I was sitting at the bar at Morton’s in West Palm Beach when I saw them reporting Hillary Clinton’s “alt-right” speech. I knew, from the faces of the CNN operatives with bylines and the chyron on the bottom of the screen, that this was serious, and that Hillary was finally putting away her racist fascist opponent.
But is this really a good idea, making Trump the Racist a headline issue? Isn’t the time-tested way of race politics that you paint Donald Trump as a racist with surrogates talking about his racism and local TV commercials dragging African Americans behind pickup trucks? The beauty of time-tested race politics is that it is very hard to push back against it.
Instead, we have candidate Hillary accusing Trump of being a racist directly. I’m no expert but it seems to me that the direct attack licenses Trump to do what he has already done, and say that the Democrats see racism everywhere they look. Hey, maybe there are even racists under the bed, just like with Commies in the bad old days of evil McCarthyism.
If I were Trump I’d add a new verse to that old campfire favorite, “Old MacClinton Had a Farm:”
With a racist here, and a racist there,
Here a race, there a race, everywhere a racist,
Old MacClinton had a farm,
E-I-E-I-O
If the Democrats have played the race card before Labor Day I wonder what the internal polls look like at the Clinton campaign.
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Over at National Review my man Kevin Williamson is saying: I told you so: that’s what you get for nominating Trump. But I think he is missing the point. Trump or no Trump, the old days, when Republicans and conservatives cringed before accusations of racism, are over.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, the old gentlemanly conservatism on the right that I have known and loved all my life is dead. So when Williamson writes that “undoing the damage that Trump has done to the Republican party and the conservative movement will take years” he is caught in the undertow. The old Republican Party is gone, gone because it cringed on race. Maybe the whole Fifth Party System is gone. There is nothing to hang on for, nothing to hope for in the old Republican Party. As I wrote back in June, it’s time to Cut the Cringe.
