“There’s no doubt he makes subliminal appeals to prejudice,” says conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, one of the few members of the news media willing to speak out about Buchanan’s bigotry. “He tries to be subtle, the comments are not direct appeals to prejudice, which is one of the reasons he gets away with it.” But the subtle appeal, Krauthammer argues, “is very much heard by his audience.”

Subtle, but not too subtle.

You knew who Buchanan was talking about, for example, during the week of the Iowa straw poll when he blamed the farm crisis on “New York bankers” and “the money boys up in New York.”

He didn’t say “money-grubbing kikes,” but it was there, lurking in the subtext.

Or, in a radio interview, when Buchanan justified his anti-immigration policies by insinuating that the character of Mexicans was generally criminal — “60,000 of them are in our prisons.” The “railroad killer” is the kind of person we’re going to have more of unless we build up the border patrol, he said.

He didn’t say “dangerous wetback drifters.” He didn’t have to.

And again, during his speech at the straw poll, he promised that, if he were elected, he’d open up China for U.S. trade — or else China will have sold its “last pair of chopsticks in any mall in the United States of America.”

He didn’t say “yellow menace” or “Chinks” or “they’re not like us” — not in so many words, anyway — but he seemed dangerously close to the precipice of actually uttering such words.

Buchanan has a documented history of making these kinds of incendiary comments. In 1992, the Anti-Defamation League charged that Buchanan had shown “a disregard or hostility toward those not like him and a consequent displeasure with the exercise of freedom by these others … [a] displeasure … expressed in a 30-year record of intolerance unmatched by any other mainstream political figure.”

Even Richard Nixon found the views of his former speech writer, Buchanan, too extreme on the segregation issue. According to a John Ehrlichman memo referenced in Nicholas Lemann’s “The Promised Land,” Nixon characterized Buchanan’s views as “segregation forever.”

After Nixon was reelected, Buchanan warned his boss not to “fritter away his present high support in the nation for an ill-advised governmental effort to forcibly integrate races.”

This mind-set continued as Buchanan segued from working in communications for Nixon and Reagan to bloviating as a columnist and a CNN windbag.

In 1990, Buchanan spewed out another hate-filled sound bite: “With 80,000 dead of AIDS, 3,000 more buried each month, our promiscuous homosexuals appear literally hell-bent on Satanism and suicide.”

Many in the media, when asked by Salon News why they aren’t covering Buchanan’s slightly more veiled bigotry in 1999, suggest that he’s only a marginal political figure.

“I had to think twice before I wrote about him,” Krauthammer explained. “He’s simply not a player. It’s like attacking Lamar Alexander.”

Maybe. But Buchanan kicked Alexander’s butt in the Iowa straw poll. And while Alexander has since withdrawn from the race, Buchanan’s name is increasingly bandied about as a possible Reform Party candidate.

In fact, the entire debate on CNN’s “Crossfire” last Wednesday night focused on whether Buchanan would go third party. Buchanan’s bigotry wasn’t mentioned once during the half-hour show.

The Wall Street Journal’s conservative columnist Paul Gigot devoted his space Friday to a discussion of how a Perot/Buchanan deal could deny the White House to the GOP next year, again without so much as mentioning “Pitchfork Pat’s” racism.

“I don’t have unlimited space,” Gigot said in an interview with Salon News, explaining why he didn’t mention Buchanan’s bigotry in his column. “But my guess is that if Buchanan does become a third-party candidate, or if he does well in the primaries, the press is going to cheer him on. Members of the press like a contest. and they like the idea that he’s going to stick it to Bush.”

Nonetheless, Gigot says, if Buchanan “becomes a player, I assume all those things would come back.”

(Neither Pat Buchanan nor his campaign returned phone calls for comment for this story.)

There is plenty of reason to believe that Buchanan may not be as marginal a figure among the electorate as some would like to believe. In between his racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic and anti-Semitic rhetorical outbursts, Buchanan speaks cogently and with conviction about a number of subjects — including trade, abortion and foreign policy — that clearly resonate with voters.

An August poll of 1,000 voters, taken by Schroth and Associates, had Buchanan winning 16 percent of the vote in a hypothetical three-way race against Gore (35 percent) and Bush (39 percent). That’s twice as much as Ross Perot scored in ’96, and Perot — while seemingly unbalanced — has been raked over the media coals far more than Buchanan, and for offenses far less ugly.

