and conservative intellectuals have had such difficulty engaging their critics on the question of race.

@cjane87 @JonahNRO To take one example. Was Goldwater a racist? My guess is that Goldberg would say "no," supporting that answer with many examples from Goldwater's personal and professional life where he was kind to African-Americans. Goldwater was not personally a bigot, hence he's not a racist.

@cjane87 @JonahNRO As Coaston argues here, Goldwater being non-bigoted in his personal interactions with black people is only one small consideration to keep in mind when asking if Goldwater was a racist. vox.com/2018/10/12/179…

@cjane87 @JonahNRO I've developed a similar line of argumentation in this thread. I mean come on...when the GOP wins 5 deep south states for the first time ever in 1964 running on an anti-Civil Rights Act platform, you can't tell me racism was not at play.

https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1035242397230219264?s=20

@cjane87 @JonahNRO I think the conservative defense here would be this: "Look, it's not our fault white Southerners were racists. The Democrats were happy to have their votes for years. We just saw an opportunity and took it. We didn't cause the racism, we just passively tolerated it."

@cjane87 @JonahNRO The response would be that it was racist when Democrats courted segregationists votes, & it was racist when the GOP did it. Because racism is a cultural dynamic that requires feeding...it's not just "there" to be either tapped into or not. By catering to it, you help feed it.

@cjane87 @JonahNRO I think about this a lot in regard to GHWB and Willie Horton. That racist ad worked like evil magic in 1988. GHWB (and his defenders) would say "our policies were better, so we did what we needed to do to win. We didn't create the racism, we just used it to our advantage."

@cjane87 @JonahNRO But that's BS. Political speech has consequences in our political culture. It shapes how voters sees the world. A party that refuses to run the Willie Horton ad in 1988 is a party, I'd argue, that is far less likely to be taken over by Trump in 2016.

https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1072885290811838465?s=20

@cjane87 @JonahNRO .@cjane87 makes an important distinction in this convo between the conservative *movement* & conservative *ideas* or intellectuals. As with Goldwater in '64, the conservative mvmt drew much of its energy from illiberal forces in US society--racism, homophobia, misogyny, etc.

@cjane87 @JonahNRO An anti-racist person could read Russell Kirk or Hayek and be persuaded by them...one needn't be a racist to like less government regulation or to see the institutions of local communities as key seedbeds of the virtue necessary to sustain a republic.

@cjane87 @JonahNRO But as myriad historians have pointed out, when you drop those ideas into a deeply racist society, they can't avoid being entangled with that racism. If you don't explicitly seek to disentangle "local control" and "small gov't" from "pro-segregation," then you're being obtuse.

@cjane87 @JonahNRO This is one of the key takeaways from this book by @KevinMKruse. The seeds of Gingrich's "colorblind" conservatism were planted in the 1960s struggles over integration. Gingrich was the national mouthpiece of White Flight, "polite" segregationist ideology. amazon.com/White-Flight-A…

@cjane87 @JonahNRO @KevinMKruse Why did white suburbanites in the South suddenly abandon the city's public pools, public golf courses, and system of public transportation at exactly the moment that the civil rights movement was winning access to those once "whites only" resources? Gosh...what odd timing, eh?

@cjane87 @JonahNRO @KevinMKruse The "official" story coming from those suburbs was that it was just about choice and convenience. We like driving our own cars. We enjoy having our own pool in our backyard. The schools in the suburbs are just "better." "This isn't about race," they said.

@cjane87 @JonahNRO @KevinMKruse Some of them probably even meant it. But the fact remained that they were benefiting from and *contributing to* an asymmetrical, racial power dynamic that had been redistributing resources from black people to white people since 1619. That's how racism reproduces itself.

@cjane87 @JonahNRO @KevinMKruse A GOP partisan will now say "oh yeah, well the Dems haven't done much to undo structural racism either." Fair and true enough. That said, the overwhelming majority of black Americans have decided, since 1964, that their interests are better served by the Democrats. Why is that?

@cjane87 @JonahNRO @KevinMKruse I have no big reveal here. Racism is an immensely complicated topic that historians will continue to unravel for decades to come. I don't have the solution.

But I do know that a conservatism that acts like racism and white supremacy are not a big deal in the contemporary US, is not a political movement that's ever going to be relevant in what I hope continues to be our multi-racial democracy.

But the problem is, a conservatism that grapples honestly with the legacy of white supremacy is a conservatism that will likely alienate a huge portion, if not the majority, of current GOP voters, making it a political non-starter.