My suggestion that Keith Richards’ description of rednecks brought to mind the Tea Party People brought howls of protest below. Inevitable cries of “liberal elitist!” emerged from the commento-sphere, along with the suggestion that the TPPers weren’t at all racist or homophobic or women-hating or any such thing.

Well…maybe they are?

In the Times, Charles Blow writes of the trend within the TPPers to say that blacks like to be discriminated against because it takes them off the hook for failing to advance socioeconomically, and how TPPers say that in fact they are the real victims of racial discrimination.

Blow notes that a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that…

…62 percent of whites who identified as Tea Party members, 56 percent of white Republicans, and even 53 percent of white independents said that today discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities. Only 30 percent of white Democrats agreed with that statement.

Blow points out that there’s absolutely no body of data for that claim, which this blogger finds absurd and pathetic.

We can find racial prejudices in all segments of the population, but pretending that the degree and consequences are comparable is neither true nor helpful. …In fact, some on the right seem to be doing with the race issue what they’ve done with the climate-change issue: denying the basic facts and muddying the waters around them until no one can see clearly enough to have an honest discussion or develop thoughtful solutions.

Of course there are differences, modern elements, particular twists. But we’ve seen this form of populism before. It’s the Know-Nothings, the KKK, the McCarthyites, the hippie-bashers—the paranoid style in American politics. And not to recognize it as such is dangerous.

As Richard Hofstadter once wrote,

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.

And, in turn, he afflicts the nation, as we will all find out over the next couple of years.