Besides, the last time the press deemed Buchanan as “marginal” he went out and beat former Sen. Bob Dole in the New Hampshire primary. That was 1996.

“If your theory is that the press takes it easier on him because he’s one of us, that’s certainly a possibility,” says Michael Kinsley, the editor of Slate, who had to stare at Buchanan’s scowl on “Crossfire” off and on for about four years. “The bad way to look at it is that he’s getting a free pass ’cause he’s a pal. The slightly more complicated way to look at it is that if you know someone, you know their complications, and you’re slower to reach conclusions about them. Especially negative conclusions.”

“In person, he’s charming,” notes Howard Kurtz, media critic of the Washington Post. “That doesn’t mean he’s not evil. It just means it’s harder to reach the conclusion that he’s evil. Many pundits tend to give Pat Buchanan a break because he is a member of the fraternity. There is a tendency with Buchanan — who was, after all, a professional bomb-thrower as a commentator — to roll your eyes and say, ‘There goes Pat’ when he says something outlandish. And that is probably a mistake.”

So, his media chums say, Buchanan isn’t really a bigot, he just plays one on TV.

But, what would happen, say, if it were discovered that George W. Bush had made a pet cause of defending World War II Nazis, often engaged in his own form of Holocaust denial and had once praised no less than Adolf Hitler, calling him “an individual of great courage, a soldier’s soldier in the Great War, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him”?

Or, what would the media fallout be if Elizabeth Dole sarcastically sneered at “the poor homosexuals — they have declared war on nature and now nature is exacting its retribution”?

How would the press corps react if someone discovered that Steve Forbes had once called Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko “the porch-nigger of the Politburo,” or if he labeled the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa, in which 67 blacks were killed, “whites mistreating a couple of blacks”?

Or if Vice President Al Gore, on the subject of immigration policy, proclaimed, “Jose, we ain’t gonna let you in again!”?

Or if former Sen. Bill Bradley proclaimed, “Rail as they will against ‘discrimination,’ women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism … The momma bird builds the nest. So it was, so it ever shall be. Ronald Reagan is not responsible for this; God is”?

What would happen if any non-Buchanan candidate made any of the above comments — every single one of which came from Buchanan? The answer, according to Kurtz: “The press would go nuts.” But perhaps even more curious than the silence among reporters about Buchanan’s racism is the self-censorship among his fellow Republicans seeking the White House.

In an interview with Salon News, former Sen. John Danforth, a Republican from Missouri, expressed bewilderment at the fact that not one of Buchanan’s rivals for the GOP nomination has been willing to condemn Buchanan’s bigotry.

“I’ve never been in presidential politics,” Danforth says. “But had I been, I think I really would have used that kind of thing. It’s the right thing to do, but I also think it’s good politics. It’s good to have a foil. It’s good to have somebody you can contrast yourself with.”

Danforth, of course, is no liberal. He was one of the Senate’s most ardent conservatives while in office, and is best-known for having shepherded Clarence Thomas through his 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

But Danforth, who retired from the Senate in 1994, scratches his head in an interview when he’s asked why the Republican presidential candidates are so afraid of taking on a man who could be their party’s version of a right-wing Sister Souljah.

Souljah was the harsh anti-white rapper then-Gov. Bill Clinton berated in 1992, generating much favorable publicity for his campaign. Could Pat Buchanan be just such a foil for the GOP this year? An extremist whom mainstream Republicans could condemn, thus indicating their willingness to attack a somewhat-fringe member of their core constituency who has gotten out of line?

Any candidate who did so might then win over moderate voters in the electoral middle, and become, in the parlance, more “electable” — not to mention the beneficiary of a significant media bounce.

“It would be a good thing for people to take that on,” Danforth says. “To say, ‘Here’s what he said and this is wrong.’”

In the past, a few conservatives have had the guts to condemn Buchanan’s hatred.

When Rich Bond was national chairman of the Republican National Committee, in 1996, he charged that Buchanan was “heading toward a low-road message of anger, hate and race-baiting.”

