When I read Jonathan Chait's extended argument that a) many Republican policies have deep roots in slavery and racism, but b) for liberals to assume that advocacy of core conservative policies is itself a marker of racism is illegitimate, my immediate thought was that Chait was echoing Obama:
@xpostfactoid1 @jonathanchait Hey, didn't Obama say that in March 2008? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/18/obama-race-speech-read-th_n_92077.html …In a followup post, Chait himself notes that Obama had more recently stolen his fire -- in an interview with David Remnick published this past January:
“There is a historic connection between some of the arguments that we have politically and the history of race in our country, and sometimes it’s hard to disentangle those issues,” he went on. “You can be somebody who, for very legitimate reasons, worries about the power of the federal government — that it’s distant, that it’s bureaucratic, that it’s not accountable — and as a consequence you think that more power should reside in the hands of state governments. But what’s also true, obviously, is that philosophy is wrapped up in the history of states’ rights in the context of the civil-rights movement and the Civil War and Calhoun. There’s a pretty long history there. And so I think it’s important for progressives not to dismiss out of hand arguments against my Presidency or the Democratic Party or Bill Clinton or anybody just because there’s some overlap between those criticisms and the criticisms that traditionally were directed against those who were trying to bring about greater equality for African-Americans. The flip side is I think it’s important for conservatives to recognize and answer some of the problems that are posed by that history ...”That is in fact a pretty exact match with Chait's thesis, as Chait asserts. But like almost everything Obama says -- in fact like almost everything most of us say -- it was close kin to prior pronouncements. Here's what I had flashed back to, from Obama's great speech on race in the immediate wake of the Jeremiah Wright controversy. After recounting the roots of African American anger, Obama pivoted, in his on-the-one-hand-on-the-other manner:
