It’s Not Racist to Hate Government
Photo Credit: Rick Wilking / Reuters
Which may be one of the reasons that politically savvy Democrats are never slow to equate advocates of limiting the size, scope, and spending of the federal government with racism, slavery, and white supremacy. Who can blame them, really? Even after the “success” of Obamacare, the president somehow has managed to chalk up his lowest approval ratings ever, and things don’t look so good for the Donkey Party in the fall’s midterm elections, either.
Salon’s Joan Walsh is quick to cry racism in the face of arguments or developments she doesn’t like, as are MSNBC hosts Chris Matthews, Lawrence O’Donnell, and Ed Schultz. Jimmy Carter, who himself stooped to race-baiting during his 1970 campaign for governor of Georgia, has chalked up “an overwhelming portion” of negativity toward Barack Obama to the fact that “he is a black man.”
Then there’s New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, who recently averred that “America’s unique brand of ideological anti-statism is historically inseparable…from the legacy of slavery.” Unlike many of his liberal-progressive confrères, Chait recognizes that “advocating tax cuts is not in any meaningful sense racist” and that even if small-government conservatives and libertarians were really secretly bent on moving the nation’s capital to Stone Mountain, that doesn’t mean particular policy proposals can simply be written off: “Individual arguments need and deserve to be assessed on their own terms, not as the visible tip of a submerged agenda; ideas can’t be defined solely by their past associations and uses.”
There’s no question that some of the past associations are ugly. To the extent that many Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians look back kindly on Barry Goldwater’s 1964 shellacking at the hands of Lyndon Johnson, they have to acknowledge that opportunistic segregationists came along for the ride (as did a young Hillary Clinton, who was hardly a racist). As Glenn Garvin writes: “Nothing was more problematic than the civil rights issue—particularly the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed most forms of racial discrimination. Goldwater was no racist; early in his career as a Phoenix city council member, he aggressively supported local civil rights ordinances…Goldwater was privately appalled to discover that his opposition to the Civil Rights Act rallied to his side not only libertarians but racists who detested and feared not state power but black people. He was horrified when Alabama’s racist Gov. George Wallace offered to switch parties and run as his vice president.”
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