After Buchanan insinuated that Jews were roping America into the Gulf War, William F. Buckley condemned Buchanan in the National Review back in 1991: “I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination, the military build-up for the Gulf War, amounted to anti-Semitism,” Buckley wrote, “whatever it was that drove him to say and do it; most probably an iconoclastic temperament.”

This time around, however, the right, like the media, seems to be giving Buchanan a pass.

“The interesting thing is how he can say these things and still be considered a national figure,” Krauthammer says. “Even the ‘chopsticks’ line. If any other politician made that comment, he would have to spend a week apologizing. It’s a real puzzle; I don’t understand why he gets away with it.”

Last week, as an experiment, I contacted each of Buchanan’s rivals to see what they thought about the comments cited above. They are all, after all, running to be president of a country that contains blacks, Latinos, Jews, gays, lesbians, immigrants and all the other groups that Buchanan so casually maligns.

Some of these candidates consider themselves “compassionate conservatives,” speaking en español on the stump, eating chimichangas and dancing to salsa in their figurative big tents.

But unlike the glimmers of courage we’ve seen in Republican candidates in the past, not one of Buchanan’s eight rivals this year was willing to condemn his remarks.

“Gov. Bush is running a positive, issue-oriented campaign focused on his record of accomplishments and his agenda of prosperity with a purpose — and not on other candidate’s agendas,” Bush spokesman Scott McClellan told me in explanation of his man’s unwillingness to condemn Buchanan.

But isn’t racism and anti-Semitism an issue? I asked.

“Sure it is,” McClellan said. “But Gov. Bush’s philosophy is one that’s uplifting, hopeful and inclusive. Others may believe in pitting people against one another, but Gov. Bush believes in uniting people around common goals.”

Sen. John McCain’s spokesman made similar comments. “John McCain is a strong supporter of legal immigration, a strong supporter of Israel and is probably the strongest supporter of free trade in Congress,” said McCain spokesman Dan Schnur. “Clearly there are some differences in both policy and tone between the two candidates [McCain and Buchanan], and that’s why we have elections.”

It’s clear that both Bush and McCain know what Buchanan’s up to, and they don’t approve of it. But since they themselves aren’t preaching bigotry, they don’t feel the need to risk any political capital by condemning it in a rival.

But to their credit, at least I got that much out of the Bush and McCain folks.

“Elizabeth Dole is going to focus on her campaign and what she needs to do,” said Dole spokesman Ari Flesicher. “She’s not going to be distracted by other candidates.”

“Gary wants to take a pass,” said Bauer spokesman Matt Smith, whose boss was running in Iowa as a sort of Buchanan without the baggage.

Spokespeople for Forbes and Hatch asked to be sent the quotes cited above. After I sent them, they refused to return phone calls.

Dan Quayle spokesman Jonathan Baron took a different tack, offering a figurative “Welcome Bigots!” sign on behalf of his boss to Buchanan supporters. “Even many of his enemies recognize that Pat Buchanan is sincere and passionate and a good person, and Dan Quayle certainly considers Pat Buchanan a friend and an important member of the conservative movement,” Baron said. “They may not agree on every issue, but they agree on many issues.”

“Look,” Baron added, “everybody recognizes that Buchanan’s colorful quotes have enabled him to attract media attention.”

Beggers can’t be choosers, I suppose.

So, that left one more candidate:

“Alan Keyes said for me to tell Salon that there is an Eighth Commandment,” said Keyes spokeswoman Becky Fenger.

“Thou shalt not steal?” I asked.

“That’s the Eighth in the Protestant Bible,” she told me. “In the Catholic Bible it’s ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness.’”

“Huh?” I asked. “These are quotes. From Buchanan’s columns, and transcripts from his speeches. Buchanan’s proud of them. What’s the ‘false witness’?”

“I would guess,” Fenger said, “That Alan Keyes is saying that he’s never heard Buchanan make those comments himself, so he wouldn’t want to bear false witness against him. But that’s just my interpretation.”

(Fenger can be forgiven. Many of Keyes’ transmissions come from planet Neptune, so they’re often tough to decipher.)

To be fair, much of the reluctance of the other candidates to denounce Buchanan is based on the so-called 11th commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of thy fellow Republican.”

