Is that an African elephant coming up behind you? (Brian Snelson, CC-BY 2.0)

In the latest New York magazine, Jonathan Chait writes ostensibly about the character of racism during the Obama presidency. It’s generated a minor firestorm because it’s presented as a sort of apologia for conservative racism—the left doesn’t like the apologia, and conservatives don’t agree with the implied racism. Despite claiming to be about “not the way anyone imagined” it is still the same old stuff, the usual falsehoods that have made it into the liberal worldview:

That the tea party was a reaction to Obama; the only question is how race played into it. This ignores that the first tea party target was TARP. The movement began—before it was named—against the program that President Bush signed. The protests continued against President Obama’s pork-barrel “stimulus”, but they started as protests against TARP.

Joe Wilson’s “you lie” outburst is discussed solely through the question of how racist it was, and without any discussion of whether or not it was true; merely an assertion that it was not. However, states implementing the ACA are basically promising that the information submitted will not be checked, and the ACA does not appear to require proof of citizenship even though it says citizenship is required. This doesn’t guarantee that illegal immigrants will have their health care covered under the ACA—but it doesn’t make for much of a block, either.

When he talks about the new media myth that excludes Republicans and how that makes Republicans angry, his pantheon includes Martin Luther King—without mentioning that King was a Republican, and that the reason he was a Republican is that Republicans were instrumental in passing civil rights legislation against the filibusters of Democrats. In other words, there’s a good reason that Republicans are angry at the new media myth: it’s wrong.

And to back it up, he puts forward an old misleading quote from Lee Atwater.

However, the most telling line in the opinion piece is this:

…the Obama years have been defined by a bitter disagreement over the size of government, which quickly reduces to an argument over whether the recipients of big-government largesse deserve it. There is no separating this discussion from one’s sympathies or prejudices toward, and identification with, black America.

This is the close-mindedness of the anointed in a nutshell: that arguments about the control government has in our lives is about the intentions of government and those who support big government. That when we question the benefits of government programs and their costs, we are questioning the intentions of those who run and support and enact those programs.

The real divide in America is not between people who disagree about who deserves government largesse, it is between people who think that big government is an unquestionable good, an a priori argument that then inevitably reduces to intentions; and those who believe that big government almost always hurts those it tries to help, and almost always creates not just more problems than it solves, but in fact usually deepens the problems it tries to solve.

It is not, as Chait asserts without question, whether “black Americans” deserve government largesse. It is whether the existence of this government largesse causes the very problems in America it was purportedly created to solve, and whether the programs are worth the lost opportunities for which the resources that pay for them could otherwise be used.

The measurements Chait uses to prove his thesis are mired in this same close-mindedness: the questions used to create those metrics assume that the question is one of “who deserves” rather than “does it alleviate or worsen the problems it was meant to solve” or “is it worth the trade-off, is it worth what we lose?”.

The left, and the anointed, are so mired in race that they cannot see the world through any different lens. And since what they’re looking for isn’t there, they see opposition to their programs as invidious racism—and can’t see the racism in the mirror.