I’m sure Jonathan Chait is grateful to the Heritage Foundation’s Jim DeMint for sharing his wisdom about ‘people of faith” ending slavery, not ‘big government.” It shows the extent to which the mainstream right is still fighting the Civil War. I never bought Chait’s false equivalence between the way the left and right use race in the age of Barack Obama, but DeMint surely didn’t advance Chait’s cause.

It could seem unfair to link DeMint to Chait, just because Chait’s reply to his critics, myself included, came the day DeMint’s ludicrous remarks became public. But Republicans are stepping in it every damn day, so if Chait had published his reply on a day ending in ‘y,” I probably could have found a toxic GOP statement on race. DeMint’s emancipation denialism just shows how thoroughly race is baked into the modern Republican Party, and anyone who’s trying to insist ‘Democrats do it too” has to answer for the former senator from South Carolina’s invidious revisionism.

Here’s exactly what DeMint told a Christian radio show last week, courtesy of Think Progress:

Well the reason that the slaves were eventually freed was the Constitution, it was like the conscience of the American […]