On Fox News Sunday, Ron Fournier made the rather banal observation that the GOP “cannot be the party of the future beyond November, if you’re seen as the party of white people.” In response, while talking with Laura Ingraham, Republican Congressman Mo Brooks went overboard:
This is a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party. And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that whites hate everybody else. It’s a part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare, all those kinds of things.
Fournier defends himself:
I do feel compelled to remind Brooks that nothing I said should surprise him, because his party leaders agree with me. If I am part of a war on whites, so is RNC Chairman Reince Priebus and the 2,600 fellow Republicans interviewed for the “RNC Growth Opportunity Book 2013,” the so-called GOP autopsy.
“If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e., self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence,” the report reads. “It does not matter what we say about education, jobs, or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.” …
What I said is indisputably, if uncomfortably, true. Unless a broader swath of the GOP community learns to accept and adapt to the fact that the United States will soon be a majority-minority nation, the Republican Party is doomed not to lead it. Finally, sir, bury the straw men: Blanket amnesty and wide-open borders aren’t the price for political relevancy. For starters, let’s try compassion, wide-open minds, and compromise.
Chait snickers at Brooks’ comments:
Brooks is characteristically fuzzy on both the motive and the mechanics of the current War on Whites. On the surface, you might find it silly to imagine that the Democrats would antagonize the majority segment of the American public. Democrats definitely need white people (whites supplied 56 percent of Barack Obama’s vote in 2012; nonwhites supplied just 11 percent of Mitt Romney’s votes). White people have other uses for Democrats, like providing campaign donations, filling cabinet roles and Congressional seats, and so on. From a pure strategic standpoint, launching a war on white people would seem like a bad idea.
Steven Taylor adds:
One thing is for sure: Brooks does not understand (or does not wish to acknowledge) the way in which certain factors tend to align (such as race, economic status, and policy preferences) and he, like many conservatives of his ilk, have no self-awareness of how the structure of US historical development might have sorted persons by color into certain economic strata. He certainly lacks a tremendous amount of self-awareness if, in a multi-paragraph manifesto of how there is a “war on whites” he can say “I don’t know of a single Republican who has made an appeal for votes based on skin color.”
In general, I want to say something intelligent and helpful in terms of maybe getting some readers who really don’t get how problematic these views are, but really all I can think are various insults (and the ones in Spanish are the most fun, given the context).
Weigel joins the conversation:
What will the fallout be for Brooks? Nothing—his district, which hugs the Tennessee border, voted by a 2-1 margin for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama. No Democrat bothered to run against him this year. Honestly, there’s less to Brooks’ “war on whites” riff than the headline suggests. Other conservatives, most notably Stanley Kurtz, have described the Obama administration’s urban-focused transportation and energy policies as a “war on the suburbs,” ways to get the people who fled the cities (white people, though that’s not made explicit) to come back in. And the politics of welfare and food stamps have always tracked with opinions about race.
But Brooks wasn’t saying any of that. He tried to coin a phrase—like “war on women”—insisting that accusing Democrats of waging this fight was calling out racism.
Kilgore sighs:
I dunno: it strikes me as entirely consistent with the twisted logic we hear all the time about the only racists being race-card-playing liberals that demonize conservative white folks who are “color-blind” in their hostility to anything black and brown folks deem highly objectionable.
The Dish 