American politics is primarily about race. Full stop.
Good on semi-serious person Jonathan Chait for telling it like it is in this excellent piece he wrote after seeing “12 Years A Slave”:
While its depiction of physical torture has commanded the most attention, I found the psychological torture more disturbing. To make a person a slave requires making them complicit in their own subservience, through rituals of degradation, such as forcing them to clap their hands to mocking songs, dancing for their masters, or being stripped, or compared to animals.
[….]Conservatives have made endless jokes based on the strange premise that Obama is unable to express coherent thoughts unless reading from a teleprompter, defined health-care reform as “reparations,” imagined a Reagan-era program to subsidize telephone use for the indigent is actually “Obamaphones,” or complained when black entertainers or athletes socialize with the First Family.
What’s most frustrating about reading American political pundits is all the pretend bullshit about how people are motivated by Burkean pragmatism or fiscal restraint, when it’s really all about slavery and its aftermath. The only civil war ever fought here was fought over slavery and the biggest political realignment in memory happened because of Civil Rights. Case closed.
Update. There’s a bit of an argument in the comments about class versus race dominating American politics. I’d say that many (but not all) policies are class-based — in terms of being about hurting or helping working people versus taxing or giving more money to our Galtian overlords — but skin color (I’m not crazy about using the word “race”, though I know I did earlier) has a massive impact on voting patterns. Working-class whites vote 60% Republican, working-class blacks vote 90% Democratic.
Botsplainer
Why do you hate the heritage of the descendants of labor thieves? That’s going to give a painting of Stonewall Jackson praying next to a horse a sad.
A noble portrait of Robert E Lee will definitely have tears.
Hunter Gathers
Don’t forget about the secret welfare system that is only available to black people.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
This quote from an NRO/Alabama Republican shocked even me. Chait is far more forgiving about Hillyer’s motivation than I
eric
We disagree. American politics is primarily about class, and racial disharmony and resentment is the primary tool in Capital’s toolbox of distracting Labor from seeing the ways the people are all wage-slaves to the cause of exporting profits to Capital.
Comrade eric.
Tommy
IMHO, and I have not seen the movie, you have to “break” people to enslave them. And my experience is that is done more mentally then by physical violence.
Warren Terra
Never any love for The Whiskey Rebellion
(to be sure, no actual fighting happened, so it probably doesn’t qualify).
the Conster
@eric:
This. I actually fully comprehended this in S2 of The Wire.
Villago Delenda Est
Doug, you know, your exercise of actual reason would never get you a gig at Reason. Just keep that in mind when you dip your toe into the market for pundits and “journalists.”
Botsplainer
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
They don’t get it. Obama isn’t reactive, and refuses to get bogged down in the stupid. He knows that the “scandals and embarrassments” are manufactured, and simply plays his own game plan, which is a long plan.
Villago Delenda Est
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Wow. That guy really needs to move away from “journalism” to the profession that is very obviously his natural calling.
Running the projection booth at the multiplex.
Villago Delenda Est
@eric:
These guys are really good at using fucktard white people to work against their own self interest.
You’ve got to give them that.
Chyron HR
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
It’s so weird that every time they think their latest scandal will utterly destroy the Obama presidency, it just…. somehow… magically… doesn’t! How is such a thing even possible?
(That’s a rhetorical question. Obviously it is because of Obama’s lack of “humility”, duh.)
Tommy
@Villago Delenda Est: I am stunned by that as well. I live in a rural area. 98.7% white. Not sure a person not “white” could get elected here. The local paper and politicians always use “blacks” as a wedge issue. Heck in our last Congressional race the tea party guy was 32. A multi-millionaire. Never worked a day in his life. Just inherited it.
Yet the lower income folks, I mean literally living in trailer parks, were all for him. I was like do you really think he cares about you? He doesn’t.
Lucky, he lost. He made a huge mistake. He attacked the Democrat, a two star general that ran the Illinois National Guard, for his lack of service to the nation. Yes he actually did that.
Belafon
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yeah, he’s never asked Republicans to help him with legislation.
shortstop
@eric: Okay, I don’t disagree. I’ve said on various occasions, including to my cracker stepmama-in-law last night, that the real war is a class war and all the other stuff is a shiny distraction that prevents the economically disadvantaged from banding together.
However, I don’t see how classism and racism ever get disentangled, so interwoven are they throughout our nation’s history. The class war couldn’t be fought were it not for so much of the white populace’s willingness to wallow in its own racism. The plutarchs can and do whip up the rubes, but there’s something there ready to be whipped up — ready to be gleefully, passionately wielded by those being whipped up — unless we take no responsibility at all for our own beliefs, biases and emotional frailties.
Citizen_X
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Wow. Shorter Hillyer, courtesy of Bruce Dern’s slaveholder in Django: “Ah got no use for a n****r with sand.”
Mike G
This is the ultimate rightard “These aren’t the droids we’re looking for” dumbass statement. There’s more projection here than a 23-theater multiplex.
They really can’t remember who was President before January 2009, how much they blindly supported his every fuckup, and how he sounded like a retarded, mumbling comic book character whenever he spoke without a script.
As for humility, Obama has personally apologized for a balky government website. I never heard Bush apologize for failing on 9/11, or Katrina, or Iraq.
Poopyman
@Warren Terra: I wouldn’t put the Whiskey Rebellion on par with a civil war, especially since it was citizens vs the Federal govt. However, there were some skirmishes here in MD during the English Civil War ca 1650s.
(PS – I grew up about 4 miles from the Miller Homestead.)
Rhoda
@Tommy: Taking people from there home, destroying all family bounds, making the real and permanent connection that btwn an individual and his “master” will fuck with your mind.
schrodinger's cat
I would have disagreed with you and called you cynical, if I had heard you say this about 5 years ago. However after watching how Obama has been treated by both the GOP and media, I am in total agreement with you. Boy, was I naive.
Belafon
OT: Has anyone heard the idea that the company that worked on the health care website was hired because one of Michelle Obama’s relatives was involved with the company?
shortstop
@Tommy:
Oh, they don’t actually say “blacks,” though, do they? They say “Chicago and East St. Louis” and think they’re being subtle and sly.
Chris
@Tommy:
Well, it worked pretty well for Bush against Kerry, Chambliss against Cleland, etc, so it’s hard to blame him for thinking he could get away with it.
? Martin
@Warren Terra: That wasn’t a civil war. It was the first Tea Party meeting.
shortstop
@Chris: True, but I think it’s tougher on a local (statewide) level. A lot of those guys the GOP was targeting probably know this general personally from the Guard.
bemused
@Chyron HR:
The title of Krugman’s latest “Unacceptable Realities” nails the conservative mindset describing conservative thinking, “It’s not supposed to be this way – therefore, it can’t be this way”. Like toddlers, they don’t understand the world doesn’t revolve around them and their desires, have tantrums when they don’t get what they want when they want it.
Mike G
@Belafon:
I’ve heard that BS in the wingnutosphere.
Facts — the contract under which the website was built was issued in 2007. The woman in question was in the same year as MO at Princeton, but no indication that they were close buddies in recent times.
They’re really reaching with this one.
hitchhiker
How is that movie doing in the south?
The USA, methinks, has no longterm future if it can’t somehow confront and reconcile the past. It wasn’t all that long ago. These aren’t thousand-year-old problems, they’re legacies from own our great-grandparents’ time.
The Obama years are going to remembered for the way the south felt baited every second of both his terms. His very existence pushes them into some kind of mental corner they’d much rather pretend isn’t there.
Tommy
@shortstop: Oh it is East St. Louis 24/7. The place has a ton of problems. But how it is harped upon is staggering. I live like 18 miles from East St. Louis and I don’t even think of locking my front door most nights. I am not fearful.
gogol's wife
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Yes, the entire piece gives them too much credit for not being “Klan-style” racists. What’s the big diff?
ranchandsyrup
@Belafon: Yes. My FB feed was chock full of it a week or so ago. Died down. Will rise again (pun intended).
Chris
@eric:
There’s truth to this.
