Conservatives attacked state capacity to curtail antiracist policy without appearing racist

Evidence

The most effective counter, on the conservationist view, both instrumentally and to avoid being seen as racist, would be to go after the institution of the state itself. Kill Goliath and the philistines with a single fling: Restrict black advancement, thus cutting out the possibility of additional competition; and delimit state power, long a central conservative tenet. And so that it cannot respond to perceived crisis after crisis of racially driven impoverishment – gangs, crack cocaine, HIV/AIDS, educational failure, intensified poverty, urban blight – other than through criminalizing the most vulnerable, the state is being steadily denuded of the resources of response. The state’s resources directed at producing greater racial equality are being drowned in Grover Norquist’s bathtub. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 445

Categorization

• XREF: The Norquist ‘drown the state in a bathtub’ move connects to the broader austerity/neoliberal scholarship the reader tracks on state retrenchment. — connects to: Neoconservatives recoded the state itself as a threatening black institution — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1763
• SEED: Angle: how shrinking the state and postracial denial are actually one coordinated move, not separate conservative commitments.