But utilization of the 11th commandment among the GOPsters seems spotty. Just last month, front-runner Bush was asked about Louisiana Republican David Duke, a former Klansman, and said, “I don’t like Duke’s politics. I don’t like where his heart is. I don’t like the bigotry and prejudice that he spreads. That’s my position on David Duke … As a loyal Republican, I don’t want that kind of message in our party.”

Of course, speaking out against a guy in a sheet is easy. Condemning a Republican on the same stage as you — one with a voter base, one who may well live to fight another day in another venue, as host of CNN’s “Crossfire” once again — is a little tougher.

As a front-runner who claims to be reaching out to new voter pools besides white Christians, Bush may be ready to affirm himself as a non-racist, but he’s not yet able to criticize friends who, figuratively, at least, wander over and shake hands at the local Klan rally.

Take Louisiana Gov. Mike Foster, for example, who has admitted purchasing a mailing list from David Duke in his last campaign, against an African-American congressman named Cleo Fields, and illegally failing to report that fact.

When asked a few weeks ago whether Foster, who is now Bush’s Louisiana campaign chair, should have purchased a mailing list of racists to target for votes, Bush said, “Here’s my position. Gov. Foster is a good and decent man. He’s an honorable fellow. I respect him a lot. I’m fortunate to have him as a friend and ally.”

When asked if he would have purchased a mailing list, Bush said, “I don’t know all the facts. I don’t know what the facts are. I do know I trust Mike Foster, and know he’s a good man.”

“I don’t know all the facts”?

Let me enlighten you, Governor: In 1995, Foster was running for governor. That year, and two years later, Foster purchased mailing lists from Duke for $152,000.

Foster broke campaign laws by keeping the purchases secret because, in his own words, “it ain’t cool” to be associated with the former Klansman. But in an investigation into Duke’s finances, the deal with Foster was brought to light. And then, just a few weeks ago, Foster was fined $20,000 by the Louisiana Board of Ethics for “failing to accurately … report campaign expenditures.”

It would seem in this that Foster has been anything but “good,” “decent” or “honorable.”

It is worth noting that besides remaining silent about Buchanan’s smears, Bush and his fellow Republican candidates have yet to say anything significant on the issue of race and prejudice in America in this, an insecure era that has seen a number of high-profile murders and shootings based on prejudice in Los Angeles, Chicago, Wyoming.

With the exception of Elizabeth Dole, all of the Republican candidates have denied that the proliferation of guns is one of the causes of such violence — but then they also refuse to condemn the warped thinking of bigotry when it is demonstrated in anyone of any political consequence.

“That’s another thing I don’t understand about these Republican candidates,” says Danforth. “Is why none of them talk about race at all.”

“They wouldn’t have to say very much,” Danforth says. “All they have to say is, ‘We’ve got a problem with race in this country, and we need to figure out what to do about it.’ They wouldn’t have to be for quotas or anything, they’d just need to indicate some interest in the subject. If somebody said, ‘We’ve got to do something about this race issue,’ it would immediately color the perception of that candidate. People would say, ‘This is a moderate.’”

But for now, among Republicans, no one has anything to say about the bigot in their midst. Would David Duke be afforded such a courtesy if he were running for president? Of course not — he wears a sheet.

So consider Buchanan’s own words on the former Klansman: “David Duke is busy stealing from me,” Buchanan said in 1991. “I have a mind to go down there and sue that dude for intellectual property theft.”

Go, Pat, go.

In fact, even though virtually every Republican presidential candidate kissed Trump’s ring, it’s further down the ballot where he has had the biggest financial impact. He gave $5,000 to Connecticut GOP Senate nominee Linda McMahon last year and $30,800 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), the campaign arm of Senate Republicans, which did not return a request for comment.

On the House side, he gave $2,500 to Rep. Ed Royce’s, R-Cal., reelection effort; another $1,000 to Tea Party favorite Rep. Allen West, R-Fla.; and $2,000 to Rep. Peter King, R-NY. And while he’s given to Democrats in the past, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, all of Trump’s donations in this year’s election cycle were to Republicans, including Romney ($2,500) and disgraced former New York Rep. Chris Lee, who resigned after being caught looking for sex on Craigslist. (Trump gave $500, which appears to have been returned.)

