Buchanan to GOP: Be More Racist

It's hilarious that conservatives like to complain about MSNBC being a horrible liberal channel when every time I turn the damn thing on, I have to see Pat Buchanan's ugly mug. This is the guy who just penned a piece arguing that Republicans need to be more, not less racist, to ensure that their party doesn't go the way of the dodo. First, he recounts the demographics:

In 2008, Hispanics, according to the latest figures, were 7.4 percent of the total vote. White folks were 74 percent, 10 times as large. Adding just 1 percent to the white vote is thus the same as adding 10 percent to the candidate's Hispanic vote.

If John McCain, instead of getting 55 percent of the white vote, got the 58 percent George W. Bush got in 2004, that would have had the same impact as lifting his share of the Hispanic vote from 32 percent to 62 percent.

Apparently, the reason John McCain didn't win the election is because he wasn't racist enough:

Why did McCain fail to win the white conservative Democrats Hillary Clinton swept in the primaries? He never addressed or cared about their issues.

These are the folks whose jobs have been outsourced to China and Asia, who pay the price of affirmative action when their sons and daughters are pushed aside to make room for the Sonia Sotomayors. These are the folks who want the borders secured and the illegals sent back.

Had McCain been willing to drape Jeremiah Wright around the neck of Barack Obama, as Lee Atwater draped Willie Horton around the neck of Michael Dukakis, the mainstream media might have howled.

And McCain might be president.

Obviously, this point of view is extremely odious. Pat Buchanan has an even lower opinion of white people than the opinion he attributes to the horrible brown people who are trying to take over. He thinks that white people's "issues" are that they don't like black and brown people. Nevermind the fact that he just compared Jeremiah Wright to a convicted murderer (aren't all black people criminals?).

But Matthew Yglesias says that even though what Buchanan's proposing is offensive and telling, it's not actually wrong: being more racist might give the Republicans some additional leverage. He says:

Consequently states with small white populations like Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi can be solid GOP territory. Under the circumstances, it’s not entirely crazy for Republicans to believe that the right way to respond to shifting American demographics is by just trying to amp-up the level of racial anxiety in the shrinking white majority.

Both Yglesias and Buchanan are forgetting a very important point about American politics: we don't have national elections. So even if you can add ten percent to the number of white people who vote Republican in Alabama and Mississippi, that's not going to win you more elections, because Republicans already win those states.

I hate to break it to Pat Buchanan, but the racists already vote Republican. Meanwhile, there are a lot of states where racial anxiety is lower than in the south, and being more racist isn't necessarily going to win you more votes from white people. It might actually turn them off. Because again, Pat Buchanan doesn't seem to understand that not all white people are inveterate racists who will vote on the basis of race. Furthermore, there are states with significant Latino populations where Latinos comprise far, far more than 7% of the population and can have a serious impact on electoral outcomes. Buchanan's argument seems to be "Latinos are only 7%! Fuck 'em!" But in making that argument, he reveals himself to be not only a racist, but getting a bit senile, since he seems to forget about that old electoral college we've got.