Reaction from the right was naturally more intelligent but still of low quality.
There was a lot of moral preening. This centered on racial insouciance—that is, on cultivating an attitude of complete indifference to race, either individual or collective. Several commentators prided themselves on having attained this state of grace, though none of them followed my suggestion that they take the Implicit Association Test and post their results online, as I have done. (…)
Racial insouciance is not a core American value; it’s a boomer fad, like James Bond movies. It will be interesting to see which fad outlasts the other.
***
I talk about the same phenomenon in my new piece about Ann Coulter:
Worst of all, O’Rourke tends to chicken out and turn liberal just as things are getting exciting, like a boyfriend who suddenly blurts out his old girlfriend’s name at the worst possible time.
Coulter on the other hand, untouched by toddlers and tumors, rarely resorts to the modern conservative’s abiding flaw: that desperate need to be liked which inspires otherwise intelligent right wingers to heap unadulterated (pun intended) praise on Martin Luther King Jr. or “hard working Mexicans” or “moderate Muslims” or whoever this week’s liberal-approved human unicorn happens to be, in the middle of an otherwise laudable, cliche-free column.
