True, I was engaging in a little rhetorical hyperbole / oversimplification, but I think there's some validity to it, at least as far as the right is concerned. In the 60s, we dismantled the formal structures of segregation, and in the 70s and 80s, as people adjusted to the new reality, it gradually became less acceptable to be overtly racist. By the 90s and the 00s, open racism was pretty solidly anathema in the culture at large. However, the shift of working class, white voters over to the Republicans during that period was directly related to those changes, and Republican political rhetoric adopted a healthy dose of racially-coded resentment in the 70s and 80s - e.g., the "tough on crime" and "war on drugs" stuff, Reagan's "welfare queens", Bush Sr.'s Willie Horton crap, talk radio, etc. The voters who switched to the Republicans because of their opposition to legal desegregation in the 60s and social/cultural desegregation in the 70s and 80s sure as **** didn't think those things meant cracking down on poor, rural, white people, and they were right about that, as it was urban, black people who were disproportionately impacted by those policies. Then in the 90s, the left embraced "political correctness" as a rallying cry, and the political right jumped all over it as a way to preserve and reinvigorate that dwindling resentment. I agree, though, that by the '00s, the main battles were largely won, and much of the old school bigotry had died out (although it's worth noting that it wasn't until the mid-90s that a majority of this country even approved of inter-racial marriage). And yet, the right is
still playing off that lingering resentment, only now it's resentment that the left won't let it go and is "demonizing" white people./quote]
What you're ignoring in this is that simply calling this "racially coded" and referring to it as "resentment" is exactly the sort of portrayal of the concerns of white people, especially working-class whites, as A) necessarily opposed to the interests of minorities B) driven almost exclusively by racial resentment, and C) very subtly shifting from opposing the overt, Jim Crow bigotry of the South pre-1965 to opposing an insubstantial suspicion of bigotry on the part of any white person that does not adopt the attitudes and positions the left and minorities - particularly blacks - have deemed acceptable.
The reason the right jumped all over "political correctness" in the 1990s was that it was the first sign of what we're seeing today - actual racism was almost completely stamped out, and the elft turned to any frank discussion of real problems as a target to call "racist" because it might bring up some uncomfortable realities. Complaining that "tough on crime" is racially coded is a way of distracting from the fact that crime is a real thing - and really was a serious issue from the late 1960s through 1990 or so.
It's making a resurgence lately because the left has abandoned all pretenses of actually addressing meaningful bigotry and is now using it as blatant grab for the power to place opposing ideas out of bounds. "Disproportionate impact" is one such claim - it's essentially a circular argument that the aren't "proportional" because the system is racist and then turn around and say "well, we know it's racist because these results aren't proportional!" Yet calling out this terrible reasoning is labeled "resentment" or "White privilege" and the underlying implication - that minorities should get a discount in these "disproportionate" systems to make them more "socially just" while ignoring that this is a call for massive minority-favoring discrimination at the individual level - is never discussed in public forums because some BLM protestors will show up and literally shout you down for daring to point out these uncomfortable facts.
It has far more absurd elements as well, such as the complaints of "cultural appropriation", and with white people getting caught pretending to be black the emperor literally has no clothes at all.
It isn't just that it became less acceptable to be overtly racist, it's that people actually became a lot less racist, very rapidly - because over that period of 1965 to 1985 an entire generation learned that the sky wouldn't fall in because things changed. The problem was, however, that while that was being learned the seeds of resentment were already being sown on economic grounds. The reason was that so much of the effort to remedy the lingering effects of several hundred years of discrimination were, themselves, both ham-handed and blatantly discriminatory and remain that way today. The reason we were still able to make progress on racial attitudes up until about 15-20 years ago was that A) older people that held pre-1965 attitudes were still significant in the workforce and were being weeded out, resulting in progress, and B) that the resentment was aimed far more at the system than at the minorities themselves becuase while Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and a few other crazies were individual punchlines you weren't seeing widespread lunacy - and when you did (Rodney King riots) it was, at least, in response to a real incident where the authorities really were in the wrong, not fabricated claims (Treyvon Martin/Ferguson) or imaginary "violence" and "silencing" on campuses by highly privileged young black people.
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So my point is, although the country as a whole has indeed shifted definitively away from racism, the racial politics of the right has, for 50+ years, been about resisting and resenting that shift.
This is where you're entirely wrong. The politic of the right has been
portrayed that way by the left for the last 50 years - fed by the "dog whistle" concept that was really about simply purloining some extra voters who were never going to get what they wanted anyhow - but the simple fact is that while many of the issues you cite have had a disproportionate effect on blacks, that is because the issues driving Republican policies really did exist. The War on Drugs may be foolish in hindsight, but at the time it seemed like a real, legitimate problem. So was crime in general, which was rampant in cities.
