'Double talk': How the GOP is making white supremacy 'respectable'

Fifty years ago, American politics managed to successfully marginalize overt white supremacy and white nationalism from the political mainstream. But in the Trump era, that progress is eroding as a certain subset of Republicans have pushed and rehabilitated these ideas to make them "respectable" for a new audience, wrote Chauncey DeVega for Salon on Thursday.

One of the biggest examples of this, DeVega said, is how Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) keeps opinion that white nationalists as honorable, everyday Americans.

"In one of the most recent examples of how white supremacy has been mainstreamed and normalized by today's Republican Party and 'conservative' movement, during an interview on Monday with Kaitlan Collins on CNN, Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville refused to condemn 'white nationalists' as being inherently racist," wrote DeVega — although, he noted, the very next night Tuberville tried to walk back his comments, saying "white nationalists are racist."

This confusing "double talk", wrote DeVega, is "an example of what sociologist Joe Feagin has described as 'the white racial frame' and the related 'logic' of evasion that many (white) Americans use when discussing so-called race relations in American society. Tuberville's verbal contortions about 'white nationalism' are among the many examples of how white supremacist ideas and ideology have become mainstreamed and normalized in the Age of Trump."

Some Republicans, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), disavowed Tuberville's comments — but they are still part and parcel of a shift in the GOP, said DeVega — as evidenced by Trump's claim some of the Charlottesville Nazi demonstrators were "very fine people," the efforts by the GOP to roll back minority voting rights protections, and the surveys showing a correlation between support for Trump and racist political beliefs.

And all of this is happening, DeVega noted, as the old Protocols of the Elders of Zion conspiracy theories about Jewish elites and the "Great Replacement Theory" that white people are being deliberately bred out of the population with immigration policies, are finding new voices in the GOP.

All of this means that the undercurrent of white supremacy that has warped American politics since the country's inception is ascendant once again, DeVega concluded.

"There is a direct connection between how as the Republican Party and 'conservative movement' have become more racist and more white supremacist they have also become more fascist, authoritarian, violent, anti-human, cruel, sexist, misogynistic, bigoted, hateful, anti-intellectual, and generally irresponsible and antagonistic towards democracy, human freedom, human rights, and the good society," he warned.