Trump has been especially involved with West, whose campaign did not return a request for comment. The “Apprentice” star appeared with the congressman at a Tea Party rally in Florida last April, and West even said he was open to being Trump’s vice presidential pick if the real estate mogul somehow won the GOP nomination. West told Newsmax at the time that he hoped Trump was “very serious” about his presidential bid. West also accepted $2,500 from Joseph Farah, the birther editor of World Net Daily, in 2008. (It’s Farah’s only political donation the past three cycles.)

But perhaps no candidate has closer or deeper ties to Trump than McMahon, who also did not immediately respond to a request for comment. McMahon made her money through the WWE professional wrestling league, which her husband founded.

Trump has been involved in the sport for years, which suits his flamboyant and phony image. Wrestlemania IV and V were both held at Trump Plaza, and a video that made the rounds on Twitter yesterday shows Trump tackling Vince McMahon at Wrestlemania 23. Trump and two beefy wrestlers hold down and restrain McMahon before shaving his head to wild cheers from the packed arena.

Trump’s ties to Linda McMahon became a campaign issue earlier this year when Democrat Chris Murphy slammed his opponent for taking Trump’s money. “That’s right, the man who led the charge to see President Obama’s birth certificate, report cards and test scores has set his sights on Connecticut’s Senate seat,” Murphy campaign manager Kenny Curran said in a fundraising email to supporters in February. The Connecticut Democratic Party even cut a web ad attacking McMahon that featured Trump.

The piece is largely an attempt to add a patina of respectability to the ancient, brainless comment thread talking point about how Robert Byrd was in the Klan, but lots of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act, so therefore Democrats are the real racists. (In this respect, the piece is an homage to Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism,” which attempted to expand “Nazi stands for National Socialist” to book length, without pictures.) The only problem is that the “lie” he’s arguing against is 100 percent true, except when he states it in such a way that it no longer resembles what anyone has ever actually claimed.

So: It’s true, and no one denies this, that Republicans used to be very good on civil rights and Democrats used to be super racist. It’s true that Woodrow Wilson was a bigot and (Northern, liberal) Republican senators were better than (Southern, conservative) Democratic senators on civil rights in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Williamson’s argument seems to be that Republicans couldn’t have taken advantage of a Democratic split over civil rights by appealing to racist white Southern voters because Republicans were too uniformly pro-civil rights, themselves. (This great big lie he’s debunking is one that Nixon and Lee Atwater and Ronald Reagan happily signed on to — they were thrilled when the Democrats fractured the New Deal coalition by eventually embracing civil rights!)

Williamson would, I guess, call it revisionist history, but he has revised all of the history out of it.

Even if the Republicans’ rise in the South had happened suddenly in the 1960s (it didn’t) and even if there were no competing explanation (there is), racism — or, more precisely, white southern resentment over the political successes of the civil-rights movement — would be an implausible explanation for the dissolution of the Democratic bloc in the old Confederacy and the emergence of a Republican stronghold there. That is because those southerners who defected from the Democratic party in the 1960s and thereafter did so to join a Republican party that was far more enlightened on racial issues than were the Democrats of the era, and had been for a century.

Oh, did they? It’s dubious to argue that the party that nominated Barry Goldwater for president was “far more enlightened” than the one that nominated Kennedy, but Johnson was a big ol’ Texas racist, so sure, fine, pretend Nelson Rockefeller cancels out Barry. But the segregationists didn’t all wake up and decide to vote for Republicans starting in 1965 — they revolted. George Wallace started a third party. They continued fighting for racism within the party, and they eventually lost. But it wasn’t until the conservative movement had finished fully taking over the Republican Party that the great shift finished.

After devoting a lot of words to LBJ’s very real history of being a loud-mouthed racist, Williamson explains that Johnson’s dumb, loud-mouthed racism was just a reflection of the whole of Democratic Party philosophy and belief since time immemorial.

Johnson did not spring up from the Democratic soil ex nihilo. Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fourteenth Amendment. Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fifteenth Amendment. Not one voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Eisenhower, as a general, began the process of desegregating the military, and Truman, as president, formalized it, but the main reason either had to act was that President Wilson, the personification of Democratic progressivism, had resegregated previously integrated federal facilities. (“If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it,” he declared.) Klansmen from Senator Robert Byrd to Justice Hugo Black held prominent positions in the Democratic Party — and President Wilson chose the Klan epic Birth of a Nation to be the first film ever shown at the White House.

