When Left Becomes (What They Think Is The) Right

An apt analogy:

It is no accident that American progressives put so many of us in mind of our Puritan ancestors: not for their virtues, such as they are, but for their sanctimoniousness, their humorlessness, their grim little mouths set permanently in rictuses....

The article is about the left's favorite boogeyman, racism:

Touré’s concept of “niggerization” is very subtle, so subtle, in fact, that only the most discerning of sensibilities — presumably Touré’s — can detect it, like one of those world-class master sommeliers uncovering notes of burnt pencil shavings in an ’82 Bordeaux. The less subtle forms of that phenomenon — for example, using the famous racial epithet on national television — have been in the 21st century restricted to members of the political party that Touré supports, for reasons that are no doubt subtle beyond the brute understanding of the uninitiated. And that is the state of play today: When Robert Byrd, a Democratic senator and Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan, helpfully elucidates the concept of “white niggers” on the evening news, that’s an unfortunate episode that demands sympathy for the wretched old coot. But when the Associated Press accurately transcribes the current president’s faux-folksy “g”-dropping — “Stop complainin’,” etc. — the verdict from MSNBC is not just “racist” but “inherently racist.”

Except he really does talk that way. Sometimes. And if you’ve ever noticed that Barack Obama’s propensity for slipping into ersatz southern cornpone preacher-speak correlates with the complexion of the audience being addressed, you might wonder who, exactly, is behaving in a way that is “inherently racist.” But such thoughts are unthinkable.

I like this observation as well:

The Left needs racism, because unlike their good, old-fashioned Marxist forebears, the postmodern Left’s politics is not rooted in economics or history but in narrative — the most adolescent narrative: Good Guys and Bad Guys. (You could call it Cowboys and Indians, but that would be . . . ) If the other side is Hitler, then almost anything is acceptable, because Hitler can’t win. But, unfortunately for the inventors of national crusades, you don’t get a lot of Hitlers. So Hitlers must be invented. This is one of the reasons every social issue adopted by the Left (and a few adopted by the Right) becomes the “moral equivalent of war” — War on Poverty, War on Drugs, etc. Hitler was many things: nationalist, socialist, central planner, advocate of substantial “investments” in national infrastructure projects, in favor of generous spending on the arts. And, of course, a racist. The GOP checks off none of those boxes, the Democrats check off a few, but Republicans are Hitler because somebody on Fox News said Santa is white. It makes sense, if your worldview depends on its making sense.

At this point in history, the Left needs a spectral standard of evidence when convicting its opponents of racism because there is so little actual evidence to be found. Right = Racist is an article of faith on the left, facts be damned.