Racism in service of plutocracy: Beutler's response to Chait

Jonathan Chait's two-front argument that 1) the Republican policy platform has deep roots in slavery and racism, but 2) Democrats are too quick to ascribe racism to individual conservatives, their policy positions and utterances, angered a lot of progressives, who see false equivalence as well as neglect of the real effects of conservative policies on African Americans and other minorities.

On the false equivalence front, Brian Beutler argues that Chait has mischaracterized progressives' case that the Republican gestalt is racist:

Maybe Bernstein's wrong this time?

If I may indulge in a lazy blog post format, at bottom is my comment in response to Jonathan Bernstein's rather astonishing claim that the fight over the Islamic Center near Ground Zero. Bernstein, always trenchant in his  debunking of unsupported assertions about the way politicians' words and deeds affect electorates, rather gleefully insists that Park51 (f.k.a. Cordoba House) is

not going to affect elections, it's not substantively important, and to the extent it's symbolically important...well, let's just say it's not symbolically important as a stand-alone issue in any significant way (at best, it's what Kevin Drum says, one straw -- so shouldn't we pay more attention to all that other straw?).  I'm sorry to be a stick in the mud about it, but it just isn't actually a big story no matter how much it gets hyped.  Okay? 

My response, which I'll be the first to admit lacks supporting evidence and doubtless needs work:

Gee Jonathan, I know you're an expert in the dynamics of public opinion and all that, but to second CSH, you sure seem wrong to me here.

Per a Ben Smith story, I think the Republicans completely repudiating Bush's efforts to differentiate Islam from Islamism is significant. I think Palin's success in bringing another poisonous meme to the eruption point is significant. I think that waves of hysterical demagoguery that hit fever pitch are significant. And I think that, as with torture, when it comes to defense of civil liberties leaders have to be better than the rest of us, because majorities will sell those liberties without a twitch for a modicum of relief from rage or fear. When one of our two major parties goes all out demonizing an entire religion and works assiduously to interfere with a local government's approval of a religious institution to be built on private property, that's dangerous.