I was rambling on about twitter earlier, developed my thoughts, and thought I would share. I think the major part of why this election is so frustrating for me is that neither of the candidates excite me the way Barack Obama did in 2008. Everything about that election was just magical to me- I still remember sitting in the hotel room at the conference I was attending on election night with my boss, and we were drinking and hooting and hollering every time another state went for him.
There was just something there in the man that just seemed larger than the times, and that exists to this day. I hope I am wrong, but deep down i don’t think I am ever going to feel that way about a candidate again. He was, in full dork speak, my Neo. I would crawl over broken glass for the man, and still would. Mind you, his record is not perfect. From my perspective he’s been pretty bad on a few issues, but when I balance that with how far we have come, and the grace and dignity with which it has been accomplished in the face of a worthless cowed media, backstabbing blue dogs, and a sociopathic opposition party, and I still marvel at what has happened these past eight years.
I love documentaries, and I often sit and play them like one would a podcast or the radio while I am working, and one that I play quite frequently is Ken Burns on the Roosevelts. I was a newly minted Democrat when Obama took the stage, and he made me a Democrat for life. The same can be said of Obama about me as can be said about the people, now dying off, who still have pictures of FDR in their living rooms.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Bernie, and I think I like the Hillary that isn’t media managed and shielded from me with a screen of bullshit from her sycophants, and I love listening to Al Franken and Sherrod Brown and Zephyr Teachout and Elizabeth Warren up there busting the balls of big banks, but they aren’t Obama to me and never will be.
Having said that, I also get that there are a lot of people out there who feel the same way about Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton that I felt and feel about President Obama, so I try not to be too much of a dick about the nonsense that gets spewed. You can decide whether or not I have succeeded, but if you decide I haven’t, just think about this- I am actively holding back most of the time when I talk about these campaigns. The Bernie Sanders supporters can be some of the most irritating human beings on the planet, as if they took every annoying fucking trait of the Paulites and said to themselves- “Let’s take this to eleven.” Likewise, the thick slime of the permanent Clinton advisors, who will literally say anything, even if it defies all logic and reason, makes me want to gag at times. I think the utter gibberish her supporters spew is also one of her best attributes- she can command such a loyal following that they will willingly debase themselves publicly in support of her. That’s loyalty. And in politics, that is useful and EXTREMELY valuable.
I think the thing that makes me jaded, though, and again, this is just me blabbing, is that I don’t feel like I had to make things up to be outraged about when defending Obama. People were really doing the things that pissed me off. People who should know better were saying outrageous things. I didn’t need to make things up to appear offended about- there was so much offensive shit being launched at Obama that you couldn’t keep up with it.
On the other hand, I watch the online Sanders/Clinton supporters (and again, this is my fault for doing so), and as I discussed in a private discussion with someone else, it is as if they have taken the “Republican bitch slap theory” of politics and turned it on its head and created the “butthurt theory of politics” – the idea that whomever is most grievously offended is the one who you should support.
The TNC piece yesterday is a classic example- Sanders supporters have been wailing and screaming that TNC is somehow doing Hillary a favor, and that this is an attack on Sanders and TNC is in the Clinton camp. Likewise, many onlince vocal Clinton supporters also seem to think this piece on Sanders’s decision to not support reparations is somehow good news for John McCain Hillary. Meanwhile, I’m reading it and thinking to myself “English, do you people speak it?” Here’s a generous snippet:
What candidates name themselves is generally believed to be important. Many Sanders supporters, for instance, correctly point out that Clinton handprints are all over America’s sprawling carceral state. I agree with them and have said so at length. Voters, and black voters particularly, should never forget that Bill Clinton passed arguably the most immoral “anti-crime” bill in American history, and that Hillary Clinton aided its passage through her invocation of the super-predator myth. A defense of Clinton rooted in the claim that “Jeb Bush held the same position” would not be exculpatory. (“Law and order conservative embraces law and order” would surprise no one.) That is because the anger over the Clintons’ actions isn’t simply based on their having been wrong, but on their craven embrace of law and order Republicanism in the Democratic Party’s name.
One does not find anything as damaging as the carceral state in the Sanders platform, but the dissonance between name and action is the same. Sanders’s basic approach is to ameliorate the effects of racism through broad, mostly class-based policies—doubling the minimum wage, offering single-payer health-care, delivering free higher education. This is the same “A rising tide lifts all boats” thinking that has dominated Democratic anti-racist policy for a generation. Sanders proposes to intensify this approach. But Sanders’s actual approach is really no different than President Obama’s. I have repeatedly stated my problem with the “rising tide” philosophy when embraced by Obama and liberals in general. (See here, here, here, and here.) Again, briefly, treating a racist injury solely with class-based remedies is like treating a gun-shot wound solely with bandages. The bandages help, but they will not suffice.
