Responding to a reader’s question about National Review’s decision to fire write John Derbyshire for a now-infamous piece (which appeared elsewhere) that is, er, less than racially sensitive, David Frum gets at the nub of what I think you could call the racial fear lurking within movement conservatism:
A lot of effort has been invested since 2009 to create a narrative of white endangerment and beleaguerment. The Drudge Report showcases selected local police blotters to create an impression of an intensifying criminal rampage by blacks against whites. Rush Limbaugh very explicitly describes the Obama presidency as a project of racial revenge. Fox News suggests the same idea more obliquely. The theme is taken up—with appropriate euphemism—by elected politicians and some conservative writers as well.
What’s going on is obvious to all, but of course any mention of what is being done is met with indignant denials.
John Derbyshire made the fatal mistake of explicitness. In so doing, he left the editors of National Review with little choice. He’d embarrassed them, and obviously he fully intended to continue embarrassing them.
Yet there was something also very weird about his termination. The feelings that John Derbyshire ventilated—where did they come from? Yes, some of them are common prejudices, such as rattle around in many of our heads. But others were so very highly specific. The belief that the country is pulsing with potential “flash mobs,” ready to erupt at any moment? That black people form a new privileged caste in America?
Just yesterday morning, I invested a few minutes to take the temperature of local talk radio. I heard the host deliver a rant about how terribly unfair and one-sided the media are, culminating in the outright declaration: “We [meaning conservatives, or maybe Republicans] are the new blacks.” Meaning, presumably, that blacks are the new whites.
It’s in the air, in this case quite literally.
The question ahead for American conservatives is whether they envision their future as a multi-ethnic coalition in favor of enterprise and individualism—or as a Bloc Québécois for older, white people. Fox News and Rush Limbaugh have embraced this latter future, and profited immensely by it. Nobody’s firing them.
Well, and beyond that – it’s why they’ve profited so immensely.
Conservatism has long featured the circle-the-wagons-we’re-under-attack mentality. But on the issue of race, I sense a subtext to the fear, the idea that once the brown-skinned hordes take over… they will treat us as whites have historically treated them! Racial revenge!
Or, at the very least, they seem to associate the rising “socialist” state with the prospect of America as a majority-minority nation. As in, those minorities are looking for handouts, unlike virtuous, elderly, white us, who would never do such a thing… but when, I ask you, when will Social Security give us a cost of living adjustment that actually keeps up with the cost of living?
