Steele Cage

Last weekend began with Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, clinging to his job primarily via implicit racial blackmail. Steele’s tenure has consisted of a string of gaffes and managerial blunders, but Republicans had concluded that his color made him un-fireable. “You’re not going to dump the first African American chairman,” an influential party strategist told Politico, “That’s the only reason.”

By the end of the weekend, the attention of the political world turned to a 2008 comment by Harry Reid that Barack Obama, unlike other black candidates, could win the presidency due to his light skin and lack of “Negro dialect.” Steele was immediately thrust back into the role for which his party chose him. He denounced Reid’s comments as “racist” and demanded that the Senate majority leader step down.

Steele perfectly embodies modern Republican racialism. Democratic racialism represents a perversion of the civil rights ideal--an opposition to racism taken to excesses of hypersensitivity, occasionally devolving into a mere political tactic. Republican racialism is an attempt to mimic Democratic racialism without first having any grasp of the original sentiment underlying it--a parodic replica of the original thing, like a person who decides to convert to Judaism by studying Madonna.

Republican racialism is not an expression of racism but, rather, a failure to understand racism. Obama’s appearance on the scene has made this misapprehension painfully apparent. On the right, there lies an enduring suspicion that Obama’s race has been his greatest, and possibly only, political asset. As Glenn Beck complained in 2008, “a lot of white people will say, ‘Look, I’m not racist. I voted for Barack Obama.’ ” Only white racial guilt could explain the inexplicable rise of this inexperienced, ultra-radical, teleprompter-dependent figure.

The reality is that Obama’s race is far from an unalloyed political boon. In 22 percent of the counties in the United States, Obama garnered a lower percentage of the vote than John Kerry did in 2004, despite running in a dramatically more favorable environment. Those counties are clustered in a stretch running from Louisiana, north through Arkansas and Oklahoma, and then east through the Appalachians. Republicans, though, have treated Obama’s race as a trump card.

Thus the immediate Republican response to Obama has been to find their own black guy. In 2004, the Illinois GOP imported lunatic Alan Keyes from Maryland to run for Senate, on the apparent assumption that another African American could neutralize Obama’s strength. In 2009, they elevated the buffoonish Steele to party chairman, where he has proven a regular source of embarrassment. (Incidentally, why are such a high proportion of black Republicans in elected life crazy? Is it because the party’s demand for ideologically qualified African Americans so outstrips the supply? I’m open to alternative explanations.) The post-election Bobby Jindal wave and the current Marco Rubio wave--Mike Huckabee: “He is our Barack Obama but with substance”--represent ethnic variants of the we-need-our-own-black-guy strategy.

The campaign to whip up faux racial outrage at Reid likewise shows a party clumsily attempting to mimic what it considers a devastatingly effective tactic. Republican efforts to explain why Reid’s comments amounted to racism have proven comical. “Some Americans,” huffed The Wall Street Journal, “white and black, might be more insulted by Mr. Reid’s implication that most Americans--45 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964--are still so residually racist that they would only vote for a black candidate who isn’t really . . . black.” But, while it may be insulting to white Americans to suggest that they respond more favorably to a politician who looks and sounds more like they do, it’s hardly racist, let alone false.