***…That a mainstream Democrat like Hillary Clinton embraces mainstream liberal policy is unsurprising. Clinton has no interest in expanding the Overton window. She simply hopes to slide through it.
But I thought #FeelTheBern meant something more than this. I thought that Bernie Sanders, the candidate of single-payer health insurance, of the dissolution of big banks, of free higher education, was interested both in being elected and in advancing the debate beyond his own candidacy. I thought the importance of Sanders’s call for free tuition at public universities lay not just in telling citizens that which is actually workable, but in showing them that which we must struggle to make workable. I thought Sanders’s campaign might remind Americans that what is imminently doable and what is morally correct are not always the same things, and while actualizing the former we can’t lose sight of the latter.
A Democratic candidate who offers class-based remedies to address racist plunder because that is what is imminently doable, because all we have are bandages, is doing the best he can. A Democratic candidate who claims that such remedies are sufficient, who makes a virtue of bandaging, has forgotten the world that should, and must, be. Effectively he answers the trenchant problem of white supremacy by claiming “something something socialism, and then a miracle occurs.”
***This, too, leaves us in poor company. “Hillary Clinton is against reparations, too” does not differ from, “What about black-on-black crime?” That Clinton doesn’t support reparations is an actual problem, much like high murder rates in black communities are actual problems. But neither of these are actual answers to the questions being asked. It is not wrong to ask about high murder rates in black communities. But when the question is furnished as an answer for police violence, it is evasion. It is not wrong to ask why mainstream Democrats don’t support reparations. But when the question is asked to defend a radical Democrat’s lack of support, it is avoidance.
The need for so many (although not all) of Sanders’s supporters to deflect the question, to speak of Hillary Clinton instead of directly assessing whether Sanders’s position is consistent, intelligent, and moral hints at something terrible and unsaid. The terribleness is this: To destroy white supremacy we must commit ourselves to the promotion of unpopular policy. To commit ourselves solely to the promotion of popular policy means making peace with white supremacy.
To me, this looks like a teacher addressing two pupils. One pupil, the teacher has decided, is a transactional leader, and basically is what she is and we know who she is. The other pupil claims to be a transformational leader, yet either is unwilling or unable to even imagine what really needs to be done to change the status quo. It may seem like a stronger condemnation of Sanders because teachers are always angrier with the students who could do better, but the indifference towards the apparent complacency of Clinton regarding these issues is in itself scathing. Why either Sides supporters would want this discussed widely is beyond me, because it is not the kind of thing I would want said about my candidate.
It’s also a brutal assessment of where we are as a party. Why are reparations off the table? We’ve done reparations before. Yes, it’s messy, and yes, it’s divisive, but so was ending slavery and so was the civil rights movement and so was the fight over gay marriage and we survived them all and are better as a nation for it. As Ta Nehisi says with far more style than I ever will, if we can’t as a party say to ourselves “why not,” then maybe we should sit back and ask why we are here in the first place.
After we beat the Republicans in 2016, of course.
Thoroughly Pizzled
The Martin O’Malley surge begins now.
Southern Beale
Right there with you, actually. Obama was a transformative figure on a lot of levels. Not just that he was black, not just that he was young, not just that he followed the awful Bush/Cheney Regime Of Terror, that he was (is) a masterful speaker … that he had a beautiful wife and a beautiful family, that it was like a modern-age Camelot. It was all of those things and then more. The fact that he came along when he did, after the awful Bush years and the resurgent Repugnicants (we hadn’t met the Tea Party yet, had we? Oh such innocence …) No president could have met all of those expectations but I think he did an awesome job.
I still love President Obama. He didn’t do everything we wanted but nobody could. What we wanted was to erase the Bush/Cheney presidency, make the Awful Oughts a bad dream. Nobody could do that.
Elizabelle
Excellent comment.
I hope we do become the party that says “why not?” and paves the way, again.
Damn Overton window is just about overseas, though.
Flukebucket
I am positive that I won’t. I am 57 years old and had never felt that way about a candidate until Obama. He is a once in a lifetime politician.
Chip Daniels
Or as Nancy Pelosi said, “We came here to do a job, not keep a job.”
shortribs
No drama Obama is my favorite part of his presidency. I hope Democrats take up that mantle going forward and maybe little by little the rest of society will too, we would all benefit.
