Race is central to the fear and angst of the US right

The shrinking white base of the Republican party cannot accept the country in which it now lives – so it shut it down

Gary Younge
The Guardian, Sunday 20 October 2013 13.35 EDT


In the early 1980s veteran pollster Stan Greenberg, conducted a focus group in Macomb County, a Detroit suburb, of former Democrats who had switched allegiance to the Republican Ronald Reagan. After he read a statement by Robert Kennedy about racial inequality, one participant interjected: "No wonder they killed him."

"That stopped me and led to a whole new analysis of Reagan Democrats," wrote Greenberg in a recent report, Inside the GOP. "I realised that in trying to reach this group of people race is everything," he told me.