Remember Barack Obama held that “beer summit” back in 2009 because the future host of the PBS show Finding Your Roots was arrested for being Black while entering his own house? Little did we know, that sent the right and the GOP over the edge and into the arms of Donald Trump, so that’s why he’s currently president.

No, seriously, that’s what they believe. The most recent example of a winger saying this out loud was Ben Shapiro, a far-right commentator who looks and acts like a main character in the show Man in the High Tower. Shapiro was recently on Ezra Klein’s podcast where Ezra gets his serious tone on and considers these lying nutty hateful bastards as legitimate political actors.

Shapiro was on there to promote his new book “Lions and Scavengers” which is kind of standard issue right-wing stuff, that there are great Americans who don’t worry about stupid things like caring for others, and the rest of us are pig people who leech off the system. Klein was, of course, trying to grapple with this concept as if it was a great intellectual idea that needed some considertion, and not a creepy, awful way to think about your fellow Americans.

Then the conversation turned to why the right became what they are today. This is what Shapiro said:

So in 2008, Barack Obama ran as a unifying candidate, like him or hate him. I didn’t vote for him. I was not a fan. But Barack Obama ran as somebody who was, in his very personage, unifying America. There was no red America, there was no blue America, there was just the United States. There was no Black or white America.

 

There were just Americans. And the idea was that he was sort of the apotheosis of the coming together. He was going to be the culmination of a lot of these strands of American history coming together to put to bed so many of the problems that had plagued America over the course of our tumultuous history….

 

So he runs, he wins. Obamacare happens. There’s a big blowback in the form of the Tea Party. And he reacts to that by essentially polarizing the electorate. He decides that instead of broadcasting to the general electorate an optimistic message about America, he is going to narrowcast his election in 2012. He’s going to base it on a much more identity-groups-rooted politics. He’s going to appeal to Black Americans as Black Americans and gay Americans as gay Americans and Latino Americans as Latino Americans.

Okay, um, I don’t even know what to say about this, other than to point out that the tl;dr of this is Shaprio never ever talks about unity unless it’s everyone accepting that white Christian Nationalists are right about everything and we should all accept what they say as gospel. As an example of this, he pointed to the beer summit, and how “divisive” that was, somehow getting two Black people and two white people together to have a beer was the worst thing ever to happen to American race relations.

Seth Masket does a very good job of exploring everything that Shapiro and Klein said, and as Market correctly points out, it isn’t just Shapiro who believes this. It is, in fact, something that I’ve heard repeated from time to time by those on the right.

Basically, the theory goes that Obama talked a good game about unity but then made very low-key references to the reality of racism, which was very hurtful and upsetting to the Real Americans (white ones) to allowed him to win because he promised to never ever say anything about race because his win proved it was over. And despite stuff like Obama-with-a-bone-in-his-nose signs at Tea Party rallies, Obama kept it up and up (he didn’t, really) plus he didn’t let Mitt Romney win. That was such a slap in the face that they had no other recourse than to embrace Trump.

This is the American political story of this century, and to be honest, before that. Republicans must always have everything they want at all times, and despite their non-stop insinuation that people with real problems beyond their control, like low-income folks, are always playing the victim card, they play that card like a guy hitting on 18 at the blackjack table.

Because much of our media plays along, this is a winning parry. Which is crazy town, because something as simple as this drove people to support the destruction of our democracy, that’s racism at a deep level of delusion. But seems like we can’t say that. Might upset someone.

Anyway, the last word goes to Green Day.