“Capital” was probably the biggest winner of the Civil War. Specifically, capitalist interests based in the North who had supported the abolitionists when it was a matter of keeping the country together and, just by the way, breaking the back of the slave owner class (the nation’s other 1%), but after the war was over, quickly grew tired of Reconstruction and were happy to throw all the black people under the bus as a peace offering to the surviving Southern elites. No accident that the worst of the Gilded Age came right after the Civil War and Reconstruction.
(A runner up would be the Southern elites themselves, who were able to return to their position as absolute masters of their little corner of America and tell the white folk it was all the fault of their black neighbors).
ChrisNYC
This post made me think of this from Frederick Douglass’ autobiography. The other side of the coin — not what a person must become to be enslaved but to enslave. I was pretty dense as a 19 year old and I remember being rapt by this.
Belafon
@Mike G: Thanks.
ETA: I will have to go find the details on this, including some links. There are some people buying it that really should not be.
Tommy
@Chris: Well the largest voting sector by me is an Air Force base. 57,000 folks. The man served with honor and well, at least where I live (I am a military brat) you don’t belittle service.
Baud
@Botsplainer:
There was a TPM post not too long ago about protesters in Florida who were opposed to a planned Civil War memorial because it would also honor Union soldiers.
The kicker, though, is that the protest was led by a black guy.
rikyrah
Who does this Barack Obama think he is?
Oh, that’s right.
Choke on it, you racist muthafuckas.
RSA
Which we can see in a recent decision made by the Selma, AL, city council concerning a monument to Nathan Bedford Forrest:
Cacti
@ChrisNYC:
This post made me think of this from Frederick Douglass’ autobiography. The other side of the coin — not what a person must become to be enslaved but to enslave. I was pretty dense as a 19 year old and I remember being rapt by this.
12 years a slave also addresses the issue of the “nice” slave owner. Benedict Cumberbatch played the “nice” master, in that he was not overtly sadistic, but one of Northrup’s fellow slaves makes the point of “so what?”. Even if he didn’t get his jollies from beating them or having sport at their expense, he was still making his living on the back of their forced labor, and his “affection” for them was no different than a farmer might have for prized livestock.
geg6
@eric:
Bullshit. It’s always been about race first. Class comes in a very, very, very distant second. Very distant.
bemused
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I think Chait is wrong…Hillyer sounded damn racist to me.
Cacti
@geg6:
Bullshit. It’s always been about race first. Class comes in a very, very, very distant second. Very distant.
This.
There has never been a history of general solidarity between working class whites and blacks in our Republic.
Suggesting that it’s all about class reeks of white privilege.
shortstop
@Baud: There’s always one…or two or three. Being the good Negro who tells racist white people what they want to hear about bad Negroes is excellent-paying work if being a venal sack of shit doesn’t bother you. My second cousin, a virulent racist, is constantly posting the wise words of Allen West and Ben Carson to prove that it’s not Obama’s blackness that bothers her and that we’re doing her a grave injustice by even implying such a thing.
Stan Gable
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I would imagine that some right winger, somewhere used nearly that exact same phrasing when describing Clinton. Or to go even further, if I saw that quote and only knew that it had been applied by a republican to a democratic president, Clinton would pop into my head faster than Obama.
catclub
@Mike G: “They really can’t remember who was President before January 2009, how much they blindly supported his every fuckup, and how he sounded like a retarded, mumbling comic book character whenever he spoke without a script.”
I disagree. They Do remember, and that is much more galling.
Mullah DougJ
@eric:
I think it’s really race, not class…otherwise why would working-class whites vote strongly Republican (something like 60% in recent elections) while working-class blacks vote strongly Democratic (something like 90%)?
Many of the actual policies affect people according to class rather than skin color, but the voting breaks down more along skin color lines than along class lines.
ruemara
@eric: You have nothing to disagree with. If race wasn’t a factor, then it could not be used as a wedge issue.
I’ll also wager you’re white. And male. It’s amazing how white males have a deep knowledge of how race is not a factor.
I’ve been dealing with insta-hate my whole working life. It’s been eye-opening to know you were ok for a while, especially if you fit the helpful black person stereotype and then see the anger and disdain when it’s proven that you’re at least an equal, if not smarter than (usually white) other person is. I’ve never understood that, especially if it’s in service to that person as a subordinate who is making your department look good. But I have experienced it and it’s not fun.
geg6
@Cacti:
Totally agree. If not for race, the class war would have been won, and by the 99%, back in the 50s/60s, at the latest. It is race that has given it an extra 50 years or so of life.
Cacti
@catclub:
I disagree. They Do remember, and that is much more galling.
If they didn’t remember, there wouldn’t be a frenzied effort to make anything and everything into “Obama’s Katrina,” “Obama’s Iraq,” “Obama’s 9/11”, etc.
Just as the efforts to impeach Clinton were to try and take the stink off of Nixon’s criminality in office.
scav
@shortstop: Well, pass along that I don’t hate her as a mere member of the class of racists. I hate her personally and individually as an specific mean and cheap-logic-hiding lying woman.
shortstop
@Cacti: Then you’re not understanding the point eric made, which is agreeing with you that the solidarity between working-class whites and blacks has never existed. What he’s talking about is the sure-fire, never-fail efforts on the part of the moneyed elite to keep low-income and middle-class whites so busy demonizing black people (and, to a lesser extent, gay people, women, immigrants, religious minorities, etc.) that they don’t notice or care that we’re all getting screwed by the plutocracy. They fight the wrong enemy.
In that, I’d say the powers that be continue to be spectacularly successful — but I don’t believe they could have been without having such a motherlode of natural material to work with in white people’s racism.
Botsplainer
@shortstop:
Thomas Sowell, Walter Willliams, Clarence Thomas, Star Parker, Erik Rush, Allen West, Niger Innes, Ben Carson, Herman Cain, Jesse Lee Peterson all fit the bill.
Aaron Evan Baker
Jonathan Chait is so often right about this stuff that I’m a little puzzled at the sometimes very hostile response he gets in progressive quarters. He’s a pretty standard-issue liberal, not some right-winger lurking about in liberal’s clothing.
shortstop
@scav: I shall do so. BTW, I have lots of cool relatives, too. I realize la famiglia shortstoppia is not coming off very well in this thread.
Roger Moore
@Chyron HR:
I think the missing scare quotes on “scandal” are the main reason. The Republicans just don’t seem to understand that there has to be some there there for a scandal to get legs, and that endlessly hyping something imaginary won’t magically make it take off. Or maybe they don’t care, and the endless scandal mongering is just an attempt to distract people so they don’t pay attention to just how awful and devoid of ideas the Republicans are.
geg6
@Stan Gable:
I hear this shit all the time. And I say bullshit. Not only was I also around during the Clinton years, I was around and politically aware for every Democratic president since Kennedy. No matter how much white people wish it were so, no white president has had to deal with the shit this black one has. Ever. Obama is treated with the least respect of any president I’ve ever been alive to see.
If Hilary runs and wins, I’ll be interested to see which demographic the white men of this country despise more: a black man or a white woman. I’m betting on the black man, but I could be wrong. I don’t pretend to understand what goes on in the neurons of white men. And I really don’t care to.
Chyron HR
@Roger Moore:
Dude, their scandals and other assorted beefs with Obama are totally legitimate. Asshole McGee specifically said so.
Belafon
@geg6: Agreed. If it had been about class we would have heard a lot more complaining about how the wealthy are ruining the country. But we don’t. Instead, it’s how the lazy blacks and Hispanics are taking our money and our jobs.
currants
@eric: THIS.
eric
@Mullah DougJ: Allow me to retort. The underclass white America suffers just as does underclass black America, but they have a particular version of Christianity that also manifests itself in the fetishism of exceptionalism. If you have accepted the Lord Christ as your savior, you are redeemed, and thus a member of the Chosen tribe. Yet, if you are a member of the Chosen tribe, how can it be that God’s bounty has not befallen you. Most assuredly it cannot be you, because, tautologically, you have accepted and been redeemed. So, it must be some outside, perhaps, devilish force that is dragging you down away from your rightful ascension in society. Look around and see all of the black people taking unfair advantage of the System — that is why you are not making it in America. Let’s ignore the structural impediments caused by regressive taxation and undermining egalitarian, quality education. So, believe that the Devil and his dark acolytes are the cause of your circumstance and not the true causes.
