White liberals' psychological need to feel morally superior to other whites

James Taranto has an excellent essay on a recent poll that asks participants who is more racist.  Head the whole essay here, but here is the delicious part.

It's not surprising that whites would be more apt to impute racism to blacks than to whites. Thus the partisan and ideological breakdowns are about what one would expect, given that most conservatives, and especially most Republicans, are white.

But the results for blacks are a big surprise. Blacks are more likely (by 7 percentage points) to think most blacks are racist than to think most whites are. Moreover, they are 11 points likelier than liberals (regardless of race) to think most blacks are racist, and 9 points likelier than Democrats. And blacks are 3 points less likely than liberals to think most whites are racist.

All of which suggests that the people likeliest to believe most whites are racist and most blacks are not are those who are both liberal and white. Which reinforces a point we've made often in this column: that a lot of what drives the futile debate over race in America is white liberals' psychological need to feel morally superior to other whites.

You can see it in the MSM, on college campuses and on the Internet. To take the latter as an example, the Volokh conspiracy is a blog owned by impeccably white and mostly Libertarian law professors. For reasons that are not totally clear (perhaps it's the composition of the legal profession) the site draws a large number of commenters who are somewhere to the Left of Karl Marx (exaggeration for effect). Here is a great example from degsme who denies that America was founded as - and has been - a liberal democracy:

As has been pointed out below, the USA's democracy has hardly been "liberal" in its values, be it 100+ years of slavery followed by another 100 years of oppression of minority rights or the suppression of women's bodily integrity, or the genocide of native tribes, or the wholesale "manifest destiny" oppression of hispanics in the SW. this makes it a touch hypocritical to look at someone like Morsi and argue that he is "illiberal" by comparison. What he asks for of women is nothing much more than what the USA demanded a mere 50-60 years ago, and he's hardly proposing slavery, and the response to the "Ground Zero Mosque" is hardly an example of majority religious tolerance.