I’ve been writing on conservatism and the right for several years. As part of that work, I spend most of my time reading right-leaning news outlets and opinion journals and talking to conservatives — fiscal conservatives and social conservatives, Trump-supportive, Trump-adjacent, and Trump-skeptical.

And in those travels, there’s an argument I hear a lot, particularly in the past week — that had liberals not been so quick to call some on the right, or some ideas on the right, racist, perhaps the right would not have resorted to uniting behind a racist like Donald Trump.

Something I have learned:



If you are a Republican nominee for President – or President – you will be accused of being a racist.



John Lewis compared John McCain’s campaign to being like that of George Wallace.



It comes with the territory unfortunately. — Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) July 18, 2019

As former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer put it to the New Yorker, “I am also aware of the fact that Democrats accused my boss, George W. Bush, in 2000, and ran ads calling him a racist. ... They called John McCain a racist. They called Mitt Romney a misogynist and a racist. They will call whoever comes after Donald Trump a racist. The issue is a lot less, to me, Donald Trump’s words and behavior, and a lot more of the Democrats’ eternal, ongoing tactics, which I reject.”

To them, I’d like to pose a question, and I pose it as someone who has worked hard to understand the conservative movement and conservatism more broadly, and do so in the most generous possible light:

What if, in truth, the conservative movement’s inability to self-police itself against racism and establish firm guardrails against racists in the movement has resulted in an American right increasingly beholden to racism and racist arguments?

And what if, in truth, it’s the left that has seen this most clearly and that has been pointing it out again and again? Perhaps, if your movement has ultimately rallied around a racist, allegedly in response to being called racist, that’s evidence that the people who saw the power racist arguments held in your movement, and the frequency with which those views were referenced, were onto something all along.

Viewed in this light, the popularity of this excuse — the idea that if the left hadn’t been pointing out racism on the right, the right never would have embraced a racist as its leader — is the same denial that got conservatives into this mess perpetuating itself.

Right-leaning racism, weaponized

To begin with, the term “racism” includes ideas, policies, and actions that are based in prejudicial attitudes against people based on their real or perceived racial or ethnic identity and qualities associated with that background.

And it should be clear by now that racism, like any form of prejudice, has gradations. Not all racism is the racism of the men who murdered 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. Sometimes it’s the racism of middle-class white liberals who fervently oppose school desegregation efforts in major cities under the belief that the presence of black children would result in plummeting school quality. Sometimes it is the racism of the benighted “racial realists” who arrived at the conclusion that nonwhite people are inferior and have spent the past several centuries working to backfill an explanation. And sometimes it’s the racism of a Donald Trump, who, as I wrote last year, was shocked that members of the Congressional Black Caucus didn’t already know Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson.

And very rarely do racists think of themselves as racist. As former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, the man who once said, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever,” said in an interview in 1968, “No, sir, I don’t regard myself as a racist, and I think the biggest racists in the world are those who call other folks racist. I think the biggest bigots in the world are those who call other folks bigots.”

But the kind of racism that’s most common in movement conservatism — by which I mean the political project of conservatism, with the intent of winning elections and changing policy and law — is what I call “instrumentalized” racism, the deliberate use of racism and racist tropes for the sole purpose of winning votes and elections.

People who engage in instrumentalized racism do so not necessarily because they themselves are “racist” on an individual level, but because they believe that voters will respond — and perhaps only respond — to racism. (After losing an election in 1958 to John Patterson, who had a devoted Klan following, Wallace allegedly said that he would never let a political adversary “out-ni**er” him again.) They can thus brag about the great work they’ve done on behalf of minority communities and their lack of racist bones while simultaneously wielding racism as a political cudgel — a cudgel they argue is necessary.

After all, even Patterson said in 2008 of his past racist invective, “When I became governor, there were 14 of us running for governor that time and all 14 of us were outspoken for segregation in the public schools. And if you had been perceived not to have been strong for that, you would not have won. I regret that, but there was not anything I could do about it but to live with it.” And Wallace famously said of his own campaigns, “You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about ni**ers, and they stomped the floor.”

But instrumentalized racism, of course, continued long after the fall of de jure Jim Crow. The 2000 Republican primary gave a tremendous (and considerably more recent) example of the genre:

In the 2000 Republican presidential primary then-Governor George Bush of Texas was running against Senator John McCain of Arizona. McCain won the New Hampshire primary and the race went on to South Carolina where the Bush campaign knew they had to stop McCain. Using a tried and true strategy, the phony poll, opponents of McCain spread a complete falsehood. Phone calls to South Carolina Republican voters asked “Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain … if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?” McCain and his wife Cindy had adopted a dark-skinned girl from Bangladesh in 1991 and that child, Bridget, was campaigning with them in South Carolina.

The meaning and importance of guardrails

I bring up the idea of “guardrails” a lot with respect to movement conservatism — but every political movement needs them. Guardrails would be how, for example, one might avoid the concerning crossover of a movement led by women of color and a devout anti-Semite who believes that Jews are responsible for the prevalence of LGBTQ people.

But the role of guardrails in the conservative movement has always been vulnerable, because it has always been under suspicion — particularly from those who believe that “true” conservatism is far-right conservatism and thus virtually necessitates racism. When I wrote about conservatism for the New York Times, I found a letter written to National Review founder William F. Buckley regarding his decision to slowly excise the conspiratorial (and racist) John Birch Society from conservative circles. The letter, written by Arthur Barksdale of San Mateo, California, reads in part: “I have always believed you to be a true conservative. However, since you seem categorically to accept most of the left-wing programs I’m beginning to doubt your sincerity.”