The same rhetoric works with gay and with liberal, and with unions. It is class first because, even though racism is a constant thread through the American tapestry, it serves Capital to avoid the fate of the French Aristocracy.
Aaron Evan Baker
I would add to Chait’s indictment that it has always been SEMI-acceptable, SEMI-tolerated if you will, among conservatives to entertain theories of black intellectual inferiority to whites. Many will tiptoe around such theories without boldly committing to them–at least publicly–but that tiptoeing has gone on for years.
I say this as a former right-winger myself; I knew that intellectual environment quite well.
Mullah DougJ
@Aaron Evan Baker:
He used to spend a lot of time trashing the left-wing blogosphere. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that.
shortstop
@Roger Moore: Embarrassing confession for a news junkie: I have no idea what wingers are on about with Benghazi. I realize it’s supposed to be the scandal that blows the Obama “presidency” apart, but I stopped listening about two weeks after the event itself and I have no clue what nefarious stuff the president and Hitlery supposedly did. Every once in a while I think about looking it up, then I get distracted and go back to not caring.
Rob in CT
The whole “it’s race!” “No! It’s class” argument is, to me, foolish. It is both, and they are in some ways the same thing. During the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, the rulers of this country deliberately created a peon class, demarked by their race. Race and class melded into one. And that was a key selling point – hey, you might be a dirt poor white guy, but you’re white! Win! The Southern Elite used to push this idea that white Southern society was classless (laughable, but they did push it). All white men were aristocrats, see. They had freedom. And they had this because of slavery. So it went.
Its both race and class. Let go of arguing over which it is. It’s both, and I for one can’t see how to untangle them such that you can say that it’s 65% this one and 35% that one.
scav
@shortstop: We all have mixed bags surrounding us, including those that are trying in both meanings of the word. Personalized service is targeted, never fear. I’ve some solid winners last sighted in cut’n’shoot tx if you need the ceremonial exchange of hostages.
eric
@ruemara: I have never said it is not a factor. It is a question of what is the tool. Racial hatred is a tool employed to tame the white underclass. And those folks are simply bigots. I am not saying it is not real or it is not a poison on our nation.
catclub
@geg6: “Obama is treated with the least respect of any president I’ve ever been alive to see.”
Yep. That “You Lie” could not be imagined with even Bill Clinton. How about with Ronald Reagan?
Can you imagine how the entire establishment would come down on him like a ton of bricks for yelling that?
Stan Gable
@geg6:
I dunno, to my knowledge Obama hasn’t been accused of being a rapist and a murderer (yet).
burnspbesq
I’m guessing you would fail a student who presented any similarly simplistic and unsupported analysis in any class you teach.
I don’t have the option of giving you a failing grade, so I’ll just say “that’s fucking ridculous” and be done with it, and you.
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore:
This isn’t an unreasonable strategy given that most Americans do not pay that much attention to the details of public discourse news, or politics. Whatever jumps out at them (scandal! blowjobs!) gets their attention, and they don’t seem to have the intellectual curiosity to look carefully at what is presented.
eric
@Stan Gable: a murderer to protect his cocaine dealing ways if i recall the video correctly.
Aaron Evan Baker
Mullah Doug J:
I don’t know the specifics of Chait’s lefty blogosphere-baiting, so I don’t feel competent to say whether he was being a schmuck when he did that. As your response implies, the left-wing blogosphere is a very mixed bag.
I’d be quite happy to hear or see specifics about his behavior in that context.
agrippa
@Rob in CT:
Got it in one.
It is about both race and class.
And, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle them.
srv
@Tommy:
There were actually a number of highly educated plantation owners who didn’t think the Civil War was such a great idea and understood that all the talk of “That Black Republican is going to come for our slaves” was a real as “That Black Democrat is going to come for our guns.”
But the trash that revolved around the plantations was quite susceptible to all the talk about “rights” (slave property, etc) and were not going to be told those slaves were somehow equal to them.
Not unlike the Blue Bloods and the country club Republicans having to deal with the teahadis today.
geg6
@eric:
Yeah, because unions and regressive taxes and egalitarian quality education were all HUGE issues back in 1776-1789 when they decided to use that whole 3/5 of a person thing to distract the white colonials.
eric
One might argue that the Great Society beginning with FDR through the present has been part of a Civil War pitting the Rich against the Poor. There are no shortage of victims. Glass-Steagal might be the most emblematic battle insofar as it tells which way the prevailing wind has been blowing.
Villago Delenda Est
@Stan Gable:
Bill Clinton was the first black president.
MikeJ
@Aaron Evan Baker:
If you aren’t frothing at the mouth demanding that the uppity usurper be strung up you’re assumed to be an impure liberal and therefore a secret Republican.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Bill Clinton, as I recall, was subject to a whole different kind of stereotype: He was, not to put to fine a point on it, white trash. Slick Willie, a hustling opportunist who went on TeeVee and talked about his underwear and didn’t know how to throw parties (I swear to god Sally Quinn said this on an early incarnation of the Tweety show, but I’ve never been able to find the transcript) and didn’t fit in with “our place”, our VIllage, long before he had that grubby affair with the intern, not a discreet, dignified affair with a woman of his own age and class, as one could understand, as one understood with Poppy Bush and Jennifer Fitzgerald. They looked down on Clinton, they hate that they think Obama looks down on them; them in this case being both would-be aristocratic crackers like Hillyer, and would be socio-political aristocrats like Tom Brokaw, Ron Fournier and Ruth Marcus.
eric
@geg6: I am not sure that going colonial makes it more about race over class. The racism was more overt, but it is not as if the Colonial Congress formed under the banner of workers unite.
Belafon
@eric: As someone pointed out above, the reason it is a tool is because it’s already there to be used. Class resentment is a much harder thing in this country. When a liberal even talks bad about someone whose wealthy, we nearly always have to include the statement, “I’m not against being wealthy in general,” even with people who you know voted Democrat (only when you’re with pretty far leaning left people can you get away with dropping it). The Right still gets to run around with the Confederate flag.
Villago Delenda Est
@burnspbesq:
I’m sure that an extended essay supporting those two assertions would satisfy your lawyerly need to have a full case presented in every sentence.
You know, half a million deaths in a civil conflict would be somewhat, um, traumatic, wouldn’t it? Since at the time the conflict broke out, those rebelling cited the defense of slavery as the justification for it, and slavery was explicitly linked to race, and we’ve been dealing with the aftermath of it for 148 years…
agrippa
@srv: @srv: @srv:
I think that is a good comparison.
At the end of the day, the teahadis will fall into line, just as the poor whites of the ante bellum South fell into line.
geg6
@Stan Gable:
You obviously don’t spend a lot of time talking to or reading any wingnuts. He’s been accused of numerous murders (most obviously, in BENGAZI!!). Not sure about rapes, but no one ever claimed that Bill Clinton wasn’t an American citizen. Or yelled that he was a liar during the SotU, even though, unlike Obama, he actually was a liar.
currants
@Cacti: Not entirely sure about that. Except for the preacher’s tone, this Tim Wise excerpt strikes me as worthy of note.
Stan Gable
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I don’t disagree that there are differences in the type of treatment but I also suspect that Hillyer would hate any Democratic president with the same degree of white hot outrage.
agrippa
@geg6:
It would be hard for me to determine who is hated more – Clinton ( either one, come to that) or Obama.
Svensker
@eric:
There are indeed class issues. But in the States you have no idea how your everyday life is soaked in racialism. Coming to Canada was an eye-opener because, while Canadians can obviously be racist, just like any other human, racialism is not something that is part of the fabric of daily life.
A Canadian friend is working in the States now and she is gob-smacked by the constant feeling of having to be aware of skin color and then be aware of how she should act in response to that. It freaks her out.
Roger Moore
@geg6:
I don’t think you can disentangle the two so neatly. A huge part of the success of racism in the US is that it is intimately tied to class. By treating poor whites as members of a higher class than poor blacks, the rich whites managed to divide the poor against themselves and ensure that there was never substantial solidarity between the two. You can’t say one is much more important than the other because they’re deeply entangled into what is effectively a single issue.
