What conservatives would have acknowledged as racist as recently as 20 years ago is today’s conservative orthodoxy.Īnd yet, the bigoted trash that gets trundled out on Tucker Carlson every night is what these white wingers actually believe. Just 15 years later, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act -meant to restore the original Voting Rights Act after the conservative-controlled Supreme Court eviscerated it in 2013-received 219 votes in the House, none of them from Republicans, and couldn’t get anywhere near 60 votes in the Senate. Take the Voting Rights Act, which in 2006 was reauthorized by an overwhelming majority of the House and received unanimous approval in the Senate. I’m part of the first Black generation since the end of Reconstruction who will die in a country that is more legally bigoted than it was when we were born. Mainstream conservatism has lurched far to the right during my lifetime. The same conservatives who used to value a good hood when doing racism now have a public meltdown when you ask them to put on a mask.

James Baldwin could hear it, but most white folks could not (or would not).Ĭonservatives will tell you that liberals have changed-that a rise of “illiberalism” is squelching free speech across academia, and chipping away at freedom anywhere and everywhere else. And, more to the point, even if you couldn’t draw a meaningful distinction between the policies Buckley and Duke would support, Buckley was carefully practiced in saying the quiet part quietly. In my day, you could distinguish between, say, William F.

And conservative “skill” at expressing those thoughts has now largely devolved into what plays well on Fox News. Even though I disagreed with these men about a great many things-a feeling I’m sure is mutual-I was privileged to learn from some of the people who are most skilled at being wrong.īut conservative “thought” is not what it used to be. I’m glad I had the option to treat my academic studies like a Rocky Balboa training montage, which means I’m glad my educational institutions gave tenure to conservative faculty members and empowered them to teach what they believe. If I seem somewhat uniquely able to rhetorically joust with the legal proto-fascists currently mucking about in America, it’s because I’ve already thought about everything they think about. I also knew that many of my classmates who agreed with these men would themselves go on to be leaders in industry and politics. I believed (accurately, it turns out) that these were the kinds of white men I’d be fighting for the rest of my life, so I’d better learn firsthand how they think. Will, and Alan Dershowitz, and shared an apocryphal cab with Thomas Freidman. When I was in school, I actively sought out professors and lecturers who espoused views I disagreed with.

Cancel Culture by Alan M. Dershowitz