Johnson himself denounced an earlier attempt at civil-rights reform as the “nigger bill.” So what happened in 1964 to change Democrats’ minds? In fact, nothing.

What is the funniest part of this: How it basically makes one brief stop in between 1875 and the mid-20th century in its exhaustive history of Democratic racism? Or how Williamson is clearly annoyed at having to even slightly, obliquely credit Harry Truman (Democrat!) for desegregating the armed forces, a thing (Democrat) Harry Truman did? Like, maybe what happened in 1964 was the eventual result of an intraparty battle that was happening in 1948 when Democrat Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces (and Strom Thurmond, future Republican, threw a big fit about it)?

The 1964 Civil Rights Act, and Lyndon Johnson’s role in ensuring its passage, was one major victory in a years-long effort by the party’s liberals to make the Democratic Party the civil rights party, and it worked so well that the racists were effectively no longer welcome. They responded by changing their positions or changing sides. It wasn’t an overnight change, because politics is slow, but it happened: Robert Byrd and even George Wallace changed their positions on black civil rights and apologized. Those who couldn’t adapt, or those for whom bigotry was more genuine belief than political opportunism, left the party. Strom Thurmond became a Republican. Lester Maddox launched a third-party presidential bid against Jimmy Carter and eventually endorsed Republican Pat Buchanan in 1992. Maddox was also a charter member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, the white supremacist paleoconservative group that once counted Trent Lott, Thurmond and Jesse Helms as members. These guys are the heirs to the conservative white Southern Democrat tradition. I’m not really sure they themselves would consider it a pernicious lie to say as much.

What would have been much, much more entertaining would have been if, instead of writing this piece about “Democrats” and “Republicans,” Williamson had written it about liberals and conservatives. Barry Goldwater and George Wallace both used conservative rhetoric to justify their segregationist beliefs — and so did William F. Buckley. Both parties at the time had liberal and conservative wings, and in each of those parties it was the liberal wing that was right on civil rights.

There was really only one American political party with a solid record on civil rights in the first half of the 20th century, and it was the American Communist Party. But “in praise of the liberal Northeastern Republicans who stood with the communists on civil rights and who were eventually driven from the party by conservatives like the ones who founded this magazine” would not go over well in the National Review, I imagine.

Williamson goes on to argue that the white South didn’t go Republican because of civil rights, it went Republican because of … the New Deal. So while the change happened too slowly and gradually to be ascribed to racism, it can happily be pinned on a series of popular economic programs that had been enacted 30 years prior to 1964. (Programs so popular that Southern racists and blacks joined together in a political coalition that lasted until liberals began … winning civil rights victories.)

But let’s not also forget to blame hippies and welfare:

The Republican ascendancy in Dixie is associated with the rise of the southern middle class, the increasingly trenchant conservative critique of Communism and the welfare state, the Vietnam controversy and the rise of the counterculture, law-and-order concerns rooted in the urban chaos that ran rampant from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and the incorporation of the radical Left into the Democratic Party. Individual events, especially the freak show that was the 1968 Democratic convention, helped solidify conservatives’ affiliation with the Republican Party.

In other words, it was literally everything that was going on in the 1960s besides civil rights issues that made white Southerners eventually fully embrace the Republican Party. (And blacks continue to support the Democrats because Democrats lied about what happened in the 1960s and because Johnson promised them free government money forever, apparently.)

I mean it’s obviously true that the shift didn’t happen purely because of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but it’s just as obviously true that it’s a hilarious and deeply stupid misreading of history to pretend that the Republican Party has always and will always be the champion of civil rights.

[Thanks to, and please also read: Adam Serwer, Jonathan Chait, Mark Schmitt, Clay Risen, and Jonathan Bernstein.]

For those of us who believe that there’s something seriously wrong with the Republican Party (and see Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein’s new book; see also my argument that the problem is not about how “conservative” they are, but about their radical style), the big question is whether anything can be done about it. American democracy needs two strong, solid political parties, but currently one of the parties is just a mess – incapable of making coherent policy when it’s in office, and dangerously obstructionist when it’s out of office.

So how can a party recover? I think there are three ways, but two are unfortunately quite unlikely, and the third is at best uncertain.