Belafon
@Belafon: I’m not saying class isn’t a factor, but considering that a lot of people still think you can move up with hard work and the government not taking your nonexistent estate, I don’t think it’s as big a factor as race.
eric
@Belafon: oh it is there, but it cant be lessened over time, if it is not nurtured. That is what the Right Wing Noise machine does. Racism should get you kicked out of polite society and talking in code should be laid bare. Yes it is there, but it does not have to be. I am not saying that Capital created racism to distract poor whites, but that they have exploited it, and worse still, cultivated it to live in as a shame and a cancer for us all.
eric
@Roger Moore: to turn a phrase, they have turned poor whites into the House-Proletariat.
geg6
@eric:
That would mainly be because the poor laborers were, at that point in time, almost all slaves or indentured servants (which wasn’t much different except there was at least a time limit). Yes, the vast majority of Americans at that point were poor or what we’d classify as working class, but an awful lot of them owned property, if not vast tracts of it. The only real downtrodden were those who had no freedom.
aimai
@shortstop: I have this argument with people, at least online, all the time. The short answer is that although Racism is the language and the goal of the right wing war against Democrats, from the point of view of the voter “racism” as a charge has not only lost its value (if it ever had one) but become a further source of retrenchment and resistance. When talking to a racist who doesn’t and can’t acknowledge their own racism you are better off arguing class war even as they perceive, say, Barack Obama and Michelle, as part of the elite upper class war against themselves. You can never get them to admit to the fact that they resent Obama and Michelle for being wealthy/powerful because they are wealthy and powerful and black, where they would cheerfully submit to Mitt and MrsMitt because they are wealthy and powerful and white. But this is at the root of the way race and class hyperpotentiate it each other making wealthy white liberals “side” with blacks (in their eyes) and wealthy blacks even more evil and wealthy than obviously evil political actors like the Kochs.
Stan Gable
@geg6:
So you’re arguing that the right wingers were treating the Clintons with kid-gloves? I really don’t understand this.
rikyrah
The reason why so many White folks have gone crazy since the election of Barack Obama is BECAUSE of the election of Barack Obama.
If you have clung to Whiteness your entire fucking life.
And, in your mind, the bottom line for you was,
” Well, at least I’m not a Nigger.”
And now the answer to the question of..
” What do you call President of the United States?”
And the answer is ” Nigger”
Then you are shook.
You’re all kinds of shook.
Barack Obama has destroyed the very foundation of who they believe themselves to be.
And, he has come out victorious consistently.
He’s a Black man…
Married to a visibly, self-respecting , no doubt about it, her ancestors were in the hull of those slaveships Black….
Has beautiful Black children.
He’s handsome, his wife is beautiful, their children are gorgeous….
They’ve always told themselves
” At least I’m not a Nigger.”
And here comes Barack Obama pretty much putting it in their faces that they, and their ancestors for generations, have fallen for utter bullshyt.
And, they don’t have anything to show for it.
This is why I refuse to coddle them….they wanna cling to that Whiteness and vote against their own economic interests..fuck them.
The momentous shift against White Supremacy by the election and re-election of Barack Obama is what has them shook.
Never forget.
60% of White people voted for Willard Romney.
And it didn’t even fucking matter.
He got stomped in the popular vote AND the electoral college.
White folks aren’t used to having folks tell them to go somewhere and sit down.
Rob in CT
@Roger Moore:
More concise than how I put it. Obviously I agree.
It’s Race! It’s Class!
It’s both, and they are the same (or rather some folks have worked really hard to try and make them seem the same).
Villago Delenda Est
@eric:
/pedant
“The Great Society” is copyright 1964, Lyndon Baines Johnson, all rights reserved.
FDR had “The New Deal.” HST had “The Fair Deal”. Eisenhower had…well, no slogan other than “we won’t rock the boat that much and we’re rescuing the GOP from the crazies.” JFK had “The New Frontier.”
Sherparick
Yes, with regional and cultural nuance. Working class Yankee whites vote about 60-40 Democrat (take the line that runs from end of the pan-handle in West Virginia and draw it West into Iowa. North of that line Obama carries the majority of the White vote) and white vote south of that line (including Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, southern Iowa, and Missouri) the white southern working class votes becomes more and more Republican). See http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/09/1159610/-The-pundits-clearly-do-not-understand-the-white-voter-in-the-US.
The origins of this tribal identity – which through population migrations has large pools of influence throughout the country-are interesting as Virginia and the Carolinas moved from indentured servitude and convict labor to one where skin color gave the owner of labor a clear method to label his property and to divide the agricultural working class into different tribes with different status. http://historyrevived.blogspot.com/2013/02/bacons-rebellion-and-racial-slavery.html
currants
@geg6:
Me either, but given those choices, I’d go with the white woman (being more despised).
Chris
Okay, now that I’ve read DougJ’s update –
I gotta go with this.
Politics is about race in terms of how voters think and vote. And it’s about class in the sense that this allows the people at the top to stack the deck in their favor and create a very class-based society. “Policies” vs “voting patterns” about covers it.
(Again, the aftermath of the Civil War and the civil rights movement, in which the biggest winners were the 1% and the biggest losers were black and other nonwhite people, seems to bear this out).
eric
@Villago Delenda Est: Point taken. :)
Gex
A lot of the problem is that the right uses class, i.e. poor people, as a proxy for race. So their sell their policies using class but as so many here realize the subconscious understanding among the white working poor is that these references to poor people really mean black people. This is all further complicated by the people at the top really being as concerned about class as race, in that they don’t want anyone else benefiting from policy except them. So on the right at the top it is about class and race and at the bottom it is just about race.
Villago Delenda Est
@rikyrah:
His wife is by far the hottest First Lady since Jackie Kennedy, who merely rivals her in hottness, to be honest.
And the kids…well, damn, gorgeous is half a word for them.
eric
@aimai: When they see the Obamas they see people who cannot be their betters and have achieved success through the liberal handouts of welfare and affirmative action that have so subjugated the poor white man. It is not racist to point out that the Obamas suceeded because of reverse racism. or at least that it is the first verse of their beloved Psalm of American righteousness.
Sphex
I haven’t yet read the whole thread, so apologies if I’m repeating something already said: on the “race vs. class” issue I found this weekend’s episode of “This American Life” to be jaw-droppingly… Informative/depressing/eye-opening.
Tldr version: it’s race. Aaaaaaaalll the way down. Even though class plays a part, even that is race-driven.
Ahh says fywp
@Hunter Gathers: I want to get me tgat special free Medicaid and cash aid in Spanish for ‘illegals’. I heard there’s a grapevinr in Miami where dey hook. Ju. Up.
ruemara
@eric: You asserted that you disagreed because it is class. Now you’re saying it’s a tool. I’m saying that a tool must exist before it is used. Lis. Ten.
@Stan Gable: He’s been accused of being a murderer, and a drug dealer along with being a terrorist.
geg6
@Stan Gable:
Your strawman is made of some pretty flimsy straw. I never said that.
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore:
You are, in my opinion, correct. Skin color is used as a tool by the 1% to divide the lower orders against each other. Divide and rule…oldest trick in the book.
A truly egalitarian society scares the living shit out of the 1%. It threatens to end any remnant left of the law of the jungle (where they have the advantage) and destroy the 1%’s status as the top dogs, which they love every bit as much as their lucre.
sphex
I haven’t yet read the whole thread, so apologies if I’m repeating something already said: on the “race vs. class” issue I found this weekend’s episode of “This American Life” to be jaw-droppingly… Informative/depressing/eye-opening.
Tldr version: it’s race. Aaaaaaaalll the way down. Even though class plays a part, even that is race-driven.
Can’t recommend that episode highly enough.
geg6
@rikyrah:
This.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Rush Limbaugh will hate hypothetical President Hillary as much as he hates Obama, and sexism will be rampant in the campaign and, if/when, her presidency, but I’m willing to bet that Hillary CLinton will do better than Obama in places like WVa, Kentucky and Arkansas, and while there are white women– from Maureen Dowd and Cokie Roberts to PEggy Noonan, Ann Coulter and Marsha Blackburn– who will hate on President Hillary, I’m also willing to bet HRC will not lose white women to the 2016 GOP nominee.
