It's not a culture war. It's button-down hate and racism with a smile.

Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Lee Atwater

You want to know how Republicans talk about “states’ rights” these days?  Parental rights.  The new way they talk about the “gay agenda”?  Grooming.  How about the new way they signify their racism?  Critical Race Theory.  This stuff doesn’t have anything to do with cheese or opera, but somehow Republicans have gotten away with turning prejudice and hatred into wedge issues and the culture war. 

It’s like they’ve brought Lee Atwater back from the dead to run the Republican Party’s messaging.  You remember Lee, don’t you?  Smiling South Carolina boy who once had a political consulting firm with – you’re going to love this – Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, Atwater made his Republican bones working on campaigns for Strom Thurmond, the infamous segregationist who ran for president in 1948 as the candidate of the States Rights Party.  Thurmond was quoted during the campaign saying, “I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”  But not into his bedroom:  later in life it was revealed that he had fathered a mixed race daughter with a Black woman.

Atwater was celebrated in the Republican Party because he had figured out how to use political misdirection to get around Republican candidates being called racists when the charge was clearly an accurate one.  In 1981, Atwater gave an anonymous interview to political scientist Alexander P. Lamis for his book, “The Two-Party South.”  Only later in a column by Bob Herbert in the New York Times in 2005 was Atwater revealed as the man who said the following: “Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can't say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now that you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is that blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘nigger, nigger.’ So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.”

Clever guy, huh?  You want to talk about race, all you have to do, like Ronald Reagan in the 1980 campaign, is talk about “welfare queens.”  Everybody knows what you’re saying without you having to come out and say it.

Today’s Lee Atwater is another smiling preppy guy by the name of Christopher Rufo who has one of those right-wing sinecures at a think tank called the Manhattan Institute.  Rufo is the thinker, if you could call it that, behind the mass-marketing of Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a Republican fear campaign.  To the extent that it exists at all, CRT is taught in some law schools as a legal theory holding that race plays an instrumental role in the nation’s system of criminal laws and courts.  Rufo came up with the idea of claiming CRT is a liberal plot to indoctrinate grade school children with the idea that there is something inherently wrong with being white.  He even did the world the favor of writing a series of Tweets spelling out his plan.  “We have successfully frozen their brand—‘critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

See?  Easy.  Instead of welfare queens, it’s evil second grade teachers and junior high school student counselors poisoning the minds of innocents.  Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, appearing in a fleece vest to give evidence of his bonafides as a man of the people, said Critical Race Theory so many times during his campaign last year his face froze.  Texas legislators last year banned the teaching of the 1619 Project specifically and CRT generally from being taught in state schools, followed closely by – you guessed it – Florida.   “In Florida we are taking a stand against the state-sanctioned racism that is Critical Race Theory,” said Governor Ron DeSantis in a press release last December. “We won’t allow Florida tax dollars to be spent teaching kids to hate our country or to hate each other. We also have a responsibility to ensure that parents have the means to vindicate their rights when it comes to enforcing state standards.”

And now, like magic, the bogeyman is Democrats and liberals condoning pedophilia and of course, grooming.  Last month DeSantis signed the “don’t say gay” bill, banning even the mention of “gender orientation and sexual identity” in grades K-3, a classic solution in search of a problem since sex education wasn’t being taught in those grades anyway.  “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children,” Christina Pushaw, DeSantis’s press secretary, tweeted last month when the bill was being argued in the state legislature.

And of course it’s spreading.  Earlier this month, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey signed two overtly anti-transgender bills into law.  One bans parents from arranging medical care for their trans children, and the other mandates that students use bathrooms that match their birth certificates.  Last month, Idaho passed a bill making it a felony for doctors to provide medically necessary, age-appropriate gender affirming care for transgender children.  Other Republican states have similar bills before their legislatures.

This is what Republicans are doing while Ukraine fights a war for its survival as a sovereign nation against Russia and while the Biden administration presides over record low unemployment numbers and record high economic growth.  They’re creating problems where they don’t exist and appealing to racism and anti-gay, anti-trans prejudice by slapping the word “grooming” on everything in sight.

Pundits and newspaper editors and cable news shows call it culture war politics.  It’s not.  It’s racism and hate, plain and simple.  The House, the Senate, and the White House are at stake, and if “woke” Democrats don’t wake up and figure out how to counter this bullshit, Republicans are going to push more of DeSantis and Youngkin style button-down hate and racism with a smile.