Some talk about the possibility that the electorate will punish Republicans for their radicalism. Unfortunately, I think that’s unlikely. Note that consecutive blowouts in 2006 and 2008 certainly didn’t make things better. Part of the problem here, too, is that elections generally don’t work that way. It’s true that the impression of ideological extremism can be costly, as Barry Goldwater and George McGovern learned the hard way, but we’re talking here about 2 or 3 percentage points in a presidential election. Direct action by the voters just isn’t enough to do it. After all, as voters, they can only choose between the nominees that they’ve been offered, and if anything voters are more partisan than ever; they’re not likely to defect just because a candidate embraces the crazy, even if they don’t like it, because they would still have a strong preference for that candidate otherwise.

A second possibility is that they’ll wind up with a successful president who sets a strong example of sane conservativism and who is strong enough within the party that he or she can push a lot of the crazies to the fringes and beyond. That could work. Presidents have limited influence in general, but one thing that a popular president can do is to define normality for his or her own party. They can reward some and punish — or at least avoid rewarding — others, creating real and meaningful incentives that can be very different from what came before. The obvious analogy is Dwight Eisenhower’s maneuverings against Joe McCarthy. The problem is that for this strategy to work it takes a skilled and popular president who decides to try it, but Republicans might have to wait a long time before they get another Ike.

So the first method probably can’t work, and the second one is unlikely to happen. That leaves one other possibility: that the Republican coalition itself might demand change. Specifically, that Republican-aligned interest groups – perhaps business, national security or others – might become upset enough with the crazy, or worried enough that the crazy will impede their ability to get things done, that they’ll push to end it. After all, part of the problem with the crazy is that it truly is random; you really never know what nonsense Limbaugh or the Breitbart sites are going to be up to next, and there’s every possibility that it could interfere with groups within the party pursuing their interests. Even worse: Politicians who believe they were elected because their most valuable allies convinced the electorate that the president was a radicalized foreigner are going to be responsive to those supporters, and not to organized party groups. Those groups have enough troubles as it is, since in the current free-for-all campaign finance environment they have to compete with random billionaires who might have all sorts of unorthodox policy preferences.

We’ve seen a little bit of this already. During the healthcare debate, many normally Republican-leaning groups chose to work with the Obama administration and cut their best deal, rather than sticking with the rejectionist GOP. Several companies quit the conservative state lobbying organization ALEC when it became controversial by lobbying for ideological and partisan goals. On the national security side, a break has emerged between the Department of Defense and movement conservatives; both conservatives who care about national security and (on some issues) businesses might choose to stick with the Pentagon. And it’s not quite the same thing, but there’s been a small but steady stream of defectors from the movement.

Nevertheless, something like this would likely play out in nomination politics, with party-aligned groups insisting on candidates who are willing to fight for their interests while rejecting the crazy, and there certainly isn’t any sign of that yet. Will it in 2014 and 2016 if Romney falls short this fall and the crazy gets even worse? I have no idea – but that’s the only path out of this that I can imagine.

The most recent evidence that the current incarnation of the Republican Party just can’t handle the truth arrived this month when House Republicans voted to get rid of the American Community Survey. The ACS is an annual information-gathering effort that’s part of the U.S. Census. Every year, a randomized sample of 3 million Americans is surveyed for data on “demographic, housing, social and economic characteristics.” In one form or another, the U.S. government has been carrying out similar surveys since 1850 — the current version is the fourth major iteration.

Most sensible people consider the ACS to be extremely useful, the kind of thing that government is really well equipped to carry out. That is not, or at least did not used to be, a partisan statement. Both private and public sector policymakers use ACS data to make important decisions. The federal government allocates $450 billion annually according, in part, to information derived from the ACS. Businesses also consider the ACS vital, which explains why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, rarely a fan of government spending, is opposed to the House action.

Even conservative economists are leery: The clearest evidence that the House GOP has gone completely beyond the pale can be seen in a Businessweek article reporting that representatives of the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute all declared their support for government data gathering. If you don’t understand what’s going on in the U.S. economy on a granular level, you’re flying blind. This should not be a controversial statement.

Even the Wall Street Journal is appalled — although the lead sentence of its editorial criticizing the funding cuts required some remarkable calisthenics before reaching the point of disapproval.

