The Right's Racism Is Showing

Except that instead of citing the pragmatic nationalism of Washington, Hamilton, Adams and the earlier incarnation of Madison -- who all favored a vibrant central government -- the Right promoted the revisionist version of a weak central government as devised by Jefferson and the Southern slaveholders.

With the election of the first African-American president in 2008, and with it the recognition of the demographic changes that Barack Obama represented, the lightly repressed racism of the American Right bubbled to the surface with conspiracy theories about Obama's supposed Kenyan birth and posters showing him in African tribal dress with a bone through his nose.

Of course, Republican and Tea Party leaders still insisted that their political movement was not about racism, but about free markets and removing the heavy hand of government regulation. But their actions kept belying their words, both in the racially tinged legislation -- like discriminatory voter ID laws, resistance to immigration reform and elimination of food stamps -- and in the rulings of the right-wing Supreme Court, such as gutting the Voting Rights Act.

Then, there was the right-wing backlash on Fox News and talk radio against the public outrage over the murder of an unarmed 17-year-old African-American boy Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. Some right-wing commentators even celebrated the acquittal of his killer George Zimmerman on Saturday, much as an earlier generation of racists cheered "not guilty" verdicts for Klansmen accused of lynching uppity Negroes.

When confronting the apparent glee that some right-wingers expressed over Zimmerman's acquittal -- and facing comparable sentiments when the Supreme Court's majority trashed the Voting Rights Act and House Republicans axed food stamps for the poor -- one has to wonder where these white racists hope to take the United States.

In their ugly words and deeds, there is an echo of Jefferson and an earlier generation of American racists who wistfully hoped that they could ship non-whites out of the United States and make the young nation white and homogenous.

We heard that wistful voice again last year in Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney wanting to make life so miserable for Hispanic immigrants that they would "self-deport" and complaining that Obama was giving "stuff" to the unworthy "47 percent" whose color in the mind's eyes of Romney's white listeners was surely of a darker hue.

The current dysfunction of the Congress is another distant echo of the pre-Civil War days when Southern whites obstructed any proposal for federal government action, even disaster relief, as a possible precedent for ending slavery. In the modern case, the fear may be that the federal government will help non-whites gain genuine political power.

So, what is becoming painfully apparent is that the pleasant thought that the United States was finally reaching a post-racial future isn't true. The only question is whether the reassertion of white supremacy -- now in the guise of "small-government conservatism" -- will succeed in creating a Second Jim Crow era.