Steve S
That Chait article was pretty good.
eric
Word Press ate my post and I dont have time to repost, but it focused on the Second Great Awakening as a class uprising as an example of class as the dominant theme and how and why it must be tamed. I am not arguing for the temporal primacy of class over race but simply that Capital would use hippie love if it meant fleecing the masses out of more sheckles.
Stan Gable
@ruemara:
I seriously can’t tell from this sentence whether or not you’re describing Clinton or Obama though. I searched for “Bill Clinton drug dealer” on google there were 230k results, this is from #2:
“Clinton worked himself up rapidly and became a governor of Arkansas. As a governor Bill Clinton committed a series of high crimes, related to his Illuminati connection. He became the leader of a gigantic network which dealt with drug-smuggling, laundering of drug-money and corruption in general.”
I also forget how noxious this all was but long story short, I don’t see anything weird with Chait assuming that Hillyer could/would write almost the same thing about any democratic pres.
eric
@Steve S: Sort of like Zionist jews watching the Pianist and seeing the Germans walling up Warsaw and not getting it about Palestine.
scav
Bit of a chicken and egg problem, and lets not forget religion as a wedge issue, in the US currently as against Muslims and Atheists/Agnostics or the insufficiently Capitalist-Evangelical. Fragmentation helps preserves the status quo, it’s societal gridlock.
Darkrose
My problem with the “It’s not race, it’s class!” argument is that the only people I’ve ever heard making it are white men. Most of the time, it’s an attempt to make it All About Them, and to avoid having to face up to the fact that their lack of self-awareness of their own privilege makes them part of the problem.
jl
I wasn’t going to comment on the topic, but just saw this, which I thought was precious: RNC trots out an African-American spokesperson to ask why Obama has not engaged in the black racism, that they have almost constantly dogwhistled and screamed he is obviously guilty of committing.on a daily basis.
RNC Spokesman: ‘What Exactly Has The President Done For The Black Community?’
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/rnc-spokesman-what-exactly-has-the-president-done-for-the-black-community-video
Elizabelle
@rikyrah:
Well said, rikyrah.
Got to add: some people have told me re PBO: “Well, he is half-white.”
I don’t know why someone needs to look for that.
Villago Delenda Est
@Steve S:
That’s very telling…particularly the second quote, something that the parasite vermin of the Village fully think is reality, which is why they don’t scream from the mountaintop about how fucked up the RNC is.
The Other Chuck
It’s about race because it’s ultimately about class. Divide and Rule. Don’t talk to me about pigeons and curtain rods, there’s a darkie over there with a curtain rod that should be mine, dammit.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@RSA:
The really funny- and sadly telling- thing about this is that the Battle of Selma was a resounding Union victory.
eric
@Darkrose: There are those that are irredeemable racists fuhcks and there are those that play on that racism to line their pockets at the expense of everyone else. I would it thusly, if you want to end racism in america you need to deal with the immoral merchants of hate as much as with the haters themselves. It is not an abdication of responsibility to point to point to such merchants as the core of perpetuating a hatred that has been longstanding in the American experience.
Villago Delenda Est
@eric:
That, right there, is the true tragedy of Israel.
“Never Again” doesn’t seem to apply to Palestinian Untermenschen, does it?
eric
@The Other Chuck: yes.
eric
@Villago Delenda Est: say what you want about the Big Chill, but is there a more true exchange:
Michael: I don’t know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They’re more important than sex.
Sam Weber: Ah, come on. Nothing’s more important than sex.
Michael: Oh yeah? Ever gone a week without a rationalization?
aimai
@rikyrah: Sure, but of the 60 percent of white people who voted against Obama some proportion were never going to vote for the Democrat at all. I’m not saying that they don’t hate Obama because he’s black. But they hate the Democratic Candidate anyway. Its the percentage–and i don’t know what percentage of the white vote it was–who voted against Obama when they would ordinarily have voted Democrat that I worry about.
The way I look at it, remembering very well the extreme, scortching hot hate that was directed at Clinton, is that they hated Clinton with a white hot passion and they (and we) thought they couldn’t hate more. But we were wrong. When it came to it Obama’s race made them hate him even more than they had ever dreamed possible. But they can’t acknowledge it because they always hate the Dem. and they don’t see the very palpable differences in the tone and the way they deal with Obama as race based.
Roger Moore
@eric:
More accurately, they have turned class into a primarily racial issue rather than a primarily economic issue. Marxists talk about class as an economic thing, but traditional classes were at least as much about ancestry and upbringing as they were about wealth. That’s why, to pick a recent example, there was such a big deal about Prince William marrying Kate Middleton; her family may be very well to do, but it’s still a big deal because they aren’t hereditary aristocrats. Tying race to class makes it possible for poor whites to prefer white millionaires over poor blacks as a matter of class solidarity, and that won’t change until we can eliminate racism.
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
I’m fairly cynical of the whole “never again” thing and Holocaust remembrace in general for that reason and others.
fuckwit
It’s all projection. Every last fucking bit of it. ESPECIALLY the teleprompter thing!!
The last THREE RETHUG PRESIDENTS WERE COMPLETELY INCOHERENT AND MORONIC WITHOUT THEIR TELEPROMPTERS.
Saint Reagan pretty much defined the teleprompter-addicted puppet president. I remember it at the time. He was not capable of speaking much without Nooners writing shit for him. Bush the First was a massively incoherent diarhheah of gobbedlygook without a teleprompter. And his idiot son was even worse!
Meanwhile, Clinton was a brilliant extemporaneous speaker, hell even at the 2012 convention he went on for hours and was pitch-perfect in his speech. Obama is, in my opinion, even better, thanks to having the advantage of being serious and sincere as well as inspiring and uplifting.
So we have perhaps the best extemporaneous speaker on serious, hard subjects, that we’ve ever had. And the Rethug Wurlitzer constantly harps on about teleprompters.
Fucking annoying. The projection is at an unprecedented scale.
Ahh says fywp
@Mike G: The apology they are waiting for is the one that will never come: where Obama apologizes for his existence. Remember, these rubes ate tge Pizza Man’s act with a fork. (Irony intentional.)
Eta: ate UP, that is
Rob in CT
@aimai:
I think this is true but incomplete. There are lots of folks who hate any Democrat. But that’s not unconnected to race! The Democrats are gonna take your money away and give it to shiftless blahs (if you’re a more evolved right wing type, insert shiftless poors here), you see. The Democrats in question could all be white, but that would remain truthy.
Roger Moore
@ruemara:
Sure, but the American conception of race was not something that existed since time immemorial. It was deliberately constructed as a tool to convince poor whites that they didn’t have common interests with slaves, and after slavery it was modestly reworked to keep poor whites from making common cause with poor free blacks. Race and class are social constructs, and they were deliberately constructed to serve the political ends of the wealthy.
aimai
@fuckwit: Well, they really learned to believe, under Bush, that they could manufacture their own reality not just on the ground, with the invasion of Iraq, but with the manipulation of images and the market segmentation of the voting populace. They know–not just believe but know–that if they can define Obama to their voters with these ridiculous smears and accusations that their voters will never encounter the President except with this lens on. Which is why you can be talking to a right winger who gets all his information from Rush or from Murdoch and Fox news and you can talk about the “same” incident or event and you will both come out with completely different conclusions. Thats all their objective is: to create a blinkered, frightened, ignorant, frantic republican voter. They don’t care about how absurd the accusation is to people who have eyes to see or ears to hear these speeches. They just know if they keep repeating their lies long enough their own voters will buy them.
Chris
@fuckwit:
Part of their spiel is that anything that’s said about or done to them or their presidents must be repaid in equal measure to the next Democratic president, regardless of whether that makes any sense in context.
Nixon was impeached, or about to be, therefore Clinton had to be impeached too. Never mind whether or not lying about your sex life is the same thing as using your office as president to break the law in order to destroy your political opponents’ campaigns.
