You can\u2019t be surprised by this. This has been a long time coming, ever since the GOP hitched its wagon to the South in 1994, or 1988, or 1968 – pick whatever date you want. But it obviously wasn\u2019t going to happen under George W. Bush – normally control of Congress and the White House means you can pursue your aims through political means. The villains in the piece here aren\u2019t just the white supremacists and the President [sic] who enables them – it\u2019s the party that thought they could keep using the opiate of racism just enough to get them by without getting hooked. And now, here we are: keep dog-whistling about the secret Muslim Kenyan usurper and that Democrats are out to destroy white people, and then when you get unified control of government, people like David Duke think it\u2019s finally payday in the village.<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s kind of broadly based, because we decided somewhere that the Internet doesn\u2019t count and isn\u2019t the real world. Meantime, the alt-right and the GamerGate pukes and all the other arrested-development adolescent boys took it very very seriously. Now, matters are worse. A huge group can be rallied to Charlottesville with ease, whereas a tiny fraction of that number could be pulled to Birmingham in 1991 for me to elbow one in the dome at the Guns \u2019n Roses show at the race course. And more to the point, condemning the KKK and their polo-shirt ilk should be the easiest thing in the whole goddamn world for a politician to do. This is cartoon stuff, rookie-difficulty-setting, the kind of stuff you can point to as \u201cREAL racism\u201d to distract from redlining and cutting Obamacare and all the other things that hit nonwhites first and harder and longer for the benefit of folks with money. It should be a layup to condemn those pricks.<\/p>\n
And yet.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s an easy rule of thumb: anyone who hesitates to condemn the Klan, anyone who has to hedge their words around lashing out at white supremacists? It\u2019s because they\u2019re on their side. It\u2019s because they rely on their support. It\u2019s because that\u2019s who they are.<\/em> For decades, Democrats had to live down anyone to the left of the New Deal, had to hem and haw and apologize for rappers or undocumented immigrants or gay people or do some kind of po-faced dance around anything that cast aspersion on anyone white. Well, here you go. Payback is hell. The United Cracker Front in Charlottesville this weekend needs to hang like a millstone around the neck of every Republican from now until time immemorial. These are the deplorables.You want to defend that? This isn\u2019t you? This isn\u2019t what you stand for? Fuck you, prove it.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You can\u2019t be surprised by this. This has been a long time coming, ever since the GOP hitched its wagon to the South in 1994, or 1988, or 1968 – pick whatever date you want. But it obviously wasn\u2019t going to happen under George W. Bush – normally control of Congress and the White House … <\/p>\n