The boy who cried wolf and then got eaten by a wolf

You knew this had to be coming. Right after Trump told four uppity colored Congressbitches to go back to Africa or wherever, Jay Nordlinger had this to say:

I’m gonna write a tweet that’s gonna tick a lot of people off. Reagan conservatives like me have been called racists — falsely and maliciously — all of our lives. So, to many Americans, every charge of racism, no matter how legitimate, rings hollow. Good job, wolf-criers.

So of course that made the libs really mad and they dragged him into the streets and stoned him to death ratioed him on Twitter something fierce, which gave Nordlinger a chance to complain about that, too:

I used to write about race a lot. Then I tapered off, mainly because there was scarcely anything new to say. In 2010, I poured a bit of myself into a brief essay, here. I wrote, “To be a conservative, or even anti-Left, is to be called a racist.” The editor of that piece, a young man, objected to this sentence. He thought it was untrue. I insisted it was true, as a generality.

Let me quote more fully:

To be a conservative, or even anti-Left, is to be called a racist. That much is written in stone. I have been called a racist ever since I began to express classical-liberal views, while in college. And it’s easy to be a racist, or rather, a “racist.” If you oppose preferences based on skin color, favoring colorblindness instead — you’re a racist.

Farther down, I wrote,

If you’re a conservative with any public role, you get used to being called a racist — but not really. And why should one become entirely inured to it? The charge of “racist” is about the worst that can be leveled in America. If we must merely shrug it off or ignore it, we’ve reached a sorry pass.

Yes. Back to my tweet, earlier this month. If you call Ronald Reagan a racist, and George Bush (both of them), and Bob Dole, and John McCain, and Mitt Romney . . . you get my drift. People are going to think, “Well, that’s just what they do. They call Republicans and conservatives racists automatically. It’s as meaningless as ‘fascist,’ out of some mouths.”

Yeah, the F-word — I’ve gotten that one too. I have a related memory. A prominent writer called me “a shill for the far Right.” Part of my response was: If you hold me to be “far Right,” what language are you going to have left over for the far Right?

While I’m on Memory Lane: I was talking with a friend several years ago — a conservative friend — and I said that I thought a certain politician on the right was “dangerous.” My friend smiled at me a condescending smile and said, “Why, Jay, you sound like a liberal!”

Sure. They call all of us dangerous: Reagan, the Bushes, Romney, Tinkerbell, everybody. That does not mean that, someday, somewhere, there won’t be a politician who is dangerous.

It is the responsibility of people, I think, not to debase words — words such as “racist,” “fascist,” and “anti-Semite.” There are such people in the world: racists, fascists, and anti-Semites. Indeed, the world is overrun with them, and their cousins (“ist”s and “ite”s of various sorts). If you confront the real thing and people are slow to believe you, because you’ve cried the word falsely a million times before, the slow-to-believe can be forgiven, or at least understood.

You know?

Nordlinger actually quit the Republican party, at least for a time, when it nominated Trump (I don’t know what his relationship status is at present), in part because he was disgusted by Trump’s racial demagoguery and authoritarian tendencies.

Yet like almost all American conservatives, he remains in profound denial about the Trump phenomenon, which people like Nordlinger continue to treat as if it were a bolt out of the blue, a swan in fashionable fascist black, a freak detour on the march back to Limited Government etc. etc.

These people never ask, why do all these racist authoritarians keep dominating my party? To them, left-liberal predictions that the Republican party has been, since at least the days of Richard Nixon’s southern strategy, trending ever-more ineluctably toward becoming a party of white identity politics, and the purveyor of the sort of herrenvolk democracy that such politics require in order to survive, were nothing but horrible baseless slanders. That these horrible baseless slanders have turned out to be completely correct is not something that people like Nordlinger can allow themselves to contemplate now, even as Donald Trump’s authoritarian racism achieves something close to 100% approval among self-identified Republicans.