And now for something completely different.
Category Archives: big picture stuff
Random News
I’m having a bad case of brain fuzz today and probably should be getting my head out of the computer altogether, but I thought I should blog something.
Regarding Jim D. Adkisson, who opened fire in a Unitarian Universalist church in Knoxville, killing two people — until the accused is thoroughly evaluated it’s a tad premature to call what he did a hate crime, or terrorism. He might be psychotic, for example.
Police retrieved a letter from Adkisson’s car in which the accused said was motivated by hatred of liberals and gays. Some of his neighbors said he had some attitude about Christianity also, which caused some of the Right to jump in and say his real motivation was hatred of Christians. Somebody needs to explain to them that, strictly speaking, most UUs aren’t Christian. See also Sara Robinson.
Over the weekend John McCain met with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. (Aides to His Holiness stressed that the meeting was not an endorsement.) Some commenters say McCain was meeting with His Holiness to show toughness against China. Yeah, get your picture taken with a sweet old monk; that’ll show ’em. But as long as China is holding about a trillion dollars of U.S. debt, that’s about as tough as anyone is gonna be.
Still Lurching Along the Road to Serfdom
Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom — or, at least, a mythical version of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom — has long been a common bugaboo of the Right-wing brain: All government regulation is collectivism is socialism is communism is totalitarianism. You know the lyrics to that one, no doubt.
There’s an analysis of Hayek in Dissent magazine by Jesse Larner that I found interesting. To some extent it supports a blog post I wrote about Hayek awhile back. Larner writes,
In Road, he [Hayek] thoroughly, eloquently, and convincingly demolishes an idea that virtually no one holds nowadays.
The core of Road is an exploration of why a planned, state-managed economy must tend toward totalitarianism. If this is one’s concept of socialism, it could hardly survive a fair-minded encounter with Hayek.
As I wrote in the old post, I have never in my life met a fellow American who seriously proposed establishing a planned economy, in which government controls all production and distribution of income. The Right continues to rail against us Lefties as if that’s exactly what we propose.
Larner:
BECAUSE THEY understand so little about the thoughtful left (and former association doesn’t translate into knowledge; Horowitz and his cohort, like the earlier generation of converts led by Irving Kristol, still think of the modern left as a crypto-Castroite conspiracy), it is hard for many on the right to acknowledge that as a critique of socialism, Hayek’s ideas are limited rather than devastating.
Larner writes that Hayek saw “collectivism” only as something government imposes, and didn’t understand that collectivism can be “a spontaneous, nongovernmental, egalitarian phenomenon.” This parallels my gripe with libertarians who cannot perceive that oppression can come from powers other than the federal government. This is a rigidly linear view of human society.
In fact, power manifests in many ways and in many hands, and whoever has power is capable of oppressing others. So the Right, in the name of “liberty,” opposes government authority to impose limitations on the power of corporations to exploit ordinary people. They run away from an imaginary “serfdom” imposed by government and toward a very real “serfdom” imposed by corporatism.
Also in the name of “liberty,” the Right wants to place limitations on what We, the People can do with our own government to solve problems. Again, this doesn’t make us freer or less oppressed, because it takes power away from the people and gives it to monied interests even less answerable to us than government.
Anyway — the Larner article is worth reading.
What Is Evil?
Here’s a blog exchange that gives me a chance to revisit a favorite theme — what is evil? Ernest Partridge argues that evil is the absence of empathy. And it’s a good argument.
Someone who is utterly without empathy is, by definition, a sociopath. I think there are degrees of empathy deficiency short of sociopathy, however. You’ve probably known people who could be empathetic to others in their same demographic group but utterly callous to “outsiders,” for example.
Partridge goes on to describe today’s American Right as “regressives” who lack empathy, versus “progressives” whose moral worldview is based on empathy. And I think that’s a valid argument, but perhaps not the whole enchilada.
I would argue that the difference between today’s “conservatives” and those I like to call “normal people” is also a difference in cognitive ability. And I don’t mean just “smarts.”
