In an opinion by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the Supreme Court overturned a 30-year-old murder conviction, ruling that racial discrimination infected the selection of the all-white Georgia jury that found a black man guilty of a white woman’s murder. The vote was 7 to 1. The dissenter was Justice Thomas. His vote, along with the contorted 15-page opinion that explained it, was one of the most bizarre performances I have witnessed in decades spent observing the Supreme Court.
.. I almost think Justice Thomas revels in his chosen role as the anti-Thurgood Marshall, the civil rights hero whose seat he took on Oct. 23, 1991.
.. It was standard operating procedure for prosecutors to use peremptory challenges to prevent African-Americans from serving as jurors in trials of black defendants. The Batson decision held that when the defense made a plausible claim that a peremptory challenge was racially motivated, the prosecution had to offer “a race-neutral basis for striking the juror in question.” The trial judge was then to decide whether the prosecution’s explanation held up or whether it was a pretext.
.. For example, the prosecutor said he struck 34-year-old Marilyn Garrett because the “state was looking for older jurors that would not easily identify with the defendant,” who was 19. Yet there were eight white jurors under the age of 36 whom the prosecution didn’t strike; one who ended up serving was 21. The prosecutor also said he struck Ms. Garrett because she was divorced, while not striking three white potential jurors who were divorced.
Why Republicans Won’t Renounce Trump
Asked about one right-wing blogger who said Republicans were backing a racist candidate, McConnell simpered that what matters is winning the White House. “The right-of-center world needs to respect the fact that the primary voters have spoken,” he said.
Yes, in favor of blatant intolerance.
.. Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, who practically strained his back flipping from denouncing Trump to endorsing him, said that “claiming a person can’t do their job because of their race is sort of like the textbook definition of a racist comment. I think that should be absolutely disavowed. It’s absolutely unacceptable.”
Not so unacceptable that he is withdrawing his endorsement. “I believe that we have more common ground on the policy issues of the day and we have more likelihood of getting our policies enacted with him than we do with her,” he said, referring to Hillary Clinton.
Hillary and the Horizontals
Indeed, the road to Trumpism began with ideological conservatives cynically exploiting America’s racial divisions. The modern Republican Party’s central policy agenda of cutting taxes on the rich while slashing benefits has never been very popular, even among its own voters. It won elections nonetheless by getting working-class whites to think of themselves as a group under siege, and to see government programs as giveaways to Those People.
Or to put it another way, the G.O.P. was able to serve the interests of the 1 percent by posing as the defender of the 80 percent — for that was the white share of the electorate when Ronald Reagan was elected.
But demographic change — rapid growth in the Hispanic and Asian population — has brought the non-Hispanic white share of the electorate down to 62 percent and falling. Republicans need to broaden their base; but the base wants candidates who will defend the old racial order. Hence Trumpism.
.. Furthermore, some groups with relatively high income, like Jews and, increasingly,Asian-Americans, also vote strongly Democratic. Why? The answer in both cases, surely, is the suspicion that the same racial animus that drives many people to vote Republican could, all too easily, turn against other groups with a long history of persecution.
How Donald Trump Made Republicans Half-Aware of Racism
Buckley was a defender of white supremacyand segregation in the 1960s, and then a defender of apartheid in the 1980s. Buckley’s publisher, William Rusher, argued for the GOP to recast itself as an ideologically conservative party by bringing southern whites into the fold. Buckley helped turn a party that once had congenial relations with academic experts into a raging populist force. “I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Manhattan phone book,” he famously declared, “than the entire faculty of Harvard.”
.. If you comb through Buckley’s writings on race, the emphasis falls less on a principled defense of racial apartheid in the United States and South Africa (though he did offer that) than on resentment against its critics. Buckley was simply far less interested in racial oppression than in the hypocrisy, obnoxiousness, and potential overreach of its critics. That spirit defined racial conservatism then, and defines it today. To read the pages ofNational Review, or The Wall Street Journal editorial page, racism against nonwhites is a virtually nonexistent problem. Conservatives are instead fixated on the way the racial debate has been turned against conservatives or white people.
.. The Trump constituency factored into conservative calculations all along. Conservatives courted them, defended them, and understood all along that their votes would supply the margin needed to implement conservative ideas, even if many of those ideas (like supply-side economics and neoconservative foreign policy) had little natural appeal to those voters. They even understood, as Lowry very explicitly laid out, that those voters would doom the orthodox conservatives if they formed a splinter party. The one thing Buckley and his successors failed to imagine, though, is that those people would actually one day take over.