Renie
unlike same sex marriage, civil rights, slavery most people think of reparations as giving someone else money. that, to me, is the difference, they believe money is given to others that can be used for themselves put that on top of the money going to minorities and no politician would agree to it because he would be thrown out of office. money is the factor here
just my opinion
Gin & Tonic
And yet, all of those were qualitatively different, in that they were efforts to right a *contemporaneous* wrong.
Trentrunner
[Grabs popcorn, though none of this should be controversial]
A Ghost To Most
@Flukebucket:
Yes he is. Best president since FDR.
Betty Cracker
Reparations are off the table because a meaningful compensation (one approaching the scale of the injury or effectively addressing the gulf between black and white wealth today) would cost trillions of dollars, distributing compensation to the injured parties would require dividing citizens by race, and a party that seriously proposed it would get beaten like a rented mule in the election as its own members defected in droves. Unlike civil rights, gay marriage, universal healthcare, etc., there is no broad consensus within the Democratic Party for reparations.
msdc
Or like treating structural racism–which permeates our legal system, educational system, housing system, hell, just about every system–with cash transfers. Coates’s preferred remedy (which he always leaves conveniently undefined) is no better at dismantling structural racism than the class-based policies he derides. It’s also transparently a harder sell, deeply unpopular with a vast majority of the American people. How much political capital does Coates expect candidates to spend on a policy that wouldn’t pass into law and wouldn’t treat the problems it claims to address?
See above. Messy and divisive are one thing; pointless and doomed are another.
msdc
Oh, and I completely agree about the difference between Obama and his successors. (And his predecessors, too, for that matter.) I’m glad we took the opportunity to elect this guy when we had it. They don’t come around that often.
Cacti
Barack Obama is the first POTUS of my life that I didn’t think of as THE President. I think of him as MY President.
I’m all but certain I’ll never feel the same about another, even if I cast a vote for them.
singfoom
Eh, assholes are assholes. Every person has one and every group of people has many. Some groups have higher concentrations of them. I prefer Bernie over HRC. If she’s the nom, I’ll vote for her despite my misgivings.
I hope Bernie gets the nomination instead. To me this is all a rehash of the PUMA vs. Obots funtime/flamewar of 2008. People get passionate. The passion is good when directed towards winning. Less so when it’s directed to tearing down the other contender in a primary fight.
Hopefully the hurt feelings are gotten past again this time.
I’ll never be excited for another candidate like I was for Obama either, but that’s less so because of his greatness and more because I won’t be fooled again.
JPL
Today I had a panic attack and had to talk myself down. The Supreme Court already decided one election and will the House of Representatives decide the next one. If Bernie wins and Bloomberg enters the race, it could happen.
Dmbeaster
I dont care how much and how well TNC talks it up, reparations are bad policy and bad politics. It is nuts that it has become a talking point for dissing Bernie.
Adam L Silverman
@Betty Cracker: Its not just this, which is absolutely correct, its the amount of resocialization and social/societal reconstruction that would be required. For everyone. This amount of leveling would be staggering in a societal sense. But beyond that it can’t just be handing money or assets like property over and calling it a day. And no one is going to support what would be needed. One group would cry they’re being patronized, another infantilized. It would be ugly with a capital UG.
JPL
@Dmbeaster: The repubs want reparations in Cuba.
bluehill
@Trentrunner:
Given the topics covered, I’m guessing around 350 comments unless a new post comes up before.
Zandar
Yes, but it took a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands, and then a movement that’s been going on for 50 plus years that killed thousands and is in many ways going backwards to accomplish getting to this point and for the most part we still have decades to go.
Messy is one thing. Genocidal is another.
Miesekatze
It’s up to others to do a lot of heavy-lifting first before a candidate endorses reparations.
You remember when Lincoln finally decided that slavery must be abolished? Hint: it wasn’t while he was running for office in 1860.
schrodinger's cat
@Betty Cracker: I agree. Also who foots the bill? The plantation owners? the Confederacy? All of us?
TNC has become pretty one note. I liked him a lot more when he was not so famous.
WarMunchkin
I think reparations – or at least the mechanics of it – is worth discussing. Frankly, when someone says the word “reparations” in a historical context, I think of Weimar more so than Japanese Internment.
