If the Scarlet ‘R’ Fits …

On racism, real and unreal

Our Banner in the Sky (1861), by Frederic Edwin Church (Wikimedia)

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece titled “The F-Word, Cont.” I had written on the F-word before (as the “Cont.” indicates). The subtitle of my recent piece is “On the use and abuse of ‘fascist.’”

Ah, yes.

Let me do some quoting:

As early as 1946, Orwell was saying that “fascism” had come to have no meaning “except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’” Many, many times, I have been called a “fascist,” for my conservative views (which are “Reaganite” or “classical liberal,” if you like). I could entertain you, or appall you, with stories.

My views are the opposite of fascist. I favor limited government, separation of powers, individual rights, a free economy, and so on and so forth. And fascism? I call on Mussolini, who said, “Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

That is a far cry from Tocquevillean democracy.

Well, want to hear a couple of stories? Shall I dip into my list of grievances? I’ll confine myself to one—one story.

One day, there was a meeting at the Metropolitan Opera. An executive denounced me as a “fascist.” (I was not present, I should probably say. I have never attended a meeting at the Met—only performances, which I review.)

A friend—bless her—said, “Jay is not a fascist.” The executive, rebuking her and brooking no opposition, said, “Yes, he is.”

Obviously, my friend related this to me. I then launched into a speech on what fascism is. My friend stopped me and said, “Jay, they don’t care. It has nothing to do with the meaning of things. They just know you’re a Republican who likes Reagan and the Bushes, and to them, that makes you a ‘fascist.’”

(I was indeed a Republican at the time, as I was from my college days until 2016.)

Okay, no more stories from me. Well, maybe one more—but not about me.

Last month, on Martin Luther King Day, a friend of mine was talking about the greatness of MLK’s Nobel lecture. I wrote about this lecture in my history of the prize (which is to say, the peace prize, the one that King won).

I’ll quote from that book:

His Nobel lecture … was one of his greatest orations, which is saying something. Part sermon, part political speech, part philosophical meditation, it is wise and beautiful. Some passages achieve transcendence.

But.

But one passage, I regard as beneath him—and beneath the occasion of the address.

King was speaking on December 11, 1964. The previous month, President Johnson had beaten Barry Goldwater in a landslide. And, in his Nobel lecture, King said,

Another indication that progress is being made was found in the recent presidential election in the United States. The American people revealed great maturity by overwhelmingly rejecting a presidential candidate who had become identified with extremism, racism, and retrogression. The voters of our nation rendered a telling blow to the radical Right. They defeated those elements in our society which seek to pit white against Negro and lead the nation down a dangerous fascist path.

In my book, I write,

An older King might well have been ashamed of that rhetoric, or at least regretted it. For one thing, Goldwater’s view of government and economics was the opposite of fascist: was the classical-liberal view.

Yes. (That is one reason the dominant Right in America today has no use for Goldwater, or Ronald Reagan.)

Okay, enough of fascism, on to racism. Many, many times, I have written about racism—and “racism,” which is different. Here is a 2010 essay in which I tell a number of stories and make a number of points.

The article begins,

Have you ever been called a racist on national television? It’s not the most pleasant experience, I can tell you.

Here are a few sentences from later on:

To be a conservative, or even anti-Left, is to be called a racist. That much is written in stone. I have been called a racist ever since I began to express classical-liberal views, while in college. And it’s easy to be a racist, or rather, a “racist.” If you oppose preferences based on skin color, favoring colorblindness instead—you’re a racist.

Maybe one more paragraph:

If you’re a conservative with any public role, you get used to being called a racist—but not really. And why should one become entirely inured to it? The charge of “racist” is about the worst that can be leveled in America. If we must merely shrug it off or ignore it, we’ve reached a sorry pass.

Yes.

Many times, I have written about Ellen Sauerbrey. I had a rather haunting conversation with her once. In 1998, she was the Republican nominee for governor of Maryland. The Democrats played the race card against her, smearing her as a racist.

Kurt Schmoke, the mayor of Baltimore, refused to play along. He refused to cut an ad for the Democratic ticket. Schmoke, a black Democrat, said that he knew the difference between a conservative and a racist—and Ellen Sauerbrey was no racist.

I will always bless his name for that. Always. Talked with him on the phone once (on a different matter). Thanked him for it.

Anyway, the false charge of racism worked for the Democrats, and Sauerbrey lost.