Righties have rigidly linear thought processes; they don’t see the interconnectedness of things. The Iraq War is a good example of linear thinking — Saddam is bad, taking him out is good. They were incapable of even considering how “taking him out” might change Iraq’s relationship with Iran, for example, or how the ancient Sunni-Shia feud might impact postwar Iraq. Even now they don’t seem to grasp how much the war has and is and will cost the nation, nor how the rigidly linear focus on Iraq actually hurts our overall anti-terrorism efforts.
Domestically, they don’t appreciate how allowing New Orleans to rot might impact the rest of the U.S., or how allowing big chunks of the population to fall into poverty because of health care costs or the mortgage crisis might impact the economy as a whole. They can’t see outside the linear “people dumb enough to take junk mortgages/not have health insurance don’t deserve to be rescued.”
I’ve met some far left-wing ideologues who seemed no more empathetic than their right-wing counterparts. The difference is in where their loyalties lie. As for the rest of us, I don’t know if “seeing the interconnectedness of things” is the result of empathy, or vice versa, or unrelated. I think probably it is possible for someone to have a keen intellectual grasp of interconnectedness but rank only average on the empathy scale.
John Hawkins of Right Wing News has a different view of Partridge’s post.
At the RightOnline summit at Austin, we actually discussed the nature of “evil” for a while. While most people think of “evil” as a greasy character, twirling his mustache while planning to hurt the innocent for the sheer joy of it, that’s not an accurate description of most evil people.
Saying that evil people lack empathy gets closer to the truth, but isn’t quite right. Even a person who isn’t very empathetic could be pure of heart, live by Golden Rule, and be a great person.
I don’t think so. Hawkins is leaving out the self-bullshit factor, or the lies we tell ourselves to give ourselves permission to do whatever we want to do, consequences be damned. Empathy is a wonderful moderator of self-bullshit. Without it, people inevitably rationalize why the injury they do to others to get what they want is somehow justified, even “moral.”
Hawkins continues,
So, what is at the core of evil? I’d say selfishness.
Selfish people aren’t empathetic and they don’t care very much about how their actions impact others because it’s all about them.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t see a distinction between Hawkins’s definition of “selfishness” and “absence of empathy.”
Oh, they may say they care about people and pretend to emphasize with them, but in reality, they do what they do only because it benefits them.
That’s classic sociopathic behavior.
…And regrettably, the “moral cornerstone of progressive politics” isn’t empathy, it is selfishness. Take that for what it’s worth.
What it’s worth? Since Hawkins doesn’t bother to explain why he thinks the “moral cornerstone of progressive politics” is selfishness, I’d say you’d get more value from a bucket of piss.
If you are talking about the moral cornerstone of progressive politics, I agree with Partridge — empathy, definitely. I argue that empathy — or, at least, good socialization — is the cornerstone of morality, period.
If you’re interested, I have an article about the Buddhist understanding of evil on the other site.
Let’s Hear It for Arrogance
I didn’t realize this, but “arrogance” is a synonym for “having a conscience.” No, really. I learned this today from Jammie Wearing Fool.
You may have read about L.F. Eason III, who retired from his job of 29 years at the North Carolina Department of Agriculture rather than obey a government directive. The directive was to fly U.S. and state flags at half mast in honor of the late pox upon humanity known as Jesse Helms. Well, Jammie Wearing Fool had this to say about that.
Such sanctimonious arrogance. Just because he’s a liberal twit with his own opinions, in his mind he gets to decide which state directives to follow.
Oh, my dear ones, read that sentence over and over again, and reflect upon it, because it is the true voice of American conservatism. How dare any of us listen to our own wisdom and act according to our own consciences? We are called upon to muffle our inner voices and do what we’re told. This is the American Way.
However, what Eason did is called “civil disobedience,” and it’s a time-honored American tradition going back to, oh, the Boston Tea Party at least.
Civil disobedience is the willful violation of a law or government directive because that law or directive is unjust. (It is not, as some assume, an act of malicious vandalism to demonstrate one’s unhappiness with government.) Rosa Parks’s refusal to obey a segregation law and sit at the back of a bus was classic civil disobedience. According to Jammie Wearing Fool, Rosa Parks was just being arrogant.