It’s hard to say how much I feel totally and completely spoiled by having President Obama. I will always deeply hate and feel violated to the core about his national security policies (as a person with brown skin), but dang son, there’s only so much of the right-wing onslaught you can repel. The sheer fact that I can wake up in the morning confident that, as a nation, we haven’t destroyed some facet or another of our society is something immensely precious. People go to work at the WH and actually do their jobs running the government. That shouldn’t feel insane, but it is.
Elizabelle
@Betty Cracker: Agreed. Well said.
Which takes nothing away from saying we have still not dealt adequately with our original sin.
trollhattan
Having voted for a good long while now, am of the opinion that 2008 was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Sorry, but the chance of anything remotely similar is very poor.
Any [fill-in-the-blank-] Democrat coat-tailing the Senate would be plenty thrills for my needs.
policomic
Amen to everything here, John Cole.
burnspbesq
I’m not sure that the real problem here isn’t TNC’s stubborn and proud refusal to accept political reality. He wants what he wants, and he wants it right the fuck now, and he has no interest in counting to 218 or 60 or five, and until he gets 102 percent of what he wants he will loudly deny that any meaningful progress has ever been made. That’s just how he rolls, and it’s not a bad thing to have somebody out there rolling like that, even if it is occasionally infuriating.
chopper
you think the dem primary is frustrating this year, imagine if you were still a republican.
randy khan
@Dmbeaster: I’m not convinced about reparations myself, if for no other reason than that if they actually were paid, it would give all the racists even more license to be themselves. (“We’re even now, so we don’t have to be nice to them anymore.”) But I do think there’s a broader point in what TNC is saying, which is that Sanders – and, yes, I’m about to overgeneralize here – essentially is focused on the class issues to such an extent that the racial issues are utterly buried. On one level Sanders is right, but on another it feels a little bit like he’s missed one of the causes of the class divide.
Say what you want about Clinton, but her “I’m a practical person, looking for practical solutions” approach is much better suited to doing what a lot of activists want, which is to address specific issues of racial injustice in the broader context. (You know she’s the kind of person to make a list and work to check items off as she goes.) Sanders is much more a big picture guy.
daveNYC
@Adam L Silverman: Yep. If you just (somehow, magically) handed out cash money to the injured parties (and we’ll just assume a bunch of can-openers for that part), most people would think, “All right then. Slavery and racism was bad, but we’ve paid the people hurt by it, so we’re all good now, right?”
Keith G
The next Democratic President (Hillary, or maybe Sanders) will be a placeholder – keeping the seat warm until 2020 when a much younger woman or man with a bit more of a liberal street fighter verve can serve as the source of energy for my political party.
We need to reach out and gather in groups of our population that are just hovering on the political outskirts. Obama was a good intermediary step, but we as a party need more. And both HRC and Sanders are too calcified for the vigorous work that lays a ahead – though they too can play in intermediary role.
Reparation. Not going to happen. By the time White guilt could be built up to critical mass, Whites will be too close to a minority-majority. The other growing ethnic groups will not be going alone for that ride.
The best achievable alternative might be to continue to push for economic and social justice issues so that a broader coalition can see real positive consequences. This might create a virtuous feedback loop that strengthens the Democratic party and then allows it to do more good for more of those in need.
gwangung
I will remind readers that Coates thinks reparations IS righting a contemperaneous wrong; much of what he rights about postdates slavery and some of it was within the past 40 years—and is arguably going on right now.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Indeed, he can’t see the forest for the galaxies.
Cacti
Any time the subject of reparations comes up, even in a hypothetical context among white liberals, it practically turns into a real-time example of Dr. Robin DiAngelo’s treatise on white fragility in the national discourse. From the abstract:
A Ghost To Most
@Cacti:
Ain’t that the truth. Although I feel a lot of affection for Jimmy Carter as well.
bystander
@Betty Cracker: Exactly, although I would add, “…like a rented mule in Morocco,” since I’ve never seen any animal so forlorn as the beasts of burden there.
Roger Moore
They should also remember that it was passed with the support of the Congressional Black Caucus and, for that matter, with the vote of one Representative Bernie Sanders (I-VT). The Clinton crime bill may have been a terrible thing for black Americans, but it was a serious attempt to deal with real problems with violent crime that were devastating inner city life back then. The question we should be asking is not who supported it then, but who has learned the lessons of where it went wrong and is willing to try something different today.
raven
@daveNYC: Again.
Brachiator
I agree with Cole about many of the comments about Sanders or Clinton. On the other hand, I read TNC’s piece and thought it borderline incoherent, especially with respect to reparations. He assumes incorrectly that the case (that he made) for reparations has been fully settled, and then uses this “fact” to find all three Democratic candidates deficient.
