Ok, a quickie here as I had my racism argument quotient filled up with Henry Louis Gates earlier in the year. For the record, my view is that Republicans are perfectly able to get angry about Obama without it always being about race. Sometimes and for some people I imagine it is, sometimes it isn't. Life is complicated. The stuff about Obama's religion and birthplace seemed to offer fairly badly sublimated racial undertones. But we should remember that Republicans in the 1930s were quite happy to throw about accusations that President Roosevelt was a communist and a socialist and a dictator even though he was a patrician WASP. The state of South Carolina is a matter I'm not getting into here. But I found the confidence with which some people asserted that Joe Wilson's heckling was about race to be unsettling. I certainly can't believe Wilson would have been any more polite if a President Hillary Clinton had made the same speech. Presumably then it would have been sexism?
All that said, I've just seen a piece by Bruce Bartlett in the WSJ which frankly goes beyond my limited abilities to get to grips with. Bartlett criticizes Paul Krugman for arguing that "the political success of the Republican Party and the conservative movement over the past 40 years has resulted largely from their co-optation of Southern racists that were the base of the Democratic Party until its embrace of civil rights in the 1960s." (Bartlett's paraphrase, but I've certainly seen Krugman, like many others, say such a thing.)
To challenge this argument, Bartlett provides 40 quotations from leading Democrats from Jefferson onwards, explicitly stating racist ideas. This, he argues, shows that the Democratic party "is far more culpable in promoting and defending racism" than the GOP. (This is taken from his book, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past.)
Ok, let's begin.
1. History to one side for a moment and let's start with logic. Does it follow that because party A is racist, party B is not? Clearly not. So the argument is a false dichotomy from the start. For most of America's history, both major parties were run by people who believed in the natural superiority of whites over blacks.
2. How exactly is the Democratic Party's past "buried"? I can't imagine there are many Americans out there who have any sense of their own history and don't know that the Democrats were the party of slavery and secession and the Republicans were the party of Lincoln and abolition. Surely that's US History 101?
3. The argument Bartlett attributes to Krugman, which I think is probably accepted by 99.99% of scholars, so can hardly be seen as Krugman's contribution to public debate, is that beginning with Goldwater and taking fruition with Nixon's Southern Strategy, the Republican party built a new majority in part (note: not entirely, but in part) by winning the old "Solid South" from the Democrats.
Frankly, I really don't think this is in much doubt. Simple election returns show that the Southern states who voted Dem until the civil rights movement decisively shifted to the Republicans afterward, and it doesn't take a genius to realize that a large part of the reason they switched was because of the civil rights movement. The big clue lay in the fact that so many of them at the time SAID SO.
So, fairly obviously, the Republicans inherited that old South and its prejudices. It's not Democrat voters who carry Confederate flags around today, is it? So, also fairly obviously, an attempt to stress the racism of Southern Democrats in the past reinforces attention upon the Republicans of today. If Bartlett wanted to argue that the South wasn't always motivated by race, that in the past white citizens councils and pro-slavery advocates were genuinely concerned about civic order, this could be used to show that, by extension, the modern Republican South wasn't racist. It'd be pretty implausible, but at least it would make sense.
But to say we need to pay attention to the Democrats' racist past naturally suggests that one should pay attention to the Republicans' racist present. Surely only a professional partisan could see it any other way?
If one was to make some kind of massive racistometer machine, whereby attitudes about racial difference were added cumulatively into a big pot for each party, then I daresay the Democrats would be the losers (or winners, depending on how the machine works, I suppose). The party has a terrible legacy. But to use this observation to make the claim that the virtually lilywhite Southern Republican party of 2009 is not a place where racists find a home, well it just defies logic.
Not for the first time, I'm bewildered.
Think Of the Children
53 minutes ago