Black leaders heavily supported things like the "war on drugs" and efforts to address rampant crime in their communities, as well. When Crack first appeared, some even suggested crack itself was a racist invention to target blacks. Now, when blacks are disproportionately in prison, they complain about mass incarceration. Of course the problem that people only hint at, for fear of being labelled a racist, is really that blacks remain mostly poor despite 50 years of ham-handed efforts to help them (note my earlier comments about the much different effect efforts to grant women more opportunities has had over roughly the same period) resulting in them being disproportionately criminal in the first place. References to black-on-black crime are the only socially acceptable way to call out this glaring refusal to accept that there are a disproportionate number of black criminals in the first place.
No one cracked down on rural whites because while there is certainly a white, rural, criminal element it's physically spread out, not concentrated like in a city. Small towns and rural areas simply don't spawn the kind of gang-related crime problems that urban areas do; while rural white gangs exist (ever heard of the Dixie Mafia?) they tend to be much more hidden by simple geography and don't create the appearance of an urban war zone that puts entire neighborhoods off-limits; you can find backwoods dirt roads its unwise to drive down, but they're 3 hours from anywhere so there's no one driving down them and getting robbed for their tennis shoes anyhow. Yet these physical realities are constantly glossed-over in the efforts to make this all about "White resentment" and only that.
In fact, the "white resentment" you're referring to has been about white people suddenly finding themselves labelled "racists" when they hear about Willie Horton and think "yeah, who let that guy out?" and then suddenly find themselves labelled Jim Crow racists for noticing a problem. The Democrats have exploited this endlessly by portraying any criticism of any policy they propose or back as being driven by an underlying motivation of hostility towards whoever its supposed to help. To go back to Willie Horton, the Democrats only rarely if ever brought up any merits of the prison furlough program - I seem to recall vaguely that it allegedly reduced recidivism among participants by an unspecified amount - but that was only ever brought up as if everyone should simply already know that and it just proves that all opposition is racist.
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There was no intervening period when the right embraced the idea of remedying the racial disparities in this country and advocated for policies designed to do that. That's what I mean when I say they went straight from discrimination to resentment. Yes, we've probably reached the point where continuing to focus on racial grievances is counterproductive and in some cases even unjust, but we got here despite the right, and we had to drag them kicking and screaming every step of the way.
Why would anyone embrace such policies, when we've had 50 years of those policies and they have not served to do any such thing? They started out as ham-fisted "lets counter discrimination with reverse discrimination!" and any opposition to them, or even attempts to re-frame the problems in economic terms have been shouted down with screams of "Racism!"
In point of fact, you haven't gotten anywhere and you haven't "dragged the right kicking and screaming" at all. The left can take practically no credit for any racial progress; the aforementioned progress largely made until about 2000 wasn't the product of the left or the right, it was the progress of average people of all races accepting and adjusting to new realities. The left spent this entire time trying to downplay this progress and re-frame any issue it could in terms of the need for such progress so as to maintain the status quo of white racists that needed to be combated - white racists that mysteriously came to mean any white person that was not on board with the leftist agenda must be a racist harboring Jim Crow attitudes that mysteriously get attributed to white people in places where those attitudes were previously
more rare and more mild.
The right is responsible only insofar as it has failed to find an effective counter to the left's simple and direct racial (and for that matter, gender-related and more lately sexuality-related) messaging, mainly for lack of trying, occasionally excessive concern with foreign affairs, and the baggage of a top end that really doesn't care if they're called racists as long as economic growth occurs.
The only place the left has managed to drag us kicking and screaming is to a world where the press has abandoned all pretense of neutrality (and don't even bring up FOX; no they aren't neutral, but they LOVE the current state of affairs since they can sell news/commentary to people that just want to be able to hear something WITHOUT a leftist slant, and the same goes for Limbaugh, Beck, et al) and where crisis can simply be fabricated and sold wholesale in the most tranquil, privileged places in human history - the college campus. People blatantly adopt identities they do not possess simply for the privilege of claiming to be victims of vague social forces that science cannot even hope to prove or disprove the existence of.
RD, it's really time for the left to take a look in the mirror and stop the pretense of moral high ground - and by that I mean precisely the condescending attitude you're adopting here. The left has spent 50 years portraying white, working class people as the enemy of minorities, advocating policies that to favor minorities explicitly (which, by their own logic and messaging must necessarily disadvantage white working people even if the policy itself actually wouldn't), and trying to assume the authority to pronounce opposition outside the realm of legitimate political discourse.
The expiration date has passed on this, and it's passed obviously with the events of the last 2-5 years. The left has made essentially no racial progress since 1965; it has only advocated for reverse discrimination and actual progress has been made by either the enforcement agencies of government or by the attitudes of the average person. It has certainly totally failed to elevate black people, mainly because endless attempts to make everything "proportionate" and wailing and moaning about the "racism" of anyone that points out the real problems or says "hey look your programs are themselves discriminatory and aren't actually working" or worse points out the socially-destructive attitudes endemic to the poor and therefore among poor minorities don't actually do a thing to solve anyone's problems, and making that progress would mean political disaster for the left.
It's fundamentally the same problem as attitudes towards rape - that ANY acknowledgement of progress, nuance, or of another side to the issue hinders further progress - that the left simply must divest itself of, and stop blaming the attitudes it imagines everyone else to have.
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