And the assertion, “What candidates name themselves is generally believed to be important.” is awkward and ultimately bizarre.
Reparations for Japanese Americans, and the very recent reparations by Japan for South Korean comfort women, ultimately were symbolic apologies. They were not even minimally intended to make whole those who suffered. I have no idea what TNC seeks to accomplish by his call for reparations. But in any event, there is not much point in making it a campaign or platform issue since, for now, there is no consensus among civil rights leaders that it is a path to be followed.
schrodinger's cat
@gwangung: Who should get reparations and who should pay for them? That’s the question I haven’t seen addressed in detail. Or is this a Pandora’s box best left unopened?
hilzoy
I agree completely. — About TNC: I was watching on Twitter yesterday as he retweeted responses to his column that said things like: how much is Hillary paying you? and similar: people who actually seemed to think that TNC was writing about electoral politics. Which I just thought was insane. I took him to be writing, in the first instance, about the liberal imagination, and about how even people, like Sanders, who claim to be radicals sometimes have a curious blind spot when it comes to race. And I think this is absolutely right. Sanders’ claim that this is just not realistic is slipshod. It’s a claim he’d never make about breaking up the banks, or any of the other issues he cares about.
That people thought TNC was talking about who to support seemed to me bizarre beyond words.
A Ghost To Most
Might want to ask First Nations what they think about reparations before wrestling that alligator.
msdc
@burnspbesq:
It is when every concerned white progressive decides to outsource all their thinking on race and public policy to him.
RL Harrington
Welcome to the way those who supported JFK and Bobby felt following them….
Think of 2016 as a test of Dems and how badly we want to have a President who will appoint Obama to the Supreme Court so he drive them completely off the edge……
Roger Moore
@gwangung:
It’s definitely still going wrong. A great example is banks steering minority, especially black, voters into subprime loans even when they qualified for prime. A bunch of them were caught doing it during the housing bubble, and there’s evidence they’re still doing it today.
Falco Sinatrarus
JC, you are an enlightened and enlightening man!!! highly highly impressive, esp. considering you are ex-repub, ex-Iraq-war-supporter.
ruemara
Some of y’all. My professor bought her Bowery loft with her reparations for being interned. It ain’t likely for black folk, but it did happen for some.
TNC is not being stubborn to ask about pie in the sky for a guy promising universal healthcare, legal pot and free college. His essential question is, why pie in the sky for thee, but not for me? The outright dismissal is where the disappointment comes in. I can lay out how free college is not even likely without perfect conditions, but here come supporters to tell me why Bernie is still magic. But reparations is to much of a daydream? Stop letting your support for diversity be in an academic sense. Give the consideration to this idea that you do to all the other unlikely things in Sanders’ platform.
That’s why you’re not seeing black folk adopting Sanders and what’s at the heart of TNC’s article. I appreciate your thoughts, Cole. It took a while, but you’re understanding what’s going on.
Keith G
@hilzoy:
Well jesus, there is quite an amazingly vast difference between breaking up banks and paying reparations. To use this as a part of your argument is nearly nonsensical.
randy khan
One other comment about reparations in general. At some level (and I’m not saying he thinks of it this way), TNC’s argument is something of a thought experiment about the magnitude and continuous nature of the harm done to black people by whites in U.S. society. As he points out, it started with slavery, but hardly ended there and has not remotely ended today. The sheer magnitude of what reparations would have to be paid to make up for these literal centuries of abuse is, as much as anything, just a way of measuring that harm. When someone says – not necessarily inaccurately – that it would be impossible to come up with so much money, that’s part of the point.
KS in MA
@Roger Moore:
This. Bill Clinton had his faults, God knows, but we sometimes forget how long ago he was president…
Roger Moore
@hilzoy:
They think it’s about the nomination because they’re focusing on the nomination to the exclusion of all other political considerations. If the nomination is all they’re thinking about, it must be all that anyone is thinking about, so any discussion that invokes Clinton’s and Sanders’ names must be about picking sides in the nomination fight.
gwangung
@schrodinger’s cat: Well, since reparations is off the table, Pandora’s box has been slam shut, welded shut and tossed into the Marianas Trench.
And, yeah….white fragility.
goblue72
Completely fair assessment – and what TNC actually said is a lot more nuanced than the caricature painted by both Sanders and Clinton surrogates.
My issue with TNC – and its not just confined to this particularly topic – is that he’s become a bit of an unrealistic nihilistic. He’s justifiably pissed off about the structural racism in the U.S., but at same time, completely divorced with how things work. And that there are just some things white society in America just is NOT going to accept – and reparations are one of them.
