A frontpage item today, Immigration: How the GOP is killing the GOP, makes the case very strongly that the Right's current anti-immigrant stance is demographic suicide. But the CPAC panel being discussed was all about how the other side plans to escape that consequence of political suicide that would follow from their racism if the demogrpahics of the voting population were allowed to track the emerging non-white majority in this country.
Shouldn't we be paying attention to how they plan to do this, deny voting rights to that emerging minority? Isn't that the important issue here, rather than what trolls Tancredo, et al, are?
Don't overthink this. Don't be distracted from the real issues and real dangers here by the first easy rhetorical target the other side presents.
The news that I take away from this CPAC panel is that these people understand that they have a problem. They would not even disagree with our analysis that they are the problem. They would only take exception to our characterization of their motives. They stand foursquare for what they think of as "Western" values, where you would say they mean "white" values, and they understand and fully accept that that stand of theirs, "athwart history" as Buckley would put it, makes them the target of our hatred.
They welcome that hatred. You're not even slightly chipping away at their confidence that they are on the right path when you characterize them as their own problem. Damn straight. People who stand for the Right are always going to be unpopular with the forces of disorder and decay. They are happy to serve as a lightning rod.
Their solution is not to become good Democrats, to surrender Western Civilization so that they will no longer be the problem, so that they can compete for black and brown votes on an equal footing with those muliticultural Dems. Their solution is to keep black and brown people from voting. That's what the conference was about, how to keep brown people from voting. Only had it been about how to get more brown votes, would our point that you don't do so by pillorying brown people, have any bite. But their side doesn't want more brown votes, what it wants is no more brown voters.
They know what they want. We should not be confused about what they want. We need to know how they plan to get what they want.
Now, if you don't think that project of keeping brown people from voting stands any chance of working, fine, just making fun of these people is all the strategy we need against them, because they are no threat. But if they are no threat, why pay them any attention? I don't find the sight of moral infirmity very appealing, and I only want it pointed out to me if there is some practical end in mind, if we all need to pay attention for some practical reason.
There is, of course, this practical reason to pay attention to these moral cripples, that they may very well succeed in keeping brown people from voting. As long as we leave voting as a state matter, there is most definitely a risk that Red states will deal with this problem of Red not being too popular with people of color, by making sure that people of color don't get to vote against Red.
Sure, we have the XVth Amendment, that means that Red states can only keep people of color from voting if the federal courts let them. A generation ago, I would have said that "only" was a pretty small needle to thread. Now, after 30 years of the Right systematically packing the federal bench with Federalist Society stooges, it's an eight-lane Interstate. A whole caravan of camels could barge right through.
That's the prize, the federal bench.
Look, for more than a generation, these people have been trumpeting to the world their belief that Jim Crow was only overturned, the federal courts only started enforcing the XVth, because liberals had packed the courts against Right thinking. They've told us all along that they are engaged on re-packing the court with judges who will go back to "original intention", which, in practice, seems to always mean, pre-Warren Court precedent.
The federal courts don't have to allow openly racial discrimination in granting voting rights. They didn't allow open violation of the XVth even in Jim Crow days. There always had to be some dodge, some fig leaf, to allow the courts the out of tolerating racial discrimination in voting without doing so overtly. So there were poll taxes, and poll tests, and grandfather clauses, etc. ,etc. All the Federalist Society stooges have to do is tolerate some similar dodge and fig leaf.
Some fig leaf like laws denying voting rights to people whose US citizenship derives from Amendment XIV, sec 1, the "born in the USA" derivation of citizenship. You and I would see in such a law a simple cover for racism, a dodge. But you and I aren't on the federal bench.
Keep your eye on the prize.
What are we going to do about the current federal bench? What are we going to do to take the control of voting rights away from the states?
Forget about Tancredo and his whole creepshow. They're the booby prize.