Another time-honored convention of civil disobedience is that if your violation of the law requires punishment, that you accept the punishment and not resist arrest. Henry David Thoreau refused to pay poll taxes because of his opposition to slavery and the Mexican-American War. He spent a night in prison. He was prepared to remain in prison, but an aunt paid his poll taxes over his protests, and he was released. He later said “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”
Mr. Eason wasn’t imprisoned, but he gave up a job, which is a terrible penalty these days when good jobs are hard to come by. I wish him well.
And just because these leftists say such things about Mr. Helms does not make them true.
A valid point, but just because Jammie Wearing Fool doesn’t want to believe them, doesn’t make them false, either.
Sure enough, this haughty Eason is a John Edwards supporter.
Clearly, he needs to be sent to the Rush Limbaugh Re-education Camp, so that he can be relieved of his own opinions and think only state-sanctioned thoughts.
Who knows, before long Silky will sue on his behalf for wrongful termination. You can be sure this Eason will be put on the leftist pedestal of worship for his courage. Heck, they’ll probably have him speak at the convention in Denver.
It did take courage, since it cost him his job, and I salute the man. It shows us there are still people with integrity in the world who don’t take the easy road with the rest of the crowd. If only there were more like him.
A couple of days ago I interviewed Zen teacher Norman Fischer, former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center. And one of the items that came up in our conversation is the extent to which we are socialized into forgetting our own life experiences in favor of an “official” narrative sanctioned by society. We shuffle through life with this sanctioned narrative in our heads about who we are supposed to be and what our lives are supposed to be like, but that narrative may have nothing to do with who we are and what are lives really are or could be. Some people eventually wake up to this, and get real, but others never do.
So Jammie Wearing Fool sees someone who’s awake to who he is and who acts on his conscience, and this looks like “arrogance” to the Fool because it’s overriding the Official Sanctioned Narrative that we’re all supposed to follow and not ask questions about.
Of course, at the other end of the political scale we have the “pro-life” pharmacists who won’t fill birth control prescriptions. It seems to me this is also civil disobedience, since pharmacists are licensed by their states to fill prescriptions. If filling birth control prescriptions violates a pharmacist’s conscience I respect that, but the penalty should be loss of his license and a new career path. Instead, such pharmacists want to keep their jobs and play God with other peoples’ lives. I wonder if the Fool finds that arrogant, too?
For the Monks of Tassajara
If you follow the other blog, you’ve seen my updates on the wildfires threatening Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, a Soto Zen monastery in the Carmel Valley/Big Sur area of California. This is a gripping story that, at any other time, might be getting more of the nation’s attention.
I believe that Tassajara is the oldest Buddhist monastery in the Western Hemisphere, and it is certainly the oldest Zen monastery in North America. It was established in 1966 by the San Francisco Zen Center while the late Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, was abbot.
In brief, wildfires that had been burning since mid-June began to threaten the forests around Tassajara, and the guests and most students were evacuated June 25. A crew of 22 students, mostly monks, defied orders and stayed behind to prepare to save the buildings. They’ve been cutting back brush and hooking up sprinkler systems. Although they promise they will leave if the fire becomes life threatening, local authorities insisted they provide names of their dentists for identification purposes.
Here’s a video from a local television station about the monks. Naturally, there’s also a blog about saving Tassajara, called Sitting With Fire.
Although the buildings can be rebuilt if lost, losing Tassajara even temporarily would be devastating to the San Francisco Zen Center; first, because the monastery can’t get fire insurance, and second, because programs for guests at Tassajara are a big source of income for SFZC. So, although all things are impermanent, if Tassajara burns it would be a huge setback that would ripple throughout much of American Soto Zen.
A post from yesterday evening on the San Francisco Zen Center site says the fires continue to creep toward Tassajara. Two fire trucks came to bring the monks hard hats, goggles and foam.
