Rarely does a conservative columnist state it so plainly as Michael Gerson does in his piece about why Ben Carson should vote for a Muslim president:
What gain or goal is worth the cost of breathing life into bigotry?
Here are some things Michael Gerson doesn’t think are worth that cost, because of his self-fulfilling prophecy that “declaring war on demography is like declaring war on gravity”:
- A secure border
- Preserving the two-party system
- A well-assimilated immigrant population
Lots of people have argued the Iraq invasion was racist, being a war of aggression waged against a Muslim nation with at least the secondary purpose of bringing their government up to 21st Century standards. When Gerson was in meetings of the White House Iraq Group, did he think it was worth the slings and arrows?
We don’t get to decide what bigotry is, the world in 2015 is full of people who do that professionally. Since Gerson is ready to elect a Muslim president of a Brazil-ized America, there is very little conflict between them. The ones who aren’t up for a policy of, ‘invade the world, invite the world, then consider the merit of ideas based on whether someone, somewhere, will call them racist,’ have a harder time finding their views represented in the Washington Post.