Jonathan Chait wrote a long piece for New York magazine the other day which came to what I thought was an odd conclusion: race is a subtext for Republican opposition to everything President Obama has tried to do, but it’s not the principal reason for it. In fact, Chait says,

It may be true that, at the level of electoral campaign messaging, conservatism and white racial resentment are functionally identical. It would follow that any conservative argument is an appeal to white racism. That is, indeed, the all-but-explicit conclusion of the ubiquitous Atwater Rosetta-stone confession: Republican politics is fundamentally racist, and even its use of the most abstract economic appeal is a sinister, coded missive.

Impressive though the historical, sociological, and psychological evidence undergirding this analysis may be, it also happens to be completely insane. Whatever Lee Atwater said, or meant to say, advocating tax cuts is not in any meaningful sense racist.

Oh, I don’t know. Look at who benefits from the kind of tax cuts Republicans always push: rich white people.

Jamelle Bouie, however, has written a much more serious rebuttal to Chait than my single sentence there. He looks at the same paragraph I quote up there and comes to a more apposite conclusion:

What’s odd about the argument is that Chait clearly shows the extent to which conservatism–even if it isn’t “racist”–works to entrench racial inequality through “colorblindness” and pointed opposition to the activist state. But rather than take that to its conclusion, he asks us to look away: “Impressive though the historical, sociological, and psychological evidence undergirding this analysis may be, it also happens to be completely insane. Whatever Lee Atwater said, or meant to say, advocating tax cuts is not in any meaningful sense racist.”

Read the whole thing.