You can possibly move the Overton Window on economic populist issues – its been done before. We had a whole sizable chunk of the 20th century from FDR to LBJ where the American electorate was brought along with the idea of labor unions and taking a whack at the oligarchs. Its actually possible to do that in the U.S.
But getting white America to sign off on reparations for black America? Not happening. And white America still holds the voting cards in the U.S. – and will continue to do so for quite some time, even after the point white America is a racial minority, based purely on socioeconomic status by race and what that means in context of voter turnout rates by socioeconomic status.
California – where I live – is a fairly liberal state (our state legislature is 2/3 Democrat) and has for awhile been a “majority-minority” state with Latinos having become a critical voting bloc, especially in SoCal. Yet in spite of all that, whites still hold the majority of electoral offices, to an outsized degree. And California demographically is far more minority than the rest of the country.
Some things are hard to accomplish, but within the realm of what can be accomplished with a lot of work. Other things are just tilting at windmills, which helps nobody.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@WarMunchkin:
I agree, and I think that was the main point of TNC’s original piece in The Atlantic (as I mentioned when this came up a few days ago). TNC wants the discussion to take place. He accepts that actual payments may be impossible for lots of reasons, but he wants the discussion – especially from Sanders.
Maybe the way forward is for academics and blogs and think tanks and so forth to occur. Once a critical mass is reached, and more about the mechanics plus and minus are fleshed out, then the politicians can weigh in. Obama and Biden showed that there are ways to talk about controversial “third-rail” issues and to move sensible policies forward.
It’s fine for Bernie to have things he wants to stress and things he wants to talk much less about. Nobody can have a sensible opinion on everything, and not everything can be done in 4 years. But, rightly or wrongly, Clinton is stronger with AA voters than Sanders. If he wants to appeal to them more, then he needs to be able to explain why addressing institutional racism and white privilege are less of an issue than free college. Simply saying it’s too divisive or it’s not possible now isn’t an answer in the context of all the other impossible things he is proposing.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scot.
SarahT
@Southern Beale: This exactly,
catclub
@WarMunchkin:
This. Honestly saying out loud, what reparations would consist of, what long term disadvantages they would be addressing, would be valuable. Some similarity to a truth and reconciliation commission.
Sasha
Heh. I still remember when you initially dismissed him as a “magical unity pony”.
Cacti
@hilzoy:
That’s one of the reasons why the class reductionist policy proposals from Sanders aren’t resonating much with minority voters. Universalist solutions tend to presuppose that the benefits will fall equally across the board, when that rarely is the actual case.
For instance, the idea of free public college education is a nice in principle. But as long as K-12 education remains grossly unequal, and frequently along racial lines, that benefit will overwhelmingly accrue to the children of affluent whites.
chopper
@hilzoy:
the berniacs are swarming krugman as well. he made the mistake of criticizing sanders’ single payer plan as weak tea.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Well said.
Eric U.
I guess I don’t see reparations as the hill we need to die on right now. OTOH, the interaction of police with people of color would seem to be something we really should be treating as an emergency
randy khan
@Cacti:
That crystallizes the issue very nicely. Great example.
Roger Moore
OT: The Texas grand jury investigating the Planned Parenthood videos has decided not to indict PP but to indict the videographers instead. Ooopsie!
gwangung
@chopper: Hm. If the Sanders fans prodded Sanders to address the weaknesses in his positions, wouldn’t that make Sanders a better candidate? (And vice versa?)
CONGRATULATIONS!
Let’s just say we try that. We’ll pull about 30% of the popular vote, tops, zero electoral votes, GOP supermajorities in the House and Senate for decades, and the loss of every single non African-American minority vote out there. Especially Latinos.
There is literally no way the Democratic party could ruin itself more effectively than by embracing reparations.
Linnaeus
@Cacti:
That’s a good point – and it’s a good case for a both/and approach and not an either/or one.
Goblue72
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Precisely.
Goblue72
@Eric U.: Agreed. And it’s an issue for which there is an actual possibility of getting white America – or at least an electorally meaningful portion thereof – to agree with.
Mike J
Establishment org Planned Parenthood not indicted by Austin grand jury, instead:
Elizabelle
OT and tee hee: NY Times news alert: 2 Abortion Foes Behind Planned Parenthood Videos Are Indicted
I am smiling.
I think iCarly might not be.
Brachiator
@ruemara:
I missed that part where Sanders said that universal health care, legal pot, and free college were only for white people.