Bush was mocked for his incoherence and inability to speak without a teleprompter, therefore Obama must be mocked for his ability to speak without a teleprompter. Never mind whether or not Obama can, in fact, speak coherently without a teleprompter in a way that Bush couldn’t.
See also every comment about “Obama’s Watergate,” “Obama’s Katrina,” “Obama’s Iran-contra,” “Obama’s Iraq War,” “Obama’s Enemies List,” or what-have-you.
As a bonus point, it allows them to “prove” if only to themselves that the media and Washington are biased and liberal, because if they can’t find Democratic equivalents to Watergate, Iraq, or speaking without a teleprompter, it can’t be because these things aren’t there, it must be because they’re being covered up.
Snarki, child of Loki
@Hunter Gathers:
Shhh! Don’t let the Freepers know that they’d get a 3/5 discount on their Obamacare if they call it in from an Obamaphone!
satby
@schrodinger’s cat: Yeah, I would have said more class warfare than racial; now I and lots of other (white) people can recognize all sorts of racism we might have not realized was there before. Not that we thought it didn’t exist, just that things had progressed to where it was class more than race as a problem.
Yes, we were dumber than shit.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@rikyrah: This right here.
I’ve noticed that those who come down on the “class” side of the discussion seem to be uniformly white and male.
Curious, eh?
Chris
@Rob in CT:
This.
Democrats have been “the party of black people” in the eyes of teabaggers for fifty years at least, so all of these freakouts at Democratic presidents are racially motivated, whether the public face of the party is white or black. (Which isn’t to say they don’t freak out worse when it’s black).
rikyrah
@Elizabelle:
He would have been in the fields with Booker T and Frederick Douglass.
He would have had to drink from the Colored Water Fountains like the late Walter White (head of the NAACP).
Black folks didn’t make up the one-drop rule.
And White folks don’t get to disregard when it suits their pleasure.
Black folk in America got all sorts of White ancestors..
We have ALWAYS been a multi-racial community.
Didn’t keep us from being put on the block, in the field, and in the back of the bus.
fuckwit
@scav: It’s TRIBAL. Let’s pull this way, way up to 50K feet: it’s all tribal. Humans are tribal creatures, and Americans are unique in the world (and, usually, in a good way) in having very many different tribes all mooshed together into one country. So that defines our internal politics in ways that, for most countries, define their foreign relations instead.
Race. Ethnic heritage. Religion. Gender. Geography. Occupation. Accent. Education. Very much of politics is driven by these tribal identifications. In the USA, we get to have these tribal battles internally.
The battles are annoying, and embarassing at times, and we still have serious problems to fix, but overall I’m proud of the remarkable success we’ve had as the most multi-racial, multi-ethnic democracy the world has ever known.
aimai
@Rob in CT: Oh, absolutely, I would never say it was unconnected to race. I’m just pointing out that its not either/or. Its always both. Its tribalism and its the terror of marginal whites that they might fall out of the priviliged class (and remember Italians and the Irish had to fight to climb into the category white, as well as the Jews) because once you fell out of the class of “whites” then anything could happen to you legally and socially. Like I said upthread the hatred that poor, marginal, whites feel for Obama is an absurd mix of anti-elite populist hate and out and out racism in which the poverty of the speaker is seen as excusing or expunging the racism, while the racism is the biggest factor in preventing the same hatred being directed at the actual white ruling class in this country.
slippy
@Belafon:
LOL. You can consider that I am against being wealthy, in general, because it seems to me that once someone becomes wealthy they immediately lose all of their value as a human being.
It’s a disease that disconnects us from community.
Interrobang
I think people crap on Chait because he gives people like Hillyer a pass on things like the intentions behind their obvious racism. Hillyer works for the frickin’ National Review, and yet Chait seems determined to think that Hillyer must have good intentions or something, that he really can’t be as racist inside as what he said…even though indications from context run to the contrary, and as the social-justice blog crowd (who I generally loathe as a pack of bloodthirsty sanctimonious assholes) would say, “intent is not magic.”
Hillyer said a fucking racist thing, and he hangs around with notorious fucking racists. By any rational definition, that would make him at least suspect of being a giant fucking racist himself, but somehow Chait thinks he isn’t.
Patty K
Class is definitely more important. I’ve thought so ever watching an African-American woman, a member of African royalty with the manner and bearing of white grande dames I’ve encountered in my life, sweep into a market here in Chapel Hill and have rednecks who would have despised poor blacks, absolutely grovelling before her.
Yatsuno
@rikyrah: I luvvers u.
Kay
@Roger Moore:
I agree, but I would turn it around. It’s used to make poor whites believe they have commonality with wealthy whites, one that trumps class. That’s appealing because you may not have the big house and the huge 401k, but you are still “in” and “the other” is out.
When Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich make sneaky references to the “food stamp President” they’re bringing lower class whites in, pointing out a commonality they share (in Romney’s case, really the only thing they have in common) which is skin color. I wonder sometimes if Republicans relied more and more on race with working class voters, this ONE thing they have in common, as their economic policies diverged further and further from what would be in the interests of working class people.
scav
@fuckwit: I’m less impressed by the Am exceptionalism unique part of your line of argument, there’s Canada, Australia, New Zealand, different parts of the UK and Europe, all more or less functioning with different strengths, weaknesses and blots and even little overtly “homogenous” areas can fracture hard under times of stress, using whatever lines are available. I don’t see us as being any sort of unique role model. Not bottom of the barrel, but no shining city on a hill.
jl
@Interrobang: That was the one part of the column that rang false to me. By means of recent salutory firings, the NR has made the racist and bigot rules of the road clear for their writers, so they know to be careful now. Just saying ‘can’t see inside this fool’s head’ would be charitable.
Rob in CT
http://www.newsweek.com/hard-lesson-motown-they-will-steal-your-pension-210401
And if convincing you that the blah next to you at the table is trying to steal your cookie (as they pocket the other 19), so be it. If something else works, then they’ll use that.
For a very long time now, race has served this purpose. It used to work even better than it does now. Even as it wanes, it’s still very strong. Try discussing Detroit with anyone even vaguely right wing and see how long it takes race to come up as The Reason. I give it 30 seconds, at best.
Jebediah, RBG
@geg6:
Of any President? Shit, he’s treated with less respect than the guy who just gave a parking ticket two seconds after the meter expired.
I hope someday it causes deep shame and embarrassment, but i won’t hold my breath.
Visceral
@eric: It really is about class, because when racists talk about “white people” this, that, and the other thing, they don’t mean all white people, just white people from the same socioeconomic stratum as themselves: rural blue collar workers, suburban professionals, etc. Blacks aren’t the enemy simply for being black, but for allegedly being the Marxist lumpenproletariat: an alienated, dysfunctional, and largely unemployable underclass that’s totally dependent on guilt-tripping out welfare payments. Mexicans aren’t the enemy simply for being Mexican, but for allegedly being a race of scabs: hordes of skilled and semi-skilled workers who’re quite welcome to come over and work for peanuts and screw everyone in the process. “Cesar Chavez was anti-illegal for a reason!” Asians aren’t the enemy simply for being Asian, but for allegedly being another race of [white collar] scabs, who are eventually going to repossess the American Dream from the top as the Blacks and Mexicans trash it from the bottom. Jews aren’t the enemy simply for being Jews, but for allegedly being vampire squid bankers, lawyers, and “ivory tower” academics who can’t – or won’t – see how good they and their fellows really have it in Whitopia, instead determined to forever fight for their lives – against long-dead enemies – with the other minorities in tow and (perhaps deliberately) fuck over hard-working God-fearing white Christians in the process.
Michael G
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I translate that whole paragraph as circumlocution to avoid the word “uppity”.
jl
@scav: I (a white male) also think fundamentally, for most places and societies in human history it is fundamentally about class, and economic and police power as means to gain maintain resources and control. But the U.S. is not some average of all human history, it is the U.S., and slavery boomed here around the same time as the nineteenth century pseudo-scientific racism got going. That unfortunate coincidence formed a hard and lasting mindset in certain white communities in the U.S.
