Writing in the New York Daily News, University of Southern California law and history professor Ariela Gross argues that the Republicans’ attack on Critical Race Theory “is part of a much longer campaign to shut down movements for racial justice, especially when they attract white allies.” And she thinks it’s no accident that this effort “followed the unprecedented multiracial Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, and growing pressure on politicians as well as businesses to address the history of systemic racism.”
I won’t dispute that conservatives have been waging a long uninterrupted campaign against racial equality and justice, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say the new obsession with Critical Race Theory is related in more than a tangential way to the George Floyd protests or the evolving racial postures of corporate America. There’s a simpler way of thinking about this.
The Republicans are looking for a way to hold together a fracturing coalition and they don’t have a positive organizing principle that will get the job done. One reason their coalition is coming apart is that their last two presidents relied very heavily on cultural conservatives, and they alienated fiscal conservatives and moderates in the process. Both Bush and Trump also did real damage to the Republicans’ reputation on national security. Bush overextended the military with his failed War on Terror, while Trump coddled dictators and fought with America’s allies.
As the Republicans shed well-to-do cosmopolitans and well-educated supporters, they mitigated the damage by peeling away lower class voters, especially whites. Their coalition no longer cared as much about foreign relations, taxes or regulation, and so these traditional features of Republicanism lost their effectiveness as organizing principles.
This process was in progress before Trump came along, but when he seized on white racial grievance and anxiety as his organizing principle, he gave it a boost of momentum. In the bargain, he pushed more historical Republicans out of the party but they didn’t all leave, and many left with great reluctance. Of those who stayed despite misgivings, there’s a need for rationalization. They have to convince themselves that they’re not part of a fascist party built on race-based nationalism.
There are limited ways to satisfy this need, but both Cancel Culture and assaults on Critical Race Theory are efforts to accomplish the job. Both substitute whites and conservatives for black and other minorities as the real victims. The idea is not to justify racism or make an affirmative case for white supremacy because that will only fly with a fraction of the coalition they require. The idea is to provide a rallying cry that allows both racist and non-racist Republicans to unite.
What they’re uniting around is the most racist political movement we’ve seen in this country since the end of Jim Crow, but it gives permission for the participants to believe otherwise.
What I’m saying here is that we’re seeing Republican legislatures pass laws banning Critical Race Theory in education because they have an electoral problem and this is their effort at a solution. The old stuff about lower taxes, less regulation and a strong national defense isn’t working. It doesn’t have the adhesive effect it used to, and it doesn’t create enough excitement.
One reason I feel confident in my analysis here is that almost exactly eight years ago I wrote a piece called The GOP is Moving in the Wrong Direction in which I predicted that the Republican Party would drift toward race-based nationalism out of political necessity. At the time, I wasn’t thinking of Donald Trump as a possible candidate, let alone a winning one. What I was seeing predicted Trumpism, but not Trump.
The only hope for a racial-polarization strategy is to get the races to segregate their votes much more thoroughly, and that requires that more and more whites come to conclude that the Democratic Party is the party for blacks, Asians, and Latinos.
That is, indeed, how the party is perceived in the Deep South, but it would be criminal to expand those racial attitudes to the country at large.
The Republicans are coalescing around a strategy that will, by necessity, be more overtly racist than anything we’ve seen since segregation was outlawed.
In December 2015, I described Trump as the fulfillment of this shift in the GOP when I wrote Trump and the Missing White Voters and I dubbed the strategy a tragic success when I wrote Avoiding the Political Southification of the North two days after the 2016 election.
This isn’t to say that the Republican base isn’t evolving and becoming more racist. In fact, the argument is that the GOP couldn’t just rely on tapping into latent racism–they had to grow and nurture it. They had to get whites to think more as a racial group with common political interests. This project was going to happen with or without Trump, unless a leader came along who could build a new right-wing coalition that could win without relying on conservatives.
It’s true that objective conditions in the country have made the project more viable. The financial hardship of the Great Recession, the devastation of the opioid crisis, the hollowing out of small-town America through monopolization, and the browning of America through immigration and differential birth rates have all contributed to white anxiety. Traditional conservative Christians have also been on the defensive on a variety of fronts, including the vast expansion of LGBT rights in the last two decades. The Republicans have weakened unions to the point that they no longer work effectively to keep lower classes attached to the left.
We can assign some weight to all of these factors when seeking to explain the current Republican strategy around Cancel Culture and Critical Race Theory, but the simplest explanation is that they’re trying to win elections. It’s not about substance. It’s about finding a way to get whites to vote as a bloc. It’s about giving people permission to support a white nationalist party without using overtly white nationalist rhetoric.
And it’s really about conservatives trying to hold onto their control of the Republican Party, because it’s not worth anything to them if they can’t control it and they have no intention of adapting or changing their views to attract more votes.
And if you burn the whole place down in the process, so be it. Republicanism in a nutshell.
I keep saying it because it’s so unbelievable; but the idea that so many get so worked up about an easily discoverable lie is depressing. It would take what? 120 seconds to google and read what CRT is? Another 30 to find where its being taught? And yet they don’t do it.
Incredible.
People literally start crying at meetings? Wouldn’t you want to check before you made a fool out of yourself?
Again, this place needs therapy.
Another example of why I belong to this community. Your analysis is so helpful, Martin. What you’ve written makes perfect sense and I’d not have found it on my own. No one writes like this in the media. I wish you had a column in the New York Times or were a regular on Rachel Maddow’s show. Word would get out and become part of the narrative. Rather than just educating a few political nerds like me.
This is such a strong piece. You really have a gift for 30,000 foot analysis. Sad that Republican voters are so weak minded. I guess 30-40 years of right wing media have greased the skids so much that if Tucker Carlson told them tomorrow that CRT theory was all the rage they would pull down the monuments to the Confederate traitors themselves.
All of this is definitely true and I appreciate the amount of clarity, but the question remains what we are to do about it.
Do we confront it, and speak on their desired turf? They’re clearly in the minority, but because of America’s political institutions the Republicans have the advantage. But what’s the alternative? Fox will talk about it any time they want, although CRT still isn’t on the same level as “crime” and “immigration” in terms of pure hours/viewership.
The goal should be to get the national media to talk about things we want to talk about. But that can’t happen so long as liberals are disjointed in their response. It’s a natural reaction. “This is all a bunch of made up bullshit to try and unify the Republican base” in combination with defenses of a structural analysis of racism (which is distinct from CRT). But that’s probably still an overall win for Republicans until at least 2028-2032.
Democratic politicians should always change the subject if media brings this up. It’s not that it’s running away so much as it’s like Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential strategy. “I’m not going to answer your questions directly, and I’ll find a way to turn the topic back to why I want to fight the billionaire class from screwing everyone else.” Because we want to talk about what we want to talk about, not their lies.
Speaking of which, why aren’t more Democrats calling Republicans liars in explicit terms? “Republicans lie. Republicans are liars. They want to poison you and your children.” Repeat. Over and over again. Stick to that message.
I’ll end with this. Whenever a Republican talks about this, we respond with this:
“Republicans are trying to burden your local teachers with more red tape because they are trying to distract you from the fact that they want to let corporations poison your kids with toxic metals and keep you from retiring with dignity so that they can enrich billionaires”
For Republicans, Critical Race Theory is a focus group tested slogan to rail against. Which is easy to do since they mis-define it in many different ways. And ordinary people really don’t have to the time to look things up in depth.
It’s all about flooding the zone with BS.
As for defending against it–it’s a lot easier to come up with bumper sticker slogans if your are not constrained by the truth. That’s always been the problem.