In April 1961, National Review editor William F. Buckley published the first of what would become a multi-essay broadside targeting the John Birch Society founder Robert Welch entitled “The Uproar.” A prominent conspiracy theorist, Welch served at the head of a paranoid movement that had become convinced communists had penetrated a majority of the U.S. government. Buckley’s (and Barry Goldwater’s) effort to discredit Welch and the society he led while not alienating its influential members was ultimately successful, but the process was a painful one.
Liberals are not unreceptive to the appeal of righteousness or zealotry. Nor are they immune to the pleasures of irritating the self-appointed arbiters of prudence and good taste in their ranks. There is an ongoing debate within liberal circles today about the form that resistance to Donald Trump should take. Conservatives are aware of the debate on the left over the utility of violent street theater that some confuse with political engagement, but they may be less aware of the intramural squabble over how to approach an issue that preoccupies liberal minds like few others: race. Center-left opinion makers are engaged in a largely tactical deliberation over whether to attack the right’s explicitly racially anxious elements or to simply cast the conservative movement as a whole as racist and unsalvageable.
“Until very recently, ‘white supremacist’ had a fixed meaning, and it described something different than the political style represented by Donald Trump,” wrote New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait. He noted that celebrated liberal commentators across the spectrum have labeled the president a bigot, and he offered an admittedly “pedantic” “quibble” with the expansive modern definition of white supremacy favored by the leftist activist class.
Chait seems to be of two minds on the subject. “Racism has been absolutely central to the political appeal of conservative politics since the 1960s,” he wrote most recently. Considering the frequency with which Chait has claimed that Trump personifies the unspoken id of the conservative movement, it would suggest the author sees some truth to the liberal claim that the president is representative of conservatism’s latent racial hostility. Chait prudently cautions his comrades, though, that the proliferation of accusations of racism will make it harder to organize against Trump and may have generally deleterious social effects.
Gawker alumnus and Splinter News editor Alex Pareene was having none of this. “While Chait might read like he’s making a sort of historical or semantic argument, he’s making a political one,” Pareene wrote. “He’s saying: Don’t call conservatives white supremacists.” Pareene wearily passed on adjudicating that argument for what he feels is the more urgent matter: Chait’s hostility toward the left of his party. The Splinter News editor pointedly informed me that he views Chait as the rough liberal equivalent of the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol; friendly with the establishment and ill-disposed toward the party’s ideological fringes. That argument is convincing enough. Yet, in appearing to take Chait’s critique of the left personally and responding by castigating his reticence to call veiled chauvinist utterances by prominent Republicans what he sees them to be (racism), Pareene seems not only to reject Chait’s tactical advice but his entire premise.
Liberal historians and political analysts are not shy about noting the extent to which they believe modern conservatism and white racism are bound up with one another. This is largely an opinion impervious to counter-evidence. In lean years, those who believe it are forced to divine conservatism’s latent racism from exegesis of “code words” like “Chicago,” “apartment,” “Constitution” and “golf.” Trump has single-handedly put this cottage industry out of business. From dubbing Mexican migrants rapists and drug smugglers to pardoning the contemptibly defiant racial profiler Joe Arpaio, neither Trump nor his advisors have exhibited any caution in emboldening the right’s most repugnant elements. The president’s excesses and provocations are irresponsible, and they require a sober-minded and reliable opposition to counter them. Unfortunately for the country, no such opposition presently exists.
In many ways, conservatives brought their present condition upon themselves, but the liberal conception of conservatives and conservatism as racist predates Donald Trump’s candidacy. It stands to reason that this debate over the degree to which liberals should be honest, as they see it, about what they believe to be conservatism’s foundational prejudices would be ongoing even in Trump’s absence. To the extent such a thing is quantifiable, the General Social Survey, which has been conducting polls on the subject since 1972, has found relatively comparable levels of sentiments consistent with white racism among partisans in both parties. That’s one of many reasons why ignoring Chait’s strategic warnings seem especially ill-considered. If those sentiments are to be purged, that won’t be accomplished by unfairly expanding the definition of what constitutes white supremacy.
Buckley did not dislike Robert Welch personally; at least not at first. He tried to communicate that to his adversary on a variety of occasions, and there were many issues on which the two agreed. But Welch was a paranoiac who was inculcating in his flock the same mania with which he struggled, rendering them insular and unappealing. When Chait advises his fellow liberals not to dub everyone from Steve Scalise to Steve Bannon to James Comey white supremacists, he’s explicitly contending that it not only saps the label of meaning but it reinforces a crippling anxiety among liberals. Chait isn’t advising his morally incensed compatriots to stay quiet when they see racism or injustice, but to apply the label “white supremacy” to that which fits the definition. Enraged and fearful liberal activists might not find that kind of circumspection cathartic, but it’s certainly practical. It’s a wonder the only Democrat making an uproar about it seems to be Chait.
