Rhett Butler Conservatism

Liberals are still playing the race card. Hey, it's not personal; they think all conservatives are racists.

But Gerard Alexander in the Washington Post wants to persuade liberals that, rationally, you could argue that conservatives aren't racists, not really. Even if there are good reasons for thinking that we are. It wasn't just Nixon and the Southern Strategy that brought the South into the Republican camp. According to Haley Barbour, it was the young activists like him that first moved to the Republicans in 1968. The older generation came later, if at all.

But I think that this is all vieux jeux. (Or as Rush would say, liberals playing out of a 30-year-old playbook.) We conservatives are past caring whether liberals think we are racists. All the emotional race-card manipulations of little Miss Scarlett O'Liberal have got us to the point where we don't care any more.

Call us racists, why don't you. Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn. That's what Rhett Butler conservatives think. And those are the moderate ones. There are Breitbart conservatives too, and they are what you might call Eff You conservatives. They believe in throwing the race card right back in the liberals' faces.

Shannon Love at the ChicagoBoyz has a better idea. His argument arises out of the visceral hatred liberals have for Sarah Palin. He reckons that it is status anxiety. Leftists have a "vastly superior understanding of everything compared to ordinary people." Therefore there cannot be a Sarah Palin, an ordinary person juumped up into a national politician. Why, she doesn't even read the New York Times, dahling.

The left has had a bad experience since the 1960s when lefties last had a shred of a reason to believe that they had a special knowledge.

The Great Society failed, the ’70s were an overall train wreck and the once great Democratic cities of the Northeast collapsed. People voted with their feet again but this time migrating from blue areas to red areas. In this process the left lost its meritorious claim to status.

But at least liberals know that they are better than conservatives because conservatives are racists!

Otherwise, Rhett, where shall I go? What shall I do?

Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.