Most poignantly, on Tuesday the monks requested a copy of Gary Snyder’s Smokey the Bear Sutra. This “sutra” is a poem composed by Snyder in 1969 that has been beloved by American Zen students ever since. It’s probably been 20 years since I first read it, and it’s still a delight. So please read it if you never have, and re-read it if you have read it before, and then think some good thoughts for the monks of Tassajara.
Identify With This
This morning I want to re-visit “identity politics” and why I hate it. But first, I want to clarify again what I mean by the term.
The Wiki definition of “identity politics” is “political action to advance the interests of members of a group supposed to be oppressed by virtue of a shared and marginalized identity (such as race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or neurological wiring).” That’s fine as far as it goes, but there’s a critical aspect of IP that this definition leaves out. And that is the tendency of IP activists to care and work passionately only on behalf of the marginalized group with which they share identity (hence the name, “identity politics”).
Why is this a problem? It’s a problem because the end result is a balkanization of advocacy groups that compete with each other for donations and attention and sometimes even work against each other. And that end result is one of the reasons the Right has been able to dominate American political discourse for the past quarter century or so.
I witnessed this splintering in the 1970s. Back then what was left of the old New Deal coalition broke apart, partly under pressure from the antiwar and various “New Left” liberation movements and partly because large numbers of whites allowed themselves to be race-baited into voting Republican.
The New Deal coalition had sustained the Democratic Party and constituted its soul for four decades. It was a broad, if flawed, coalition that successfully promoted progressive policies (see, for example, the Great Compression). Granted, by the early 1970s this coalition had gotten rigid and old and was not responding well to the challenges of the times. The time was ripe for a political realignment, in particular one that included minorities and women.
But when the New Deal coalition broke up, it left a huge vacuum within the Democratic Party, and the antiwar and various liberation movements did not form a new coalition to step in to fill that vacuum. Instead, young activists all too often remained in self-absorbed Identity Politics enclaves.
And divided, we were conquered.
In the 1970s, as the New Deal coalition was crumbling, a number of wealthy conservatives like Richard Mellon Scaife began to build the media and political infrastructures that have dominated U.S. politics since the 1980s. While too many progressive activists remained on street corners handing out xeroxed fliers for a narrowly focused cause du jour, a new right-wing coalition came together to dominate mass media and to drive their issues relentlessly.
And with no big coalition to support it, the Democratic Party had to turn to moneyed interests and corporate donors to get the funds to win elections. More and more, the Dems became indistinguishable from the Republicans. Progressives effectively were banned from power.
Fast forward to the 1990s. Bill Clinton won two elections not by challenging the Republican Power Machine but by finessing it. It was a remarkable personal performance that left the right-wing power infrastructure intact and did nothing to restore the Democratic Party’s lost soul.
I don’t fault him for that, because at the time Clinton was up against something that was, in its way, a lot more powerful than the presidency. Given the political culture and circumstances of the 1990s, his popularity and effectiveness were powerful testimony to his unique political skills.
But, ultimately, if we’re going to create a society and government that genuinely are open to progressive ideas and policies, the political culture has got to change and the right-wing power infrastructure has got to be pushed back hard. I don’t believe that was possible in the 1990s. Now, I think it is possible. Thanks to the colossal failures of the Bush Administration, and the new progressive infrastructure made possible by the Internet, we have an opportunity to effect broad, systemic change in American politics that will help all progressive causes.
This is an opportunity that must be seized now. A door is open now that might be closed to us by the next election.
Today, many of us are catching our breath hoping the Dem nomination battle really is over so that the general election fight can begin. But these past few months I’ve been dismayed at how quickly so many of us fell back into the old Identity Politics, equality for Me but not for Thee, patterns. Once again, we’re forming circular firing squads.
As a generic choice I don’t much care whether the First President Who Is Not a White Man turns out to be a black man or a white woman, or for that matter a woman of color were one running this year. When I look at senators Clinton and Obama, my questions are which one of these two gets it? Which one sees the possibility of creating a new political culture friendly to progressivism? Which one is more likely to walk through that door?
And the answer I come up with is Obama. I cannot say whether he will succeed. He is human and imperfect, not political Jesus. But his words and background and the way he has run his campaign tell me he sees the opportunity that I see and will, at least, try.
