The new year is only two weeks old, and it appears the Democratshave already released a new book of talking points. At least, that'stheimpression one gets if one looks at the prevailing attitude towardRepublicansboth at the national level and in Californiaherself. Now that the old method of calling Republican tax andbudget policy "heartless", "soulless", "callous","cruel" and cut from the same cloth of Ebenezer Scrooge no longer hasthe same kick, the Left and its fellow travelers are trotting out a newtrope:small government individualism is racist.
This trope was blatantly legitimized in a New York Times article, when NobelPrize Winner Paul Krugman decided to blame the Democrats' failure toperpetuate their era of dominance from the sixties up until today on Republicanexploitation of southern racism.
Well, so be it, one might say. A few irrational bits of paranoia will alwaysshow up, even in the brightest minds, but unfortunately, Krugman's thesis hasspread all the way to the Californiablogosphere. In a recent post on PolitickerCA, blogger Robert In Monterey traces the rise of suburban resistance totaxation in California by arguingthat the whole pro-Proposition 13 movement was actually the offspring of adesire of predominately white property owners to stop their money from going toundeserving minorities. Principle? Self-interest? Desire for equity? Totallyirrelevant. It's all racism.
Now, ordinarily the rantings of left-wing columnists and left-wing bloggers arenothing worth writing home about, but this particular phenomenon is worthnoting if only because of how quickly it spread. Not everything your averageprogressive pundit writes spreads like wildfire this way, but the speed withwhich this one was picked up is nothing less than shocking. As such, it may beworth exploring the charge, and also assessing why it has such attraction tothe Left as a means of attacking those who want to stand against overreaching statism, especially here in California.
It is indisputable that George Wallace's segment of theDemocratic party played a much larger role than it should have in the craftingof the modern Republican party's infamous "Southern Strategy." Moreover, manygrassroots conservatives were far too friendly toward the idea of a Wallaceand Reagan combination becoming the standard bearers of conservativegovernance. However, "conservative" does not necessarily equal "Republican" or "smallgovernment" and if there were some exponents of conservatism who loved Wallace,there were just as many who despised him and what he brought to the movement.When Bill Buckley devoted an episode of "Firing Line" to cross-examining amember of the Wallace movement, for instance, he was unusually sharp andindeed, based on Buckley's conscientious policy of weeding out the "kooks" fromconservative thought, his legacy seems to be the one that survives.
So the charge is dubious at best, but why does the Left wantto use it? Well, the answer is that it tars the one branch of the Republicanparty that mounts a credible challenge to the Left among those it usuallyconsiders reliable voters. For instance, when small government is put front andcenter as the message of Republicans, younger voters have been shown togravitate towards it muchmore frequently. But racism? Nobody likes that.
And why so popular in California,especially now? Well, because this "small government" message is exactly whatCalifornia's Republicans are sticking to, sometimes to the detriment of notjust the Democrats, but the governor himself, and any excuse the Left can getto undermine this sort of opposition is a welcome one. Let's hope it doesn'twork, not because the Republicans are necessarily right but because these sortsof smear tactics are terrible for political debate, and the Krugman strategy isno better than the Southern Strategy.