It’s really no secret that the modern Republican Party is, in part, a consequence of opposition to equal rights for people of color, black people in particular. As Matt Yglesias notes, that outright racism has fermented into “anti-anti-racism,” defined as “zealous defense of the interests of white people who may find themselves unduly inconvenienced by minorities’ efforts to secure equality for themselves.”
Most of the time, conservatives try to distance themselves from outright criticisms of seminal civil rights legislation like the Voting Rights Act or the Civil Rights Act, prior to which black people in America were second-class citizens as a matter of law. Instead, conservatives try to focus on more recent efforts to level the playing field, such as affirmative action, despite its minimal impact on employment prospects for people of color.
At any rate, the point of racism today is that it’s meant to be ambiguous enough so that you can claim you’re motivated by something else. So there’s something refreshing about Rush Limbaugh simply ripping the mask off and showing what the far-right conservative id really thinks:
[Health-care reform] means the rich are going to stop getting all the good stuff. We’re going to take–this is income redistribution, this is returning the nation’s wealth to its rightful owners. This is a civil rights bill, this is reparations, whatever you want to call it.
Limbaugh is blowing that dog-whistle so hard I have tinnitus. What Limbaugh means is that health-care reform is a scam to steal white people’s hard earned money and give it to minorities, just like all civil rights legislation. Limbaugh is no different from Pat Buchanan in that ultimately, he sees white people in an irreconcilable conflict over American resources that he believes belong to white people as a matter of principle, but is unable to recognize his own racial tribalism as a particularly ugly kind of collectivism. I guess the irony of Limbaugh’s preoccupation with “reparations” is that it indirectly refers to the involuntary labor of black folks who helped make this country what it is today.
— A. Serwer
