Washington Monthly's Steve Benen posited a thought experiment on Saturday regarding the election of Reince Priebus as the new chairman of the Republican National Committee, replacing Michael Steele, the RNC's first African American chairman. As Benen pointed out, when Democrats balked at the fluky election of Alvin Greene as the Democratic candidate in the South Carolina Senate race, conservative talkers fell over themselves to accuse Democrats of racism because Greene is black. When the Democratic Party leadership was jockeying for positions following the 2010 midterms and Steny Hoyer emerged as the favorite over James Clyburn for minority whip, Rush Limbaugh said the Democrats wanted Clyburn, who is African American, “to go back to the back of the bus.”

Benen speculated as to what would have happened had the partisan dynamics been reversed and the DNC voted to replace its first black chairman shortly after a successful election cycle. The answer, of course, would be more of the same from Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham and their compatriots.

But I can't help but think that it's more instructive to stay outside the realm of hypotheticals. The Republicans replaced their first black national committee chair shortly after their big electoral gains, and there were no allegations of racism from high-profile progressives in the media. There was no poisonous “back of the bus” rhetoric or Photoshops of Steele chauffeuring Priebus around à la Driving Miss Daisy.

This gets to the current debate over the “civility” of political discourse and the canard that “both sides” are equally to blame for the debased character of our national conversation. The New Yorker's George Packer has already dismantled the notion that left and right share equal blame for “the implied violence of current American politics,” and the same can said of ugly rhetoric like this. When a person with the clout of Rush Limbaugh uses unfounded and indefensible Jim Crow comparisons over something as unremarkable as a party leadership election, you can't honestly say that “both sides” are to blame.