‘Conservatism does not equal racism. So why do many liberals assume it does?’
13th September 2010
I suspect that they don’t; they just find it a useful stick with which to beat their opponents in light of the fact that they’ve successfully convinced NAMs of the myth.
Plus there’s the standard liberal meme of ‘We’re not racist. They’re not us. Therefore they must be racist.’ that crops up wherever politically fashionable thought abounds.
I suspect that a large part of it is the conflation of ‘conservatism’ as a temperament with ‘conservatism’ as a political program; Southern Democrats who backed the Jim Crow laws were ‘conservative’ in temperament in the sense that they liked the system they had and didn’t want it to change, and the distinction between the two has been blurred by ‘progressives’ (whether deliberately or not) in order to tar the latter with the alleged faults of the former.