In a conversation with me about that campaign, she said something like this:

“It’s one thing if you lie about a person’s view of tax policy or agricultural subsidies or something. That’s not very nice, but then the election happens, and everybody goes on. If you lie about a person’s racial views, there’s a lingering effect. The lie corrodes society. It makes race relations worse. It makes it harder for society to heal, after all these years, all these decades. Everyone’s nerves are rubbed constantly raw.”

When you affix the scarlet “R” to someone—“R” for “racist”—you’d better be right. You better pin it on the right person. Because that is a terrible, terrible branding in America: the scarlet “R.”

So, I have written for many, many years about false charges of fascism and false charges of racism. But, you know? There are fascists in this world. Lots of them. There are racists in this world. Lots of them. That’s one of the destructive things about false charges: they dilute the potency of true charges.

In the summer of 2016, I was talking with a Republican about Donald Trump, soon to be the Republican presidential nominee. I said, “He’s dangerous. He’s a populist demagogue, and there’s danger in that.” The Republican looked at me and said, “Why, Jay, you sound like a liberal!”

It wasn’t so much the words he spoke. It was the look on his face. He looked at me pityingly, as though I were a mentally defective child. “Why, Jay, you sound like a liberal!”

Ninety-nine charges may be false—but that does not mean the hundredth one is.

There was a time when a bumper sticker was seen all across America: “Bush scares me.” The reference was to Bush the Younger, Bush 43—George W. Bush. I thought this was asinine. Juvenile. You may not have liked Bush or his policies—but he was no threat to our liberal-democratic order. Indeed, he is a great respecter of that order.

They called Bush a “racist.” (You know: “they.”) They had called his father a racist. They called Reagan a racist, and Dole, and McCain, and Romney …

So there are no racists, right? A Republican leader cannot be a racist, right?

Come on.

A headline from Axios reads, “Trump revives racist imagery once seen as disqualifying.” As you know, the president circulated a “meme” of Barack and Michelle Obama depicted as apes.

When people objected, the president’s press secretary said, “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

Basically, the response of Team Trump was: Grow up, you big pussies. Don’t be all woke.

Then, it was an intern’s fault—not the president’s. It was an intern who circulated that meme at a quarter to midnight.

Say, what happened to the Big Strong Guy who “tells it like it is” and “fights” and “never backs down”? Now it’s an intern?

I don’t believe it.

That article in Axios concludes,

The bottom line: Depicting Black Americans as monkeys was once a professional and political dead end.

Trump’s amplification of the imagery shows how far the guardrails have shifted, and how racist symbols once considered disqualifying have been absorbed into the modern political mainstream.

This is bad news. I detest “wokeness.” (We used to call it “political correctness.”) I have decried wokeness in countless articles. It is destructive of life—and particularly of scholarship and the arts, I would say.

To object to the depiction of black people as apes is not to be woke. It is to be civilized. It is to have a sense of history, and a conscience. It is not to be a racist a**hole.

I grew up with false charges of racism. In college, a friend and I had a running joke, or a running line: “That’s racist!” When you said pass the salt, rather than pass the pepper, we’d crack, “That’s racist!” We were so sick of it—so sick of false charges of racism, of a racist under every bed, of a hectoring anti-racism that could seem more like racism itself.

But dammit: racism, the real thing, is all around us.

(In 2024, I wrote an essay, longish, called “Wrestling with Race.” Into it, I poured just about everything I have to say on the subject.)

The Republican Party and the movement that styles itself “conservative” have embraced Trump and Trumpism. But they can make different choices, whenever they want.

For ten years, I’ve heard something like this: “If you liked Reagan and Buckley, you have to like Trump. He’s an extension of them. Sure, he may not be as sunny as Reagan or as erudite as Buckley. He’s rough around the edges. Liberals wet their pants at his ‘mean tweets’! But, fundamentally, he’s at one with those other guys.”

No sale. Trump is a Putin admirer who practices a dark politics. He has a lot more in common with George Wallace—and Henry Wallace, for that matter—than he does with Reagan and Buckley. He is hostile to Canada, Denmark, and, most egregiously, Ukraine, while he is soft—if not sweet—on the Kremlin.

He put his own name on another man’s memorial—John F. Kennedy’s. Neither Reagan nor Buckley would ever do such a thing. He accepted a woman’s Nobel medal, which he all but coerced from her. She had been in hiding from a tyrannical regime, and she almost died at sea, to go to Norway and collect her prize. Can you imagine Reagan or Buckley?

Trump’s economic outlook is more Perón than Friedman. His …

I’ll stop now. And write a nicer column later—maybe! Thank you for listening.