I think that Sanders has a tin ear with respect to race. But I also think he compounds it by seeking the counsel of someone like Cornell West, who sees Obama as an insufficient negro. You want to see Sanders lose black support in a heartbeat? Let West address black audiences with his anti-Obama screed before, say, the South Carolina primary.
Kay
@Roger Moore:
That’s amazing. It shouldn’t be, but it is. Thanks.
Eric U.
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: The problem with TNC’s approach to discussing pervasive discrimination in terms of reparations is that just about everyone gets hung up on the money. It’s true that systemic discrimination has and continues to have a huge economic impact on African-Americans. But not that many people are going to want to put a price on it because they’ll be holding their wallet
Patricia Kayden
“Why are reparations off the table?”
I just don’t see that ever happening when it comes to African Americans. And it’s not something that I would focus on as a reason to vote for or against a candidate. Sanders doesn’t support reparations and I assume neither does Clinton. Neither did President Obama, from what I gather since I don’t recall him ever speaking about reparations. It’s really a non-issue at this point in time since the likelihood of legislation being passed to fund reparations is extremely low.
Agree with Cole wholeheartedly that Obama was exciting and charismatic in a way that is missing from this campaign. I don’t expect to see a candidate with Obama’s swagger, intelligence and charm ever again. He’s a once-in-a-lifetime President.
Elizabelle
@Kay: Just in time for Iowa.
And a Texas grand jury, yet. Way to go!
Kay
@Elizabelle:
What is the “government record” they tampered with? Do you know?
El Caganer
I’d like to see John Conyers’ bill to set up a reparations commission get passed; I don’t think support for that should be a bridge too far. Yes, commissions are often used to make difficult issues disappear, but in this case – where the actual substance of what these reparations would entail hasn’t even been identified – you need some sort of body to assemble a coherent plan of action and a rationale for it. I would be deeply distrustful of any politician who claimed that he or she supported reparations without having a clue as to what they would be. That sounds like pandering.
A well-thought-out framework would also allow supporters to work on having different portions enacted separately, rather than trying to get one huge (or yooooge, if you’re a Trumpian) bill through Congress. That would be a slower process, but it seems to me to be more likely to succeed.
Patricia Kayden
@Roger Moore: Bloop! Well ain’t that a bitch?
hilzoy
@Cacti: I have absolutely no idea whether this is true, but I have always assumed that somewhere in the background of TNC’s response to the idea that you can solve the problem of race by helping everyone to get more prosperous is the ghost of Prince Jones, who did everything right and got killed anyways.
eemom
@Brachiator:
Well, to be fair, it’s kind of TNC’s whole point that “what’s good for everyone” does nothing to address racism.
Starfish
I don’t think reparations have to come as direct payments like others here seem to think. Perhaps people who have held their jobs for a number of years who were pressured into predatory ARM loans could be given proper fixed rate mortgages at a generous interest rate to help build familial wealth? Perhaps, like employers who hire veterans receive tax benefits, employers who hire ex-cons could receive the same type of tax treatment?
These types of things are not direct payments, but they do things that could help African American families build wealth.
Baud
Obama was always a limited time offer. I don’t hold it against any of his would be Democratic successors.
Lord Baldrick
One candidate marched with Dr. King. Another was a Goldwater Girl. Seems like Coates and Obama (“wicked smart” vs “untested”) would prefer that the marcher be snuffed out before he can get his message out.
And yes, I expect to vote for the Goldwater Girl in November, but let’s line up a few crumbs before primary season is over.
Oh, and fuck the Atlantic and their scientology advertorials.
gene108
@ruemara:
I think the bigger problem with reparations for blacks is how do you track it one:one for those injured. With the interned Japanese, there was a way to map it so the people, who were directly injured by government action received reparations.
For blacks, the effects of discrimination are cumulative over several centuries. It’s harder to figure out, who should get what.
And how do you determine, what successful black people should get, because of they have made it big.
What would Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, or even Justice Thomas deserve as reparations? How do you put a dollar value on how being Africa-American hurt their careers?
@Roger Moore:
We take for granted today that crime rates were set to decline sharply over the last 20 years.
It’s as if people in the mid-1990’s should have just assumed crime was set to decline all by itself and they should have realized no government action was needed.
I think more than things going wrong or right, the question should be are those laws having any impact today? I think most research shows the effect on crime rates are negligible today and therefore there is no benefit to keeping them in place.
Times change and our leaders should be willing to change with them.