With the contempt of the Washington establishment raining down on House Republicans for voting on principle, every now and then the GOP does something that feeds the otherwise false narrative of political extremism.

Marvelous! In one sentence, the Journal’s editorial writer manages to deny, not once, but twice, the self-evident fact that the current crop of House Republicans occupies the nethermost regions of right-wing extremism, while at the same time admitting that, yeah, well, in this one case they are indeed bonkers.

There’s been no end of media chatter focusing on the importance of the data gathered by the ACS. We’ve also heard how the Constitution specifically enjoins Congress to gather demographic information “in such a manner as they shall by law direct.” And, in fact, the current form of the ACS follows the mandate set forth by a Republican Congress in 2005.

The sponsor of the House measure, the freshman Florida Republican Daniel Webster, claims that ACS questions are too “intrusive” and “the very picture of what’s wrong in D.C.” He seems to be projecting. The very picture of what’s wrong with D.C. is exquisitely captured by daily demonstration that one of our leading political parties is dedicated to the proposition that the less we know about what is going on in our economy or on our planet, the better. If science tells us that one of the consequences of human activity is an overheated planet, then the answer is to defund climate research. If data gathered by the ACS gives us a better understanding of where poverty may be growing as a result of economic policies put into place over the past few decades, best to just to close our eyes and ignore it.

Which brings us back to the 17th century. It’s no stretch to argue that both representative democracy and the Industrial Revolution flourished in large part through the application of Enlightenment principles. The founders of the United States were very much a product of Enlightenment ideals. Looking for an Enlightenment avatar? Think Ben Franklin. Progress is built on the accumulation of knowledge, and ideological rigidity shouldn’t be able to compete against the truth that derives from a better understanding of our universe. And yet that’s where we are today — watching as one of the two major political parties in our country becomes not just more and more distrustful of science, but also opposed to the very notion of information-gathering — and governs accordingly.

At the same time, Colorado’s Republican House Speaker Frank McNulty twice blocked a vote on a bill to legalize civil unions. His rationale? “We should not be spending time on divisive social issues when unemployment remains far too high and [when] far too many Coloradans remain out of work,” he said. Echoing that sentiment, the shadowy Republican front group Compass Colorado financed an automated telephone call telling thousands of voters that the push for civil unions was unacceptable because it is “promoting [a] divisive social agenda over Colorado job creation.”

Obviously, it’s perplexing to see the Republican Party allege that social issues are insignificant and “divisive.” This is, after all, the party whose most recent presidential nominating contest was dominated by attacks on contraception — the same GOP whose politicians have made an art out of riding a “guns, god and gays”-focused agenda to electoral victory.

But while such naked hypocrisy is enraging, the substance of the Republican rhetoric about gay rights is downright offensive. Essentially, conservatives are asserting that we cannot extend equal rights to all Americans and fix the economy. In the process, they are deliberately insinuating that the twin goals are somehow contradictory.

Well, you might ask, do they have a point? History says no. Our country’s story is the story of multitasking — a tale of extending the franchise to women while passing progressive legislation to deal with crushing economic inequality, a tale of both passing civil rights legislation and creating Medicare.

In light of such achievements, would anyone retroactively argue that America should have opposed the campaign to let women vote because the economy was so bad in the early 20th century? Would anyone insist that lawmakers should have halted civil rights legislation in the 1960s because there was a simultaneous need for a War on Poverty? Probably not, because most of us recognize such arguments for what they are: diversionary non sequiturs whose real goal is to preserve institutional bigotry and prejudice.

That’s the same objective of today’s GOP when it comes to rights for same-sex couples. For proof, just consider the abruptness of the shift: the Republican Party that spent the last decade insisting that we should simultaneously cut taxes, prosecute foreign wars and fight to limit a woman’s right to choose an abortion now suddenly says we can’t even discuss equal rights because of a recession.

The language changed not because the new “can’t walk and chew gum” mantra makes sense (seriously — would any sane person really claim that a bad economy justifies continued persecution of lesbians, gay, bisexual and transgender people?). It changed because the cause of equal rights is involved. And, clearly, that cause is what today’s Republicans are now most committed to stopping — no matter how much their flawed logic indicts their credibility.