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It’s the racism, stupid

Paul Krugman:

But the reality is that things haven’t changed nearly as much as people think. Racial tension, especially in the South, has never gone away, and has never stopped being important. And race remains one of the defining factors in modern American politics.

Consider voting in last year’s Congressional elections. Republicans, as President Bush conceded, received a “thumping,” with almost every major demographic group turning against them. The one big exception was Southern whites, 62 percent of whom voted Republican in House races.

And yes, Southern white exceptionalism is about race, much more than it is about moral values, religion, support for the military or other explanations sometimes offered. There’s a large statistical literature on the subject, whose conclusion is summed up by the political scientist Thomas F. Schaller in his book “Whistling Past Dixie”: “Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters to depict American conservatism as a nonracial phenomenon, the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past.”

Republican politicians, who understand quite well that the G.O.P.’s national success since the 1970s owes everything to the partisan switch of Southern whites, have tacitly acknowledged this reality. Since the days of Gerald Ford, just about every Republican presidential campaign has included some symbolic gesture of approval for good old-fashioned racism.

Thus Ronald Reagan, who began his political career by campaigning against California’s Fair Housing Act, started his 1980 campaign with a speech supporting states’ rights delivered just outside Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered. In 2000, Mr. Bush made a pilgrimage to Bob Jones University, famed at the time for its ban on interracial dating.

And all four leading Republican candidates for the 2008 nomination have turned down an invitation to a debate on minority issues scheduled to air on PBS this week.

He’s right. It’s not “moral values” or any of the other catch-phrases that Republicans use. It’s about racism. Republicans have picked up more support through race-baiting and exploiting the fear of the downfall of white male supremacy than through just about anything else. The “Southern Strategy” wasn’t even the start of it. From “welfare queens” to the current anti-immigrant fervor, racism remains an effective political tool.

Hopefully Krugman is right, and the racist conservative electoral strategy will come back to bite them in the ass.


5 thoughts on It’s the racism, stupid

  1. Well, it definitely hasn’t bitten them on the ass for the last 40 years. I don’t think that any GOP candidate worries about alienating the African-American population, as only one in twenty would ever reliably vote for the GOP to begin with. At the same time, Democratic candidates are ever-so-fearful of offending the sensibilities of a large voting bloc who would never vote for them (Southern white evangelicals)… not that rudeness is a great electoral strategy, but the fruitless attempts to curry favor should really stop for now.

    However, Krugman hits upon the real issue in the last two paragraphs: the fence-and-deportation-mania pervading the GOP primaries, while good for pandering to the base of nutcases, is long-term electoral suicide given the demographic trends in this country (I recently saw a presentation on trends in aging in Texas, and both the white and African-American populations will be dwarfed by the Latino population in a generation). So, maybe in my lifetime, I’ll see Democratic leaders who hail from Texas.

  2. Well I personally think that it’s at least got something to do with misogyny and homophobia, too. Give the bigots some credit for the depths of their hate.

  3. Cara: Well I personally think that it’s at least got something to do with misogyny and homophobia, too. Give the bigots some credit for the depths of their hate.

    I was going to post my question in a different form, but your comment lets me phrase it differently.

    Jill’s original post said, in part, that it’s

    Jill: …race-baiting and exploiting the fear of the downfall of white male supremacy than through just about anything else.

    Don’t racism, misogyny, and homophobia all fit that? That it isn’t so much racism as such, but all about the great straight white male, and that racism is a necessary part of that.

  4. Tim Wise is right: Racism is a disease twisting our (white people’s) souls and minds. It leads folks to do hateful, heinous things. It leads us to vote against our own self-interest, making the rich richer and placing more and more of the burden of taxes on the shoulders of the very folks who are voting for these idiots. It steals our pasts and our cultures, as our ancestors gave up their cultures-of-origin in order to fit in and become white. It divides families, makes friendships less than they could be if it allows for friendships at all. It wastes the human resources of those without the opportunities and leads white folks to have a skewed view of reality and their own place in the world. It leads us to arrogantly overestimate our abilities and underestimate other’s and, in the end, if it is not addressed with all the other ‘isms’, it will be the downfall of this country.

  5. To the tedium of probably more than a few of my friends, I have long argued that there is nothing in “white identity” or even “white culture” that applies to substantially all U.S. “white people,” excludes essentially all “non-white people” and is also worth keeping, other than the perverse and immoral ill-gotten gains of racial caste itself. (note: I don’t view those as worth keeping morally but some might argue that racism is in the raw self-interest of white people so-defined.)

    Before white people identified as “white” when they got their pink rear-ends off the boats and planes, they identified as something else. Maybe by religion, maybe by nation, maybe by region or city or language or family tribe or by social class. They came to the U.S. and learned how to identify with other white people as white people, i.e. the “rightful” owners of this country so-defined, screw all others. Occasionally a few groups of Europeans would have their “whiteness” placed into doubt – Hungarians, Jews, Swedes (surprisingly to some), Irish, Italians – socially, culturally or what have you. The Know Nothing movement was largely an attempt to narrow the definition of whiteness to exclude undesired Europeans; its failure meant that, in time, the whiteness gate was raised to allow in essentially all Europeans. If your people came exclusively from Europe, the overwhelming majority of Americans of every background will call you “white” in 2007.

    When Europeans came here, they largely shucked off their Old Country roots and became white people. A few retained some sense of connection to the old country, some strongly so, but still identified themselves as white people. White unity, usually implicit but sometimes explicit, meant an agreement to screw over non-whites. Today, the tolerance shown between different Euro-American ethnic groups and different religious groups is the result of this white antitrust-style conspiracy, tacit though it may have been at times, to screw over non-whites so defined or at least to tolerate those who do.

    It is no accident that radical Protestant racists such as the Klan and some neo-Nazi groups insist on “de-whiting” Jews. On the other hand, the Klan issued a directive some time ago to admit Roman Catholics as full members; Irish and Italian and other non-African American Catholics got “whited.”

    White people have nothing both in common and distinct from non-whites at the national level except white caste. In the South, there is arguably enough of a distinct “white culture” that subsumes the overwhelming majority of “white people” that there may be a regional exception to my general thesis. But white people in Alabama and white people in Maine and Minnesota and Seattle and Utah have little in common sociologically that they don’t also have in common with black Americans, except for racial caste itself and, I guess, “European” facial features and skin tone, though those on closer inspection are a false commonality as well.

    [/tedious rant].

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