GOP

Ron Fournier spoke an objective truth yesterday on Fox News Sunday. “The fastest growing bloc in this country thinks the Republican Party hates them,” the National Journal writer said to Michael Needham, chief executive of Heritage Action for America. “This party, your party, cannot be the party of the future beyond November, if you’re seen as the party of white people.” Fournier didn’t break any new ground with that statement. The ballyhooed and then ignored GOP autopsy said pretty much the same thing. If the Republican Party doesn’t broaden its reach to people of color, Hispanics in particular, it is doomed as a national party.

But Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) begged to differ. When he was asked by Laura Ingraham today to react to Fournier’s remark, he threw down the gauntlet.

Brooks: This is a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party. And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that whites hate everybody else. It’s a part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare, all those kinds of things. Well that’s not true. Okay?
You know you’ve vaulted over a line when even a firebrand conservative talker like Ingraham feels compelled to call you out. Good for her for doing so, even though I disagree with her blanket race-card accusation. Anyway, Brooks’s sense of being aggrieved, this surreal notion that whites are under siege by everyone else, is worthy of a thousand side-eyes. Jonathan Chait at New York magazine puts Brooks’s affront to history in its proper perspective today.

White racial victimization is a concept as old as racism itself. White reactionaries in the 19th century imagined that abolishing slavery would turn white people themselves into slaves, and the concept of white subjugation was transferred into such things as black suffrage, civil rights, and so on. The war on whites has raged continuously in the right-wing mind for more than two centuries.
“You can’t call someone ugly and expect them to go to the prom with you,” former House majority leader Dick Armey told the drafters of the GOP autopsy. “We’ve chased the Hispanic voter out of his natural home.” And Brooks is an example of why they won’t be coming back anytime soon.