Definition of a "racist": a conservative winning an argument with a liberal

A short time ago I had a back-and-forth with a couple of liberals in the comments of a post here on Richard Nixon's admirable record on civil rights. I pointed out that the leftist "Southern Strategy"meme about Nixon and Republican political tactics-- the claim by Democrats that Republicans strategically gained support in the South from the 1960's onward by using racist code-words or dog-whistles to garner white racist votes-- is belied by the facts. Republicans have a long consistent history of support for civil rights. When the South was racist, it was a Democrat stronghold. When it ceased being racist, it
became a Republican stronghold.

President Nixon, allegedly the instigator of the "Southern Strategy", was a supporter of civil rights all his life, and immediately upon becoming president in 1969-- at the height of his mythical "Southern Strategy"-- he desegregated schools in the South and instituted Affirmative Action. Some appeal to "racism", huh? Southern"racists" elected Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992, and Southern "racists" continued to elect mostly Democrat congressmen and senators until 1996.

To bolster their claim of Republican codewords leveraging insidious racism in the South for the past half-century, my liberal interlocutors quoted snippets from Republican strategists Kevin Phillips in 1970 and Lee Atwater in 1981 that they claim suggest the use of such codewords for political purposes. Such quotes presumably compensate for the utter lack of evidence for racism in Republican policy and in actual elections in the South during the past fifty years.

But we need not harken back forty years to find explicit political use of racist codewords. Here's a remarkable example of a liberal journalist advocating the false charge of racism for political advantage from 2010.

JournoList is a private journalists'  list serve used by hundreds of liberal journalists (but I repeat myself) to discuss and coordinate their journalism. The emails were leaked in 2010, revealing extensive collusion on the part of liberal journalists to hype liberal views and smear conservatives in their ostensibly objective work as mainstream journalists. Participants included Time magazine's Joe Klein, the New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin, New York Times' columnist Paul Krugman, the Nation's Chris Hayes, and folks from Newsweek, Politico, Huffington Post, the New Republic, and many others. Prominent among the exhortations to twist the news were extensive discussions as to how to spike the Reverend Jeremiah Wright story and protect Obama's candidacy.

Perhaps the most remarkable email was from Spencer Ackerman, a journalist who has worked at the New Republic, Wired, American Prospect, Talking Points Memo, among others.

Ackerman:

"What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger's [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constand fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically. 

[T]ake one of them-- Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares-- and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn kids to overreaction and self-destruction."

Here is a quote from a liberal journalist, colluding with other liberal journalists, not from 1970 or 1981 but from 2010, encouraging the use of false accusations of racism in mainstream news reports to slander and intimidate conservatives.

The charge of racism is incessantly used by liberals to intimidate and smear conservatives. It is a mainstream political tactic, used not only by Democrats but by ostensibly impartial journalists, to smother political debate in our country.

In fact, the accusation of racism against Republicans is probably the most common political tactic used by the left.

"Racism" is a liberal dog whistle, and it's been used shamelessly against the very people-- conservative Republicans-- who have been the tireless opponents of actual racism for the better part of two centuries.  It is precisely because the charge of racism against conservatives and Republicans is an inversion of the truth and is so vicious that it has proven to be so effective for liberals, who for two centuries embraced racism and collaborated with Southern segregationists and their modern-day race-baiting imitators.