I think the issues of race and class are so intertwined that it is impossible to separate them. And for anyone who says the issue of class is paramount, they have to explain why class warfare was not so relentless against ethnic whites, and how certain groups of non-whites became ‘white’ at some point.
But as commenter above said, ‘skin color’ is probably a better word, since conventional race categories are pretty arbitrary. And Hispanics are a target of race-based political hate and fear mongering to lesser extent, and have been popularly defined as a ‘race’, based on a few superficial stereotypical bits of appearance, so even when it makes no sense, race seems to be a handy way to get certain white folk’s attention.
So, I think there is a distinct and separate race issue which is just as important as class, in the U.S. I don’t see how that can be denied.
And saying that the Obama election was a trigger gives too much credit to the GOP and U.S. society. I remember the 1980s as a blatantly racist era, and I found the glib and unapologetic implicitly racist thought and talk among the VS white people I saw on TV and read in the media infuriating. That was a GOP Reagan-era golden years.and halcyon days.
I was overoptimistic for awhile after Clinton (‘the first black president’) withstood the assault, and attempt to use race in the political war against him failed, and after Bush Jr. served as a moderating influence on GOP racism. But I hope I don’t make that mistake again. I travel to some areas and some white communities with a different mindset now than a few years ago. Short of electing someone like Willie Brown as president, and after he was his most in-your-face self without triggering hate campaigns, I might change my mind, but that experiment won’t happen.
Betty Cracker
@Kay:
Bingo. The question is, how much longer will that be effective? I think race is becoming less of a factor in voting, which is a good thing, but if we want to see progress on issues we care about as liberals in our lifetimes, we can’t just wait for all the dinosaurs to lumber into the tar pit.
jl
@Betty Cracker:
” how much longer will that be effective? ”
For certain groups of whites, looks like it will take a few generations at least. Most we can hope for is convert some marginal percentage of deluded white community that can be saved, enough to get the country off the electoral knife-edge, and maybe force the GOP to give up on the racism and hate.
Chris
@Visceral:
Well, to put in a word for the other side of this argument;
Yes, but these racists aren’t hating minorities because of those class-based traits – they’re assigning those class-based traits to minorities arbitrarily because it’s more comfortable for them to blame their problems on tribal outsiders than to face the fact that their enemies are members of their own tribe.
During the Great Depression, there were a lot of racists who were mad at “vampire squid bankers and lawyers,” but who associated these things with a fictional international Jewish conspiracy, rather than the reality of a largely WASP Wall Street (where, if I’m not mistaken, people actually worked hard to keep Jews and other immigrants out of the business, or at least out of the upper echelons, well into the twentieth century).
So doesn’t what you’re saying weigh in on the “race trumps class” side of the debate more? That racist voters are aware of class-based problems but choose to fold them into easily drawn racial lines?
scav
@jl: I’m not denying it’s about class or race or ethnic background or whatever, nor that the available fractures to exploit vary by society. It was getting a bit into an either / or class or race shout-down and it’s more than that. They’re using religion in the US as we type. And country of origin, and gender, and etc. And, not or, that’s the minor point I was aiming for.
ETA: also, remembering the fluidity of target helps us catch the next time they shuffle the cards for the next boogy man du jour.
Turgidson
@Aaron Evan Baker:
Chait is also looked on with skepticism because he supported the Iraq war. Even his 10-year anniversary “mea culpa” was weighed down with some odious “wrong for the right reasons” bullshit rationalizations and weak claims that the WMD case wasn’t obviously a giant steaming pile of lies to anyone who cared to look. And the conclusion was basically “the liberals who got this right better be careful next time they oppose a war, because they might be wrong.” So, to Chait, the people who were right about Iraq are the ones who need to make sure they learn the right lesson from what happened. Egads.
I like the guy, a lot, on domestic policy (he’s particularly good at dismantling the dreck that spews forth from the Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver’s piehole) and his musings on political events in general are usually pretty good. But his (ongoing, apparently) Iraq war blunderings are pretty nauseating.
Drexciya
Ugh. Reading through this thread made me queasy.
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris:
BINGO.
This was true in Germany as well. The notion of “Jewish bankers” is bullshit, just because some bankers happen to be Jews. Their Jewishness isn’t the problem. Their banksterism is.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
I don’t know. I think about it a lot. One would think that at some point the disconnect would be too profound, the gulf too wide, to bridge it with “we’re all white people over on this end, after all!”
I do think it’s important to understand that this is framed positively, or that’s how the target audience hear it. We hear the division. They hear inclusion with a group of people they have nothing else in common with but want to be a part of, to join. I think that’s why they don’t know why we object to it so much. They hear Mitt Romney saying “I’m like you” and we hear Mitt Romney saying “these other people are NOT like you”.
Tone in DC
No doubt.
Many of them have driven past Crazy, through Insane and arrived in Completely Apeshit.
scav
@Drexciya: Well, that’s ok, you already know we’re all worthless shit.
Yatsuno
@scav: The Tbogg potential for this thread ust drmamtically increased. Would be better if we had recent comments back, though I know why they were trashed.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
I can accept what you’re saying about trying to put poor whites in the same group as rich whites at least as much as them being in a different group from poor blacks, but I’ll have to split with you on the issue of class. Class is a lot more than just socioeconomic status, and here in America we have a system where class has been deliberately around race instead as a way of keeping poor whites on the side of rich whites rather than poor blacks. In America race is class, or at least the single largest component of class, so it’s crazy to talk about them as if they’re separate issues.
Another Botsplainer
@Stan Gable: Why just yesterday he was accused of “droning” the Fast and Furious guy.
Another Botsplainer
Here’s the link from a guy tearing them a new one:
https://aattp.org/truther-lunatics-say-obama-killed-paul-walker-with-drone-strike-seriously/
Visceral
@Chris: It’d be easier to argue ignorance and racial animus if these minority groups were proportionately distributed across the income ladder. The fact remains that they’re not, so the role of class enemy is not assigned arbitrarily, at least not from the racists’ point of view. Blacks are overrepresented in the alienated and welfare-dependent underclass (with their “race hustling” academic/political elite), Latinos are overrepresented among the low-wage, semi-skilled working poor, while Asians and Jews are overrepresented among the wealthy. You get into chicken/egg territory very quickly, where the line between the legacy of past racism and the fruits of contemporary dysfunction is not easily drawn. Like the racists love to argue: “How long will it take before it’s not slavery’s fault anymore?!”
But that doesn’t change the fact that the attacks are never along the lines of “We hate blacks because they have dark skin and nappy hair!” No, the attacks are always motivated by and directed against whatever sinister thing the minority is allegedly doing, and ideas that they’re genetically hardwired or cursed by God – rather than shaped by culture, both theirs and ours – are fringe positions even among racists.
Some definitions of racism are so broad that actual white supremacists/nationalists who are explicitly arguing that the American Dream – or life itself – should be legally restricted to Anglo fundies are a minority. Mostly you’ve got a lot of center-right white bread types who are just whining – and less about the minorities themselves then about the movements built around them – the same way they whine about white teenagers: “Get a job and don’t be an ass, because hell no you’re not better than that!”
fuckwit
@scav: Heh, yeah, sounded a bit too rah-rah on second reading. There may be others who do it better than we do. We are probably the worst of the bunch at dealing with slavery and its aftermath: I don’t recall any other country that had to have a civil war over it; most ended it by just passing a law. Still, your counterexamples are I think much more homogenous than the USA is. We really have been made up of people from every country on earth, and I don’t know of any other country that has quite that level of diversity.
Gene108
@Roger Moore:
It worked with Clinton. They developed the narrative that Bill Clinton was just as corrupt as Nixon and Reagan’s Iran-Contra flunkies because of a bunch of stuff that either had nothing to do with his Presidency – Whitewater primarily – and small scale nitpicking like the White House Travel Office shake up.