However, I don’t believe Senator Clinton sees the opportunity. My belief is based in part on her performance in the Senate, which on the whole has been disappointing, and on the way she has run her campaign, which has been the same old “finesse (but don’t challenge) the Right and divide the Left” politics. All her formidable political skills mean nothing if she doesn’t see that open door.
Yes, electing Hillary Clinton would make a grand statement for feminism. But then we’d sweep up the popped balloons and confetti and go back to Old Politics Business as Usual. And nothing substantive would change. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s how I see it.
Michelle Goldberg has a article at The New Republic called “3 A.M. for Feminism.” You should read the whole thing, but here’s a snip:
Hillary Clinton has lost the nomination, but some of her most ardent female backers seem unwilling to accept it. A strange narrative has developed, abetted by Clinton and some of the mainstream feminist organizations. In it, the will of the voters was thwarted by chauvinistic party leaders in concert with a servile media, and Obama’s victory represents a repeat of George W. Bush’s in 2000. It’s a story in which Obama becomes every arrogant young man who has ever edged out a more deserving middle-aged woman, and Clinton, hanging on until the bitter end, is not a spoiler but a feminist martyr.
This conviction, that sexism cost Clinton the nomination, is likely to be one of the more toxic legacies of this primary season. It is leaving her supporters feeling not just disappointed but victimized, many convinced that Obama’s win is illegitimate. Taylor Marsh, a blogger and radio host whose website has become a hub for Clinton fans, says she gets hundreds of e-mails from angry Democrats pledging not to vote for Obama. She’s started running posts from such readers under the headline DEMOCRATIC STORM WARNINGS. “I’m not saying that this is a huge voting bloc,” she says. “I’m just saying that there is a huge amount of talk and I’m convinced it’s a reality that needs to be addressed.”
Taylor — and let me say I’ve met Taylor and like her very much, in spite of, well, recent events — responded:
Michelle Goldberg’s subtitle couldn’t be more insulting: “Clinton dead-enders and the crisis in the women’s movement.” There’s enough anger and rancor. It doesn’t help. But not even progressives get it.
People just do not understand the rage.
I don’t understand the rage, and I’ve been as held back by sexism as much as most women my age, which is close to Taylor’s and Hillary’s age.
I’ve faced the harassment and double standards. I’ve watched incompetent men sail effortlessly up the management ladder while exceptionally competent women remained stuck in entry-level positions for year after year. I’ve had to train men to manage me who had half my experience. I spent years struggling with unequal pay while raising two kids by myself. I certainly understand being angry about that.
But, y’know what? People get shafted lots of ways. Lots of people other than women have good reason to be angry at the status quo. If we’re going to change the status quo, we need to stop shoving each other out of the way just to make statements. I’m done with making statements. I want change.
As I wrote a couple of days ago, equality by definition has no preferences. If you are fighting for equality only for your particular slice of the demographic pie, then you aren’t fighting for equality but for favoritism.
If we’re going to turn the nation in a more progressive direction, we must jettison Identity Politics and come together to work for Progressive Politics.
I know Senator Clinton complains that she’s been shoved out of the race. But in spite of a strong finish, she was mathematically out of the race weeks ago, and her “kitchen sink” dirty campaigning was only poisoning the water without changing the inevitable outcome. Further, the Florida-Michigan issue was nothing but a slick attempt by Clinton to pick up cheap votes, and the fact that Clinton supporters willfully fail to see this tells me they’ve got their eyes shut to reality.
You know what we’re really up against? Read carefully this opinion piece by Daniel Henninger at The Wall Street Journal.
The irony too bitter to swallow is that Barack Obama’s identity politics trumped Hillary Clinton’s identity politics. Put differently, what goes around comes around. …
… The hard version [of identity politics] introduced people, mostly college students, to an America partitioned into categories of race, gender, ethnicity and sexuality. The softer version has flown for 30 years under all sorts of euphemized banners – diversity, multiculturalism, celebrating our differences. Only one campaign is celebrating our differences this week. …
… After South Carolina, the campaigns accused each other of playing the race or gender card. Obama deflected this charge. “I don’t want to deny the role of race and gender in our society,” Obama said. “They’re there, and they’re powerful. But I don’t think it’s productive.”
