Leftward, Ho!
Beinart argues that on race, for example, even the Republicans are accepting at least some of the left-wing critique:
Most interesting—because he is the Republican candidate with the keenest sense of how to appeal to the general electorate—has been the approach of Senator Marco Rubio. In August, a Fox News anchor asked him about Black Lives Matter. Instead of condemning the movement, Rubio told the story of an African American friend of his whom police had stopped eight or nine times over the previous 18 months even though he had never broken the law. “This is a problem our nation has to confront,” Rubio declared. Then he talked about young African Americans who get arrested for nonviolent offenses and pushed into plea deals by overworked public defenders. The government, he said, must “look for ways to divert people” from going to jail “so that you don’t get people stigmatized early in life.”
Conservative Republicans didn’t talk this way in the ’90s. They didn’t talk this way even in the early Obama years. The fact that Rubio does so now is more evidence that today, unlike in the mid-’60s, the debate about race and justice isn’t moving to the right. It’s moving further left.
For the record, I think it’s a good thing if we work to fight police brutality and harassment of black motorists. Conservatives ought to care about those things, as matters of justice! My main objection is to the sense you get among activists that these are the worst problems facing black America, and the viewpoint that seems to remove all moral agency from African-Americans. The crazy demands by black activists on campuses make it harder for conservatives to take seriously legitimate complaints about racial injustice.