The guardrails that are supposed to protect the conservative movement from outright racists are currently only intended to stop the George Lincoln Rockwells and Paul Nehlens of the world. They define racism so stringently that they miss it when it dons the barest of disguises, or simply frames itself in terms of structural arguments rather than personal invective.

And racists have learned to fit their invective to the frame. In March, I spoke with Nicholas Fuentes, an alt-right-leaning podcaster best known for urging listeners to infiltrate the Republican Party and for decrying interracial relationships as “degenerate” (and arguing that the presence of Jews hurt his “daily existence”).

But he told me that his views on “race mixing,” as he put it, were based merely on concerns about compatibility. “Race can be a difficult barrier for compatibility. And beyond this, I have a problem with the subliminal promotion of race mixing in television and advertising; it’s obvious there is an agenda being promoted, and it’s very sick.” (He did not explain what exactly was “sick” about interracial relationships.)

As professor Ibram X. Kendi told me earlier this year after Rep. Steve King was removed from his committee assignments for waxing rhapsodic about white nationalism, “People define racism in a way that exonerates them. If they can narrow [the definition of racism] as much as possible to things they are not saying or doing or are about, that leaves them off the hook.”

Take, for example, the work of my colleague Zack Beauchamp, who attended the inaugural National Conservatism conference last week. One of the speakers was University of Pennsylvania Law School professor Amy Wax, who was previously removed from teaching first-year students after claiming she had never seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class. (Penn Law does not publicly rank students.)

During her remarks at the conference, Wax used the subject of litter to argue for an immigration policy that would prioritize white immigrants but deprioritize nonwhite immigrants. “I think we are going to sink back significantly into Third Worldism,” she said. “We are going to go Venezuela. You can just see it happening. One of my pet peeves, one of my obsessions, is litter. If you go up to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, or Yankee territory, versus other places that are quote-unquote more diverse, you are going to see an enormous difference, I’m sorry to report.”

Wax was crystal clear about the implication of this observation. “Europe and the First World to which the United States belongs remain mostly white for now, and the Third World, although mixed, contains a lot of nonwhite people,” she said. “Embracing cultural distance, cultural distance nationalism means in effect taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.” The problem, she fretted, was that conservatives were too afraid of the “racial dimensions” to put such a policy into practice.

Tellingly, when Beauchamp accurately described these comments, he was besieged, first by those claiming he’d misquoted Wax (he didn’t) and then from those arguing that Wax’s racist comments weren’t racist because she was focused on culture, not race.

The Federalist’s David Marcus, for example, argued that Beauchamp had “slurred” Wax by calling her views racist, writing that doing so “makes it much harder for society as a whole to focus on actual, egregious white supremacist ideas that focus on the concept that white people are inherently better than others because of their whiteness.”

When I asked Marcus how the argument that an individual’s “culture” could be determined by their place of origin isn’t racist, he said, “Wax’s argument, and I don’t agree with it, is that somebody living in Zimbabwe is culturally less capable of easily assimilating in American society than someone coming from a more similar culture and America is better off with the latter. But presumably, a second-generation Zimbabwean living in London, for example, would meet her criteria. So it’s not ultimately about ethnic origin.”

And when I asked Marcus about Wax’s comments on litter, he said, “I think it’s silly, I mean I’ve tossed enough cigarette butts on the streets of New York to fill the Grand Canyon. But I still think she is talking about the cultural norms within countries we should favor or disfavor for immigration, not race or ethnic origin.”

But she’s not. As Beauchamp put it on Tuesday: “Wax believes that nonwhite immigrants are flawed by virtue of who they are, and nothing can be done to change their character and allow them to assimilate. She admits that she is making blanket judgments about nonwhite populations and is using those judgments to endorse policies that would disadvantage them and ensure that America’s white population outnumbers its nonwhite one.” That is a racist argument.

A conservative movement that cannot see the racism within Wax’s commentary, or that of Robert Bork (who argued against a ban on literacy tests for voting), or of Rep. King, long after he endorsed a white nationalist in a mayoral campaign taking place in a foreign country but before he uttered the seemingly magic words, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” is a movement that has defined racism so far down, it cannot see it until it’s too late.

If an immune system cannot detect a cold, it cannot stop pneumonia. And if the guardrails that surround movement conservatism can’t keep out racism thinly disguised as concerns about “cultural differences” or “demographic change” (particularly when those “cultural differences” are between Americans), it cannot stop the abject racism of telling nonwhite American citizens to “go back” where they came from (though it apparently can certainly deny that such statements are racist). And it cannot beat back the seductive idea that racism is good politics, and even that perhaps racism is “real conservatism” at work.

Instrumentalized racism did not originate within the right nor within conservatism. There is nothing within the philosophical undergirding of conservatism that requires it. But the right decided to embrace it, and has clutched it all the more tightly in response to concerns from political and cultural rivals and allies alike while excusing it as how “forgotten Americans talk” or what “real Americans” really think.

It is a strategy that only serves racists. At a white nationalist conference held earlier this year, a South African attendee said approvingly, “The reality is this: That we have had over two hundred interviews with the right-wing of the U.S.A. Over two hundred. Those two hundred interviews — just a little bit more — and the speeches that we’ve given and so on, at forums like this, has enabled our message to seep beyond the borders of the far right-wing of the U.S.A.”

A frequent topic within conservative circles is the need for personal responsibility. Perhaps that advice would be well suited to this particular moment in our politics.