I’m not convinced. I think Barack Obama is more inclined to interpret American life in the formal categories of identity politics than is generally thought, or even than would older “conventional liberals” like Al Gore or John Kerry. Legal theorists have been a main source of its ideas; it’s hard to imagine that Barack and Michelle Obama didn’t hear a lot about “marginalized constituencies” at Harvard Law School. Sen. Obama may not be so conventional after all.
Speaking last July about picking Supreme Court nominees, he said: “We need someone who’s got the heart . . . the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old – and that’s the criteria by which I’ll be selecting my judges.” This is the language of identity politics. It’s not just talk. It’s an ideology designed to produce . . . change. …
… John McCain by instinct, biography and upbringing is prone to see America as a common civic culture. The vocabulary of “unjust” class distinctions familiar to Obama is alien to the McCain worldview. Sen. McCain should think about this and figure out a way to talk about it. If Americans are going to affirm a president making appointments on the basis of race, gender, class and sexuality, they should know it in 2008, rather than 2009-2012.
To Henninger, any political activism that addresses the concerns of any demographic other than White Upper-Class Male is, by default, “Identity Politics.” White Upper-Class Male is the default norm that constitutes what Henninger sees as a “common civic culture,” never mind lots of us have been disowned by that “common” culture.
And as long as we keep ourselves divided into demographic splinter groups, and allow indulgent, self-centered anger to blind us to the bigger picture, Henninger wins.
[Update: I watched Senator Clinton’s speech this afternoon and thought it very classy. She did a lot to rehabilitate her reputation, and I hope the majority of her supporters can take her advice and support Barack Obama for President.]
White Nationalism
Glenn Greenwald points to this genuinely disgusting column by Kathleen Parker, in which she writes,
“A full-blooded American.”
That’s how 24-year-old Josh Fry of West Virginia described his preference for John McCain over Barack Obama. His feelings aren’t racist, he explained. He would just be more comfortable with “someone who is a full-blooded American as president.”
Parker argues that Fry isn’t necessarily racist, mind you.
Who “gets” America? And who doesn’t?
The answer has nothing to do with a flag lapel pin, which Obama donned for a campaign swing through West Virginia, or even military service, though that helps. It’s also not about flagpoles in front yards or magnetic ribbons stuck on tailgates.
It’s about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots. …
…We love to boast that we are a nation of immigrants — and we are. But there’s a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice. …
…What they know is that their forefathers fought and died for an America that has worked pretty well for more than 200 years. What they sense is that their heritage is being swept under the carpet while multiculturalism becomes the new national narrative. And they fear what else might get lost in the remodeling of America.
Republicans more than Democrats seem to get this, though Hillary Clinton has figured it out. And, the truth is, Clinton’s own DNA is cobbled with many of the same values that rural and small-town Americans cling to. She understands viscerally what Obama has to study.
Glenn points out that Barack Obama’s white grandfather fought in World War II, but somehow Barack Obama hasn’t earned the same “blood equity” that whiter candidates have, nor is his DNA properly “cobbled.” Gee, I wonder why that is?
Of course Parker is a racist. She’s worked out some system in her head by which she can justify being more comfortable with the white candidates than with the black guy, and then she kids herself she isn’t a racist. But she is.
Anyway — Since my ancestors starting earning “blood equity” in the Revolution, I assume I have the authority to tell Parker she doesn’t know America from grapefruit. Conservatives cling to a much-beloved fantasy that the “America that has worked pretty well for more than 200 years” was somehow all of a piece culturally until recent times. Fantasy, I say. As I wrote a couple of years ago, the fact is that American culture has been in constant flux since the first white guys sailed into Chesapeake Bay to found Jamestown. Each group of immigrants, from the 17th century on, both changed whatever culture they found here at the time and were changed by it.
