Has the Barack experience cured Republicans of the cult of nonwhiteness?

Shrewsbury writes:

“Steele provides classic lesson on folly of affirmative action” is a very fine piece indeed.

Shrewsbury cannot imagine the Republican Party (i.e., the party of liberals, versus the Democrats, the party of totalitarians) being able to gin up the gumption to oppose the Obamanation in 2012 with a ticket of two white men. Indeed, he will be pleasantly astonished if the Republican ticket in ‘12 does not include an African- or Lateeeno-American. He has a nightmare vision of a bumpersticker with something like Palin/Mendoza on it. Then we may once again find ourselves almost hoping for an Obama victory. The problem with his re-election of course is that it would allow him to pack the Supreme Court with totalitarians.

LA replies:

If the Republicans did that, that would certainly be an extreme case of grabbing defeat from the jaws of victory, wouldn’t it? Much of the country, including many liberals, are now at least privately embarrassed by the jejune illusion to which they had subscribed, that electing a president of color would be salvific. Many have realized that the man they viewed as transformational is both an anti-American leftist, and, on those occasions when he’s not actively pursuing an anti-American, leftist course, a disastrous incompetent. The country has thus tacitly (not vocally) lost its belief in the cult of the nonwhiteness, not as a result of hearing race-realist arguments against it, but as a result of living through the experience of having a nonwhite president. Simultaneously, Republicans have seen the folly of picking a black man to head the RNC, now that that individual, who had been thought of for years as a conservative, turned out to be both a disastrous incompetent and a racial-chip-on-the-shoulder black liberal whining about the racism of the party he leads.

If, after the country has at such great cost gotten over its hunger and demand for nonwhite national leaders, Republicans nevertheless choose a nonwhite for their national ticket, the GOP will have shown once again that it is beyond help, at least in its current form.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 14, 2010 03:47 PM | Send