Sticks and stones
Playing the Race Card, like any slur, requires a bit of innuendo to work. To insinuate, to imply, to hint that your opponent is one of “them” is what sends people panicking. But when you’ve out and out called them bigots, white nationalists, enemies, traitors – then, if you haven’t beaten them completely down, the magic is dispelled. You’ve done your worst, and they haven’t run. And the Race Card is suddenly much less potent than before.
So, to have dialed it all the way up to eleven and used up your biggest gun on stuff that really isn’t much about race is foolish. Voter ID? A comfortable majority of Americans, including majorities of the larger minorities – think this is just prudent. And when the new rules in Georgia – all that “Jim Crow 2.0” – are more open and less cumbersome than in most blue States like, say, Delaware or New York – then most people can see that calling this voter suppression or white supremacy is just demagoguery. “Argument poor, yell like blazes” as the old preacher’s sermon notes had it.
As for the filibuster, which all the Democrats in the House are now calling a remnant of Jim Crow and a tool of white supremacy, well, just two years ago all the Democrats were swearing eternal fealty to the precious filibuster. Even confronting them with their own words doesn’t embarrass them or make them attempt to offer any rationale for their sudden change. They just hurl epithets. But the more those epithets are used, particularly on such flimsy excuses, the less they mean.
This is not to say that there aren’t real racists, whose views ought to be denounced. But if everything is racism, then not much of anything is racism. And how little real racism is left in our society is what people begin to perceive. In the end, the people playing the Race Card right now are doing everybody, of all races, a favor. When they have done their uncivil worst, it may be possible to inaugurate a renewed, more civil society. For everybody.
So, to have dialed it all the way up to eleven and used up your biggest gun on stuff that really isn’t much about race is foolish. Voter ID? A comfortable majority of Americans, including majorities of the larger minorities – think this is just prudent. And when the new rules in Georgia – all that “Jim Crow 2.0” – are more open and less cumbersome than in most blue States like, say, Delaware or New York – then most people can see that calling this voter suppression or white supremacy is just demagoguery. “Argument poor, yell like blazes” as the old preacher’s sermon notes had it.
As for the filibuster, which all the Democrats in the House are now calling a remnant of Jim Crow and a tool of white supremacy, well, just two years ago all the Democrats were swearing eternal fealty to the precious filibuster. Even confronting them with their own words doesn’t embarrass them or make them attempt to offer any rationale for their sudden change. They just hurl epithets. But the more those epithets are used, particularly on such flimsy excuses, the less they mean.
This is not to say that there aren’t real racists, whose views ought to be denounced. But if everything is racism, then not much of anything is racism. And how little real racism is left in our society is what people begin to perceive. In the end, the people playing the Race Card right now are doing everybody, of all races, a favor. When they have done their uncivil worst, it may be possible to inaugurate a renewed, more civil society. For everybody.