Marjorie Taylor Greene is sabotaging conservatives' fight against 'wokeness'

Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock)

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) got a preview Wednesday of what his life will be like if he becomes speaker next year: a fresh barrage of questions about Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.). The pair spoke at a white nationalist conference in February, an event that seemed to shock even former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and McCarthy so far won't commit to keeping them off congressional committees as repudiation.

The lawmakers' associations are a bad look for the GOP, whatever their insistence that their appearance at the conference didn't mean they share the white nationalists' views. It will become an even bigger focus of Democratic and media attention if Republicans win a House majority in November. But it also speaks to a larger debate between the left and the right that is only gaining in importance.

We are in the midst of a discussion about whether and how important national institutions, even the American founding, can be separated from the racism that was prevalent for much of our history. An increasingly vocal subset of the American left is effectively arguing this cannot be done.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

That argument deserves serious conservative pushback, and the nationalist strand on the right at its best offers a robust defense of America's nationhood, sovereignty, heroes, and institutions. Making those arguments will at times require courage in the face of unfair accusations of racism. But this defense cannot be allowed to degenerate into apathy toward, or, worse, embrace of genuine racism.

If McCarthy and other mainstream Republicans want to be able to credibly push back on "wokeness" and popularized versions of critical race theory, with their expansive definitions of racism, they cannot tolerate or ignore actual racial animus in their own ranks. These left-wing trends will only grow in popularity if conservatives embody the caricature progressives would draw of them by declining to recognize the immorality of racial hatreds in all places and times, including Congress in 2021.

America's history with race, like that of other great countries, is complicated. Oversimplifying it in either direction does not help us move forward. The woke and the white nationalist need each other. Conservatives need neither of them.

Continue reading for free

We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.

Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.

W. James Antle III

W. James Antle III is the politics editor of the Washington Examiner, the former editor of The American Conservative, and author of Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped?.