As I wrote in the earlier post, if we could reconstitute Daniel Boone and show him around, he wouldn’t recognize this country at all. I think they had apple pie in his day, but much of “traditional” American culture — baseball, jazz, barbecue, John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever†— didn’t exist in Daniel Boone’s America.
If you spend much time with American history, surely you understand that different parts of the country developed very different “heritages,” in part because of the differences in immigration patterns. This was very apparent in the 19th century. The cultural differences between the slave-owning South and the free-soil North were particularly striking, and traces of that difference linger to this day. But there were also big cultural differences between, say, New England and the upper Midwest.
At the same time, although my fore-parents have been on these shores for just about three centuries, to native Americans I’m still an interloper. I respect that.
For a more nuanced look at what White America is going through, check out this column by Gregory Rodriguez. Although his DNA may not be properly cobbled either, I say Rodriguez understands America better than Parker does. (And per Parker’s own criteria my bloodlines make me the authority in these matters.) Rodruguez writes,
Last week, exit polls in West Virginia showed that Barack Obama might be facing some fierce racial resistance if he becomes the Democratic nominee. More than half of West Virginia Democratic voters — 95% of whom are white — said they would be dissatisfied if Obama won the nomination.
Is this white supremacy? No, in fact it might be its opposite, an acknowledgment that white privilege has its limits. With immigration and globalization reformulating who we are as a nation, it isn’t the white elites that are threatened by the changes; rather, it’s the nearly 70% of whites who are not college educated who figure among the most insecure of Americans. Many feel that their jobs are being outsourced or taken by immigrants — legal or otherwise — and that their culture is being subsumed. When Clinton promises to make their voices heard, she’s appealing not to Anglo-Saxon racial triumphalism but to the fear of white decline.
They’re bitter, you know, whether they’ll admit it or not.
Granted, not everyone who fits under the rubrics of “white, working class, not college educated” is going to vote against Obama. But by rallying to Clinton’s faltering candidacy, some sectors of white society might be trying to solidify the old racial boundaries of American nationhood. It’s not so much that they are hoping to reclaim their place, but that they are seeking to carve out a niche and demanding that, at the very least, the presidency remains “theirs.”
Like black or Latino activists who insist that a particular congressional district should be represented by one of their own, the disgruntled white working-class, non-college-educated voters might be demanding that their majority status still translate into something at least symbolically meaningful to them.
I say it’s splitting hairs to claim this isn’t a variation of white supremacy. For a very long time white supremacy has been all about building up the flagging self-esteem of unexceptional white people. But Rodriguez points out that we’re turning into a nation in which everyone’s in a minority.
Romantic notions of ethnic self-determination and multiculturalism may have once served to dismantle empires and garner attention for forgotten minorities. But today they are more likely to nurture the kind of white nationalism on which Clinton has placed her last political hopes.
Parker’s skewed perception of people’s “bloodlines” and “DNA” rests on the biased fantasy that the United States is a white nation. If the United States is going to be a functional nation in the 21st century, we’d best learn that we’re all in this democratic government thing together.
Art Critique
Naked dancers, fine. Naked actors, maybe. Naked opera singers — so wrong.
Forty Years
Today is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, and the web is brimming over with retrospectives. See, for example, Eugene Robinson.
I want to point in particular to E.J. Dionne’s column, however, because he plays one of my own recurring themes — the way the Right exploited racism to take over America. The column begins:
Forty years ago, American liberalism suffered a blow from which it has still not recovered. On April 4, 1968, a relatively brief but extraordinary moment of progressive reform ended, and a long period of conservative ascendancy began.
The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the ensuing riots that engulfed the nation’s capital and big cities across the country signaled the collapse of liberal hopes in a smoky haze of self-doubt and despair. Conservatives, on the run for much of the decade, found a broad new audience for their warnings against the disorders and disruptions bred by reform.
It wasn’t just the riots. Much of white America was still simmering with resentment over court-ordered school desegregation. Also, Lyndon Johnson had initiated New Deal-style programs aimed primarily at relieving poverty among African Americans. Suddenly, whites who had had no problem with “entitlements” before — when benefits went mostly to whites — discovered the virtues of “self-reliance.”
