Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), said this last week:
I didn’t object to [the Affordable Care Act] because of the race of the president. I objected to this because it is an assault on our freedom.
This, of course, precipitated Joe Scarborough's
declaration that:
I have been behind closed doors with thousands of conservatives through the years. I have never once heard one of them say in the deep south or in the northeast or in South Boston, "Boy, I really hate Obamacare because that black president" — no, I’ve never heard anybody come close to saying that. And I have spoken to some wildly right wing groups. I have never heard it once.
So, now we get treated to another round of everyone accusing everyone of "playing the race card" and "reverse racism" and how "liberals think any opposition to Obama is racist" and "Republicans are racists" and "Democrats founded the KKK" and yadda yadda yadda
ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
Johnson's quote is a pretty standard, textbook, boilerplate example of the kind of thing we hear all the time from Republican politicians, media enablers and fans to deny that their "opposition" to, "criticism," "questioning," "disapproval," "dislike" or "distrust" of, the 44th President is motivated at all or in any way by racism or racial animus. Whether it actually is or not is, for my purposes here, beside the point. What I'm interested in here is how and why a perception of racial motivation may be detected from a statement that "it's not about race, it's about [X];" or, perhaps more accurately, how and why such a perception would be reinforced or confirmed, rather than dispelled, by such a declaration.
The problem arises when [X] is an absurdity, a falsehood, or something entirely unreasonable.
Let's look at Sen. Johnson's quote again:
I didn’t object to [the Affordable Care Act] because of the race of the president. I objected to this because it is an assault on our freedom.
OK, well, sure, except that it's not. I'm sorry, it just isn't. Not by any
reasonable understanding of what any of those words mean, or of what that phrase means. A modest re-regulation of the medical insurance industry and the national medical-insurance market is not by any objective measure, or by any historical, legal or constitutional standard, "an assault on our freedom." The characterization is not so much wrong, or a lie, as it is completely
unreasonable. There is simply no valid, objective, legitimate
reason to believe that the ACA constitutes "an assault on our freedom" or to characterize it as such.
I've written at length in the past about how political partisans tend to believe unreasonable things and allow themselves to be convinced of unreasonable things, in order to validate their biases, prejudices, and more to the point their particular voting preference. What I'm interested in here is what the effect is of stating that the basis for one's opinion is [X] where [X] is something completely unreasonable, as a means of denying that said basis is something rather more sinister but unacknowledgeable.
What should be obvious to Sen. Johnson and others who say such things is this: When you state that the basis of your opinion, position, "objection," "criticism," "opposition," &c. is not the President's race but something else, and that something else is nonsense, an absurdity, a falsehood, or something completely unreasonable, it's only natural for the listener to (1) not believe you, and (2) assume that your motivation is precisely what you're denying that it is. If the stated basis of your opinion is something unreasonable, then the listener has to wonder why you believe such an unreasonable thing and would base your opinion on such an unreasonable thing. Why would Sen. Johnson believe, let alone say, that the ACA is "an assault on our freedom" when by any objective, historical, legal or constitutional measure it is no such thing?
This obviously opens up the possibility that while his "objection" to the ACA is not specifically or consciously based on the President's race, his belief that the ACA is "an assault on our freedom" might be. If it is, that means his "objection" to the ACA may not be directly race-based, but it could be indirectly race-based because he believes something about it that he could not reasonably believe, and likely would not reasonably believe if the President were a white Republican (the basis of the latter statement being the law's well-documented conservative/Republican origins).
Now, this is not to say that any and all unreasonable beliefs that form the basis of Republican/conservative "objections" and "opposition" to the Affordable Care Act are race-based or derived from racial animus (although I've taken plenty of abuse from liberals for being unwilling to make that categorical assumption). They could be just ordinary run-of-the-mill political partisanship. I'm also not going to get into the issue of whether it's reasonable to assume or deduce that having an unreasonable basis for one's opinion vis-à-vis the President or any of his achievements is necessarily indicative of racism or race-based motivations.
But what Sen. Johnson's statement reveals is something I've been saying for years, to anyone who complains that they're being unfairly accused of racism when they "criticize" or "oppose" this President or "object" to anything he does: If your "criticism," "opposition" or "objection" is unreasonable, you should expect to have your motives called into question.