MSNBC's Joe Scarborough has finally come around to admitting that Republicans' radicalization was a racist backlash against the election of Barack Obama.
The "Morning Joe" host, a former Republican himself, said he had long been skeptical of that notion, but he said the evidence had become too obvious to deny.
"I have been a skeptic for quite some time that the election of Barack Obama was such a shock to so many white Americans that they just never got over it," Scarborough said. "I was always a skeptic of that. I saw his election, even though they didn't agree with him ideologically on a lot of things. I saw that as a moment that all Americans -- Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals -- could stop and go, 'Wow, okay, the United States of America is the first majority white country that elected a Black man as their leader,' something to celebrate."
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"I must say, 13 years later, I'm just running out of explanations for the radicalism that has swept the Republican Party," he added, "and I, sadly, am coming to the point where I have to admit. I know there is always underlying strands of racism in that party, just like there was in the Democratic Party for 100 years. But the further we get into this, the more we try to explain the radicalization of the party, I'm just not so sure historians 20, 30, 50 years from now will talk about this demographic change that we've all known it has been coming for 30 years, that we've all known was going to change American politics. But I'm not so sure that Americans won't look at the eight years of Barack Obama and say that was a triggering point for white Americans who were either racially insensitive or racist to bolt away and embrace radical form of politics and lying -- unending lying, lying about everything that they can under the sun, just to untether Americans from the truth."