Oh, I loves me some Paul Krugman: 

Fervent supporters of Barack Obama like to say that putting him in the White House would transform America. With all due respect to the candidate, that gets it backward. . . . [I]f he wins in November, it will be because our country has already been transformed.

Mr. Obama’s nomination wouldn’t have been possible 20 years ago. It’s possible today only because racial division, which has driven U.S. politics rightward for more than four decades, has lost much of its sting.

And the de-racialization of U.S. politics has implications that go far beyond the possibility that we’re about to elect an African-American president. Without racial division, the conservative message — which has long dominated the political scene — loses most of its effectiveness.

Take, for example, that old standby of conservatives: denouncing Big Government. . . .

Americans have never disliked Big Government in general. In fact, they love Social Security and Medicare, and strongly approve of Medicaid — which means that the three big programs that dominate domestic spending have overwhelming public support.

If Ronald Reagan and other politicians succeeded, for a time, in convincing voters that government spending was bad, it was by suggesting that bureaucrats were taking away workers’ hard-earned money and giving it to you-know-who: the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks, the welfare queen driving her Cadillac. Take away the racial element, and Americans like government spending just fine. . . .

The cause of [the] right turn, as Mr. Perlstein shows, was white fear of urban disorder — and the associated fear that fair housing laws would let dangerous blacks move into white neighborhoods. “Law and order” became the rallying cry of right-wing politicians, above all Richard Nixon, who rode that fear right into the White House.

But during the Clinton years, for reasons nobody fully understands, the wave of urban violence receded, and with it the ability of politicians to exploit Americans’ fear.

It’s true that 9/11 gave the fear factor a second wind: Karl Rove accusing liberals of being soft on terrorism sounded just like Spiro Agnew accusing liberals of being soft on crime. But the G.O.P.’s credibility as America’s defender has leaked away into the sands of Iraq.

Let me add one more hypothesis: although everyone makes fun of political correctness, I’d argue that decades of pressure on public figures and the media have helped drive both overt and strongly implied racism out of our national discourse. For example, I don’t think a politician today could get away with running the infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad.

Unfortunately, the campaign against misogyny hasn’t been equally successful.

By the way, it was during the heyday of the baby boom generation that crude racism became unacceptable. Mr. Obama, who has been dismissive of the boomers’ “psychodrama,” might want to give the generation that brought about this change, fought for civil rights and protested the Vietnam War a bit more credit.

He gets so much right, in such a short space. Every time I read him, I’m glad there’s even one person out there so insightful, so clear, and so uncompromising. Read it all.

Just to have something to say: I’m especially glad for his remarks on “political correctness” - otherwise known as “not being a gratuitous asshole”. Conservatives are against that, for the obvious reason, but for decent people it’s something that they don’t need to be encouraged to do in the first place. He could have gone further, however: treating people with respect is not just the right thing to do, it’s part of the social harmony everyone pretends to want. To the extent that anyone sneers at the thought of calling people by the names they themselves prefer, not telling bigoted jokes, or not using group slurs, they are not just causing hurt feelings (which, in some bizarre way, has come to be a mark of “rugged individualism”), but they are standing for a world in which some groups can be treated dismissively, and humiliated, by those with more power - a world in which petty oppressions are still the privilege of the privileged, and in which the grand oppressions they contribute to are always implicitly waiting to make a comeback. Our willingness to take “political correctness” seriously (sorry, Krugman, but not everyone “makes fun of” it) is a test of our willingness to live as decent people in a society of equals - a test that conservatives have chosen to fail, putting themselves increasingly outside the ethos of a society that is, slowly and fitfully, bettering iself.