I think the loss of the Congresional special prosecutor that was abused in Clinton’s terms has helped limit the ability of this Republican House to mire Obama in “scandals”.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
That’s because a lot of us are “these other people” who aren’t like them. If you’re black, brown, gay, Muslim, Jewish, etc., it’s hard to miss that you’re still left on the outside after the poor whites have joined with Mitt. They find it a lot easier to blame that on us refusing to join them rather than their refusal to have us.
gogol's wife
@rikyrah:
I’m late, but . . . Amen.
gogol's wife
@fuckwit:
And another Amen.
Catfish N. Cod
Oh, for crying out loud.
Whether you think it’s class or race depends primarily on your own class and race. It looks more like class from a white and upper-class perspective because to you it is (and because the upper-class people that set it up did it more for class reasons than race reasons). It looks more like race in the lower-class trenches in either direction, because that’s the pointy end of the stick in your face. It is, in fact, all one thing. To disentangle it is to dismantle it — easier said than done.
But if you must make a declaration, in the United States it was class first. The slavery system AS a system was set up in the 1600’s by upper-class Virginian and South Carolinian planters who wanted a more convenient, cheaper, and less rights-driven system for acquiring peasants than the prior and more equitable system of “indentured servitude” — a system whereby you gave seven years’ labor in return for transport fees and room and board. Both black and white people were brought to America under this system (which means that, amazingly enough, there have been free blacks in America since the 1640’s — trufax) but it caused there to be a growing population of smallholding freemen which threatened control of the colony by wannabe nobles (including sons of actual nobles as well as ambitious gentry). So they imported the slave system pioneered by the Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch lock-stock-and-barrel.
The Spanish really did create the structure of their system out of pure racism, with exploitation a secondary concern — they were obsessed with “limpieza” and pure bloodedness, in part because of the history of the Reconquista and overturning the relatively progressive Andalusian system in favor of the proto-police-state known as the Spanish Inquisition. Anyone without blood ties to the invaders (originally only the northernmost counties of Spain) were generally suspect. This was only infinitessimally retracted when the system was imported to the New World. Slavery was an adjunct to this system, applied only because in some places plagues and/or harsh working conditions eliminated the peasant population. Being Moorish, Indio, or Negro was all the same to the Spanish — you weren’t of hidalgo origin, so you were nothing.
English colonists did not start out with these prejudices; if you don’t believe me, read Shakespeare’s Othello and remember how many of the characters are black Moors. Then read The Merchant of Venice to see the racism they did have against Jews — compare and contrast. They acquired prejudice against black folk when they adopted the system that bore that prejudice — a system they chose for reasons of class. Later, racism took on a life of its own in the United States, and now they are well integrated. But unlike in Latin America — or Latin Europe, for that matter — here the class problem caused the race problem, instead of the more common situation of the other way ’round.
ruemara
@Stan Gable: your Google-fu needs work if you’ve missed where it’s been said about Obama. Not to mention his gay prostitution.
Roger Moore
@Gene108:
I don’t think it did, or at least it didn’t work with anyone who wasn’t already predisposed to dislike him. They threw a lot of crap at Clinton, and he was still very popular at the end of his term.
Monala
@fuckwit: I don’t know of any other country that has quite that level of diversity.
Brazil. Largest population of African descent outside of Africa, largest Japanese population outside of Japan, largest indigenous population anywhere. Lot of folks of European descent, too – not only the original Portuguese, but huge numbers of Italians and Germans who came after WWII (since Brazil was unaligned during the war). Sizable Middle Eastern population as well.
Monala
@Visceral: I disagree. Yeah, black folks may be disproportionately represented among the underclass, but a huge majority of black folks (like 80-85%) are not underclass, yet the racists assign the stereotypes to all black people. Even folks who claim not to be racist do this, in opposition to all evidence. Someone posted here a few days ago that their mom thinks all black people are welfare queens, except for every black person she knows. I know more than a few folks like that – who know a significant number of black people from school, work, what have you, and not one single one of them fits the “alienated and welfare-dependent underclass,” yet they still think a majority of black people fall into that category. So, I plan to ask the next time I encounter this attitude, “Every single one of the black people you know is an exception? Every single one? So maybe you should reconsider your stereotype?”
Kay
@Roger Moore:
Oh, I agree. But that’s the difference in perspective. I don’t think working class whites who are conservatives think they’re on the outside of a group that includes Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. The appealing part, what makes it seductive rather than repellant, the part we maybe don’t hear, is inclusive not exclusive.
They didn’t even have to say “don’t make common cause with those other people”. All they had to do was say “you’re one of us.”
JaneE
Modern policies are class based now because the racist right decided that if they could no longer legally discriminate regarding public accommodations, schools, public assistance, etc, then they would rather harm whites than help blacks. The trend of cut, cut, cut accelerated after the civil rights era (50’s, 60’s and 70’s). Now they are openly denigrating the poor, the sick, the victims of natural disasters (or at least the ones who lived in NOLA). I would bet money that the class aspect of class warfare would diminish sharply if it were possible to only shaft the black and brown (and Muslim and Jewish and maybe Catholic, or anyone else they don’t like). They probably wouldn’t go out of their way to help poor whites, but they wouldn’t try so hard to eliminate things like public schools and natural disaster aid.
taylormattd
Doug, you have to realize this is a HUGE argument in the lily-white blogosphere. Huge.
Anytime anyone dares to mention, anywhere near an allegedly progressive blog, that race is a huge factor dominating American politics, the white emosphere takes it personally, spends a bunch of time downplaying racism, and condescendingly explains to everyone that no, no, this is really about class.
Plantsmantx
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Same here. I think he lost his nerve when he got to that part.
Plantsmantx
@Villago Delenda Est:
Ta-Nehisi Coates:
Plantsmantx
@Baud:
…a black guy who is a crackpot and a professional black Confederacy fetishist.
Matt McIrvin
@Aaron Evan Baker:
The war.
Plantsmantx
@taylormattd:
“Emosphere”? Is there any definable subgroup of whites on the center to left of the political spectrum that doesn’t do that?
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@taylormattd: Agreed certain orange hued site was certainly testament to that from about 2008 forward. Shooting squid clouds all the way down.
PJ
@Cacti: Northup makes the point that his first owner, Ford, was the kind of person who, in another society, would have been considered a good person; his instincts were charitable. Owning slaves, of course, forced him to be a bad person, because without violence or the threat of violence he could not force free men to work for him. Epps, Northup’s last owner, was a bad and weak person, but owning slaves made him much, much worse.
PJ
@Cacti: Northup makes the point that his first owner, Ford, was the kind of person who, in another society, would have been considered a good person; his instincts were charitable. Owning slaves, of course, forced him to be a bad person, because without violence or the threat of violence he could not force free men to work for him. Epps, Northup’s last owner, was a bad and weak person, but owning slaves made him much, much worse.@PJ: The point being that slavery corrodes the enslavers as well as the enslaved. Mere racism could be said to have a similar, if subtler, effect.
PhilbertDesanex
Re “60% of White people voted for Willard Romney.And it didn’t even fucking matter”
THIS
And, Obama won WITHOUT THE SOUTH, which has been the swing vote and has controlled politics for generations, whichever party they vote, wins. And now, they are threatened with being Left Behind. We wish! How about on a cast iron raft
.
Linnaeus
Intersectionality, folks.
Villago Delenda Est
@Plantsmantx:
TNC has an excellent point. It’s obvious that their own economic well being is secondary to their tribalism.
It’s all the losers have. They deserve to be serfs. Fuck them.
Aaron Evan Baker
So it was Chait’s support for the Iraq War. Well, that does make sense.
(personal admission: I supported the War initially, to my lasting shame.)
fastEddie
@taylormattd: Fully agree ( with the update ) . The policies tend to be class based but the intentions are all race based. See the famous Lee Atwater quote –
What really strikes me is how different things tend to be in European countries. Because they have no history of slavery, etc. So they live in a real “Society” – since the countries are small, etc., and homogeneous – people know that the poor are literally their cousins, their family.
Here in the US, Sadly, 30 years of Republicanism has turned us only into an economy. No longer a society we are increasingly “bowling alone” – scared people with guns who think nothing of cheating on taxes or ripping off the “government”.
Driftglass posted yesterday http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2013/12/depraved-and-indifferent.html and said
I don’t think I have ever heard it summed up so elegantly.