Quote of the day: Structural racism

A better question would be: Why do conservatives use racism as a political tool, and do they have an alternative?

Because it's not really important whether a given Republican operative—Richard Nixon or Lee Atwater—is a racist or not. What's important is the way they took to mobilizing around racism back in the 1960s, gradually absorbing the old white Democrats of the South and the frightened white proletariat of cities like Los Angeles and Cleveland and Detroit and Newark, or the suburbs to which they had fled, into an intrinsically racist institution, the new Republican party, which took what Corey Robin calls the aggrieved conservative "sense of loss" and focused it into a sense of having been robbed by, specifically, dark-skinned people who take taxpayers' money and throw it away on lobster and lottery tickets.

- Yastreblyansky at The Rectification of Names, on the difference between attempting to look into a political operative's soul and observing the big, obvious, structural properties of the national political party they serve.