Pretending the war on Critical Race Theory (sic) isn’t a cynical moral panic

The sudden appearance of “critical race theory” as a central talking point of reactionary ooga-booga was deliberately manufactured. You don’t have to believe me — believe the guy who manufactured it and boasted about it. Nonetheless, the We’d Prefer to Avoid Trump Conservative and Desperately Seeking A Reasonable Republican Centrist Industrial Complex is desperate to claim that the astroturf is actually artisan cultivated organic grass:

In retrospect, this was the clearest sign that Youngkin was going to win. Milquetoast Reaganite David Brooks, after wandering embarrassed in the wilderness under the vulgarity of Donald Trump, had found something that could make him feel swift and fierce again. The advocate of civility and civic purpose, signatory of the Harper‘s letter deploring illiberal discourse, could take the side of the people shouting at school-board meetings, with their “sense” that “cultural power” was being wielded against them. He could feel, once again, like a cowboy or maybe a steelworker; he could believe that the will of the people was good and useful. 

Youngkin had only barely tuned the Republican dog whistle back up out of the tugboat-horn range where Trump had been blasting it. This was a candidate who put out an ad with a blond woman fuming into a camera about how her son was traumatized by the anti-racist reading he was given at school (the camera panned over a rustic painted portrait of her white family, then back). But it was enough to allow the centrists and the professionally palatable conservatives to go on the attack again, to declare that the liberals had antagonized Real Americans with Critical Race Theory and were paying the price. 

Republicans, 11 months after racist militias led their president’s supporters in storming the Capitol, were back to being the victims in the culture war. Ross Douthat, Brooks’ more vigorously culture-warring stablemate at the Times, celebrated the result by writing, “You can tell people that C.R.T. is a right-wing fantasy all you want, but this debate was actually instigated not by right-wing parents but by an ideological transformation on the left.”

Douthat is usually clever about shading the truth to his advantage, but here he resorted to a brazen lie. The entire attack on “Critical Race Theory”—that is, on a hodgepodge of accurate history lessons, overwrought sensitivity trainings, racial integration efforts, and whatever else could be lumped together under Black people and liberals offending conservative whites—was openly and explicitly instigated by the conservative movement, under the guidance of the activist Christopher Rufo. Rufo and his backers publicly took credit for the propaganda campaign as it unfolded. Claiming it originated on the left is like saying the House Democratic Caucus was responsible for Frank Luntz’s campaign against the “death tax.” 

Nevertheless, the centrists were stampeding along behind the rightists, eager to restore the balance between two normal political parties, and to return to the age-old message that the Democrats were too ideological and too invested in Black people’s interests. The Times numbers pundit Nate Cohn was on Twitter endorsing the same message as its right-wingers, praising Youngkin for his “implicit aspiration to a postracial, colorblind society” and declaring that the movement against Critical Race Theory was “clearly potent stuff.” 

Wherever there’s a pundit defending Republican race-baiting, there’s someone praising Teddy Bear Martin Luther King Jr., the famous activist whose entire career consisted of one line in one speech. Or perhaps noted civil rights icon John Roberts solemnly intoning “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” while holding that the Reconstruction Amendments forbid even modest integration efforts.