It is easy to forget that the core themes of contemporary conservatism were born in response to the events of 1968. The attacks on “big government,” the defense of states’ rights, and the scorn for “liberal judicial activism,” “liberal do-gooders,” “liberal elitists,” “liberal guilt” and “liberal permissiveness” were rooted in the reaction that gathered force as liberal optimism receded.
Richard Nixon did a masterful job of exploiting fear and prejudice to lure white working-class voters away from the Democrats. And, of course, whites in the Deep South switched their allegiance from the Dems to the Republicans en masse.
The Right-Wing Narrative says that Democrats lost power because George McGovern opposed the Vietnam War, and the Dem Party was overrun by “peaceniks.” But this view of history doesn’t square with what really happened. McGovern’s stand on the Vietnam War was the least of the reasons he lost to Nixon in 1972.
And check out the acceptance speech Nixon gave at the 1972 Republican convention. The first half of the speech was all about race. It was in code, of course, but no adult alive at the time could have mistaken his meaning when he spoke of quotas and tied paying high taxes to the costs of “welfare.” And Republicans are still running on those themes today.
Just the other day, someone argued in the comments that the next Dem president would be punished for “losing Iraq” the way the Democrats were punished for “losing Vietnam.” Except that I don’t see how the Dems were punished for losing Vietnam. Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975; in 1976, America elected Jimmy Carter as president and gave the Dems a small increase in Congress, expanding the large increase the Dems had enjoyed in the 1974 post-Watergate midterms.
The fact is, once combat troops were withdrawn from Vietnam and the POWs came home, America lost interest in Vietnam. The whole bleeping country developed amnesia over Vietnam (except for the extreme Right, a group of people who are never so happy as when they are nursing resentments). As I remember it, it wasn’t until the 1980s that the Narrative emerged about Dems losing elections because of Vietnam. But this was an important narrative for the Right, because it helped them paper over the real primary reason the Right gained and the Left lost in those years. And that primary reason was racism. There were other issues, too, but racism was the foundational issue upon which other right-wing issues would be built.
Right-wing politicians had employed Red-baiting with some success since the late 1940s. But the excesses of McCarthyism had turned off moderates, and the Kennedy Administration had ushered in a liberal resurgence. Eventually, racism would succeed where Red-baiting had faltered.
The success of the racism strategy in the 1960s and 1970s taught at least a couple of generations of right-wing politicians about the importance of wedge issues. As new issues came up — feminism, abortion, gay rights — right-wing politicians embraced them and followed the old racism scenario to exploit them. Meanwhile, the Left crumbled into confusion and single-issue activism.
And as right-wingers gained more and more power over the federal government, the federal government became less and less functional. Because wedge issues may win elections, but they don’t govern a nation.
E.J. Dionne continues,
Forty years later, is it possible to recapture the hope and energy of the days and years before that April 4? Has liberalism spent enough time in purgatory for the country to revisit how much was accomplished in its name and to acknowledge that the nation is better off for what the liberals did?
In “The Liberal Hour,” an important new history of the ’60s that will be published in July, Colby College scholars G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert S. Weisbrot note that for all its deficiencies, the period of liberal sway “demonstrated what democratic politics can produce when public consensus crescendos, when coherent majorities prevail, and when skilled leaders provide direction, inspiration, and relentless energy.”
In the U.S., public consensus, coherent majorities, and skilled leaders providing direction in a positive, not a destructive, way are things only us geezers dimly remember and the young folks have never seen.
And after a few years of near-total dominance by right-wingers of the federal government, 81 percent of Americans say the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction.
It’s 40 years since 1968. Now a black man and a white woman are competing with each other for the Dem nomination. They both face nasty bigotry barriers, and it would be a breakthrough if either were elected. Yet only one of these candidates has shown a real talent for building public consensus. The other one is running an increasingly bitter, and angry, wedge-issue style campaign. I think 40 years of that crap is quite enough.
Update: Wingnut priorities.