CHRIS HAYES, host of MSNBC's "Up with Chris Hayes", said on air this past weekend, "It is undeniably the case that racist Americans are almost entirely in one political coalition and not the other", by which he means most American racists lean right, not left. This has since been proven false by Alex Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University, and John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University, both of whom have denied Mr Hayes' contention, persuasively.

Mr Tabarrok dips into the General Social Survey and fishes out some data difficult to square with the idea that most racists, much less almost all, are Republicans, or Republican-ish. Mr Tabarrok concludes, "It is undeniable that some Americans are racist but racists split about evenly across the parties." Mr Sides takes a look at the 2008 American National Election Study and finds that assessments of the intelligence and industry of blacks, when broken down by party, suggest that

identification with the Democratic Party tends to decline, and identification with the Republican party tends to increase, as attitudes toward black become less favorable—at least when attitudes are measured with two different racial stereotypes. However, the relationship is far from deterministic: substantial minorities of those with unfavorable attitudes toward blacks identify as Democrats.

So Mr Hayes is quite wrong. At best, Republicans on the whole are slightly more likely to have opinions commonly believed to be racist, and that is far from undeniable.

Reviewing all this, Reihan Salam observes that looking at the question, as do Messrs Tabarrok and Sides, solely in terms of the attitudes of non-blacks toward blacks makes sense, given America's history. However,

[T]he changing demographic composition of the U.S. population, and the changing cultural landscape, has given rise to other intercultural frictions, e.g., between non-Latino black Americans and Latinos, between non-Asians and Asians, etc. As we take into account these other forms of prejudice, one assumes that a very complex picture would emerge.

I should say so. Mr Salam goes on to say:

[F]or many of the people “in my world”—that is, professionals who attended selective colleges and universities in the English-speaking world—the notion that racist Americans are almost entirely in one coalition (the center-right coalition) is an article of faith that is really central to center-left political identity. Those of us who do not share this view thus find ourselves arguing from a position that is seen as intrinsically morally suspect.

I think he's right about this. Within the elite class Mr Salam mentions, standard liberals are presumed non-racist, while non-liberals are suspected of distasteful views on questions relating to race, unless this suspicion is put to rest by conspicuous signals of right-thinking racial egalitarianism. Still, the demonstrated willingness to fraternise with other, unproven non-liberals leaves even the enlightened non-liberal under a lingering shadow of suspicion.

In my experience, the real crux of the left-right divide on policies with fraught racial dimensions, such as welfare or affirmative action, is the question of structural coercion.

When I was a Rand-toting libertarian lad, I believed, as I believe now, that racism of any stripe is a disgusting form of collectivism. Where my opinion has changed is that I used to think that if negative rights to non-interference were strictly observed, liberty was guaranteed, but I don't now. Here's how I had thought about the matter. One racist acting in a private capacity on his or her racist beliefs can't violate anyone's legitimate, negative rights. (No one is entitled to another's good opinion!) Two racists acting as private citizens on their racist beliefs can't violate anyone's rights. Therefore, I inferred, thousands or millions of racists acting non-coercively on their racist beliefs can't coercively violate anyone's rights. I now think this is quite wrongheaded.

Eventually I realised that actions that are individually non-coercive can add up to stable patterns of behaviour that are systematically or structurally coercive, depriving some individuals of their rightful liberty. In fact, rights-violating structures or patterns of behaviour are excellent examples of Hayekian spontaneous orders—of phenomena that are the product of human action, but not of human design. This shift has led me to see racism and sexism themselves as threats to liberty. Racism and sexism have come to matter more to me in that I have come to see them in terms of the political value that matters most to me: liberty. And so I have become much more sympathetic to policies that would limit individual liberty in order to suppress patterns or norms of behaviour that might pose an even greater threat to freedom. So I've become fairly friendly toward federal anti-discrimination law, affirmative action, Title 9, the works. I have found that this sympathy, together with my belief in the theoretical possibility and historical reality of structural coercion, releases me almost entirely from the liberal suspicion that I'm soft on racism (even if I do wish to voucherise Medicare). Phew!

The punchline is that this shift in conviction has almost nothing at all to do with a shift in attitude toward any group of people. I say "almost" because it has required that I come to see victims of structural coercion as real victims, really wronged, and thus to see the demand for reform and redress as both legitimate and urgently necessary. And this makes no small difference in one's relationship to those who see it the same way.