Archon
Coates is no fool he knows returning to Jim Crow would be more popular with white America then reparations. I always looked at the issue as a thought experiment on the enormous economic advantages white America has had over black America for generations.
His critique of the Sanders campaign is that there isn’t anything pragmatic or politically possible with a lot of Bernie Sander’s proposals, so why single out reparations as infeasible?
gwangung
@Lord Baldrick: Um, no. But the good thing about reading comprehension is that you can take another crack at it and get closer to the point.
Elizabelle
@Kay: I don’t know the record(s). NY Times said DA did not specify that (yet).
Mandalay
@hilzoy:
Whoa! It’s not possible to put an exact number on this, but I’d argue that Bernie’s “dream” of breaking up the banks is somewhere between a hundred and a thousand times more likely to happen than reparations (and would even become very likely if another massive bank bail out became necessary).
Dump on Sanders if you want to, but you are comparing apples with oranges.
geg6
@Flukebucket:
Me too. Every word, even the age.
Frank Wilhoit
When in a hole, stop digging. Then, maybe, you can argue about how to climb out. As long as the digging is still going on (leaving aside the fact that someone seems to have placed an order for a couple carloads of dynamite), arguing about how best to climb back out of the hole is a failure of situational awareness.
PST
@Roger Moore:
There are a lot of forgetful people who ignore the consensus behind that bill. There were widespread demands for anti-crime measures from those communities bearing the brunt of rising crime. Everyone understands now how elements of the bill have been harmful and counterproductive, with Bill and Hillary Clinton saying it publicly and frequently. I’m not very interested in mistakes long past anymore, and like others, I never expect to recapture the feelings of the Grant Park crowd on election night 2008. Moreover, my expectations for the next decade are low, seeing the persistence of Republican majorities at the state and Congressional levels. I want a stubborn, stolid, cagey, rugged, competent incrementalist who can help keep the country from backsliding while we work harder to rebuild.
randy khan
@Lord Baldrick:
She was a Goldwater Girl in high school. (She turned 17 just before the 1964 election.) By the time she was 24, she was committed enough to civil rights to act as a tester in a project to demonstrate that private academies in the South wouldn’t admit black students.
I wish people would stop with this particular line. At most, it demonstrates that she had her parents’ politics when she was a kid, like an awful lot of people do. And it’s evident her views have changed since then. Heck, they had changed by the middle of her time at Wellesley.
randy khan
@Mandalay:
For all practical purposes, the difference between a 0.0000001% chance and a 0.0000000001% chance is negligible.
kped
@schrodinger’s cat:
Spoken like a true hipster. “I liked them better before they got famous”.
And TNC has said who should pay – America. Which, as he’s stated, includes him, via taxes.
geg6
@randy khan:
You are exactly right and this is what is so infuriating about this discussion about what TNC wrote in both this and the original reparations article. I’m ashamed of how so many supposed progressives are either willfully misreading and misunderstanding his point. I won’t even discuss it any more. The white privilege wafting from these commentaries about it here is overpowering. His point is too subtle, I guess, and those who can’t get past their horror over the word reparations don’t see it or refuse to see it. Ugh. I’m done with this subject because the whole argument about this is only among white peoples and I find it repugnant.
Roger Moore
@Cacti:
One of the ideas I want to float is to force states to equalize local government funding for public health and safety functions the same way they’re forced to equalize education funding. Requiring local funding for local government functions is one of the ways we perpetuate inequality: poor people get crappy government services, even though those services are the ones people depend on the most. We’ve done something to defend against that in education by requiring central funding to keep schools in the poorest areas from collapsing completely, but we don’t do the equivalent for other important functions like police and fire. The result is incredible inequity like what drove the protests in Ferguson. Central funding for other critical local government functions would help to prevent that.
Brachiator
@eemom:
This is absurd. Universal health care, by any rational measure, would relieve some of the impact of racism. Legal pot, involving say a repeal of war on drugs foolishness that transform black and Latino communities into militarized zones, would also relieve the impact of racism. Free college is a more complicated proposition. But in any event, to pretend that these policies would not benefit black citizens in the absence of reparations is strange,
There is also a pointless nihilism to suggest that black people are exempt from proposals to provide for the general welfare, because racism and reparations.
nutella
@Eric U.:
Yes, a good answer from Sanders or anyone else asked to support reparations would be “My plan for addressing structural racism during my term of office is not reparations but X” where X is some step forward, perhaps related to policing, whose practicality and value we can judge.
A bad answer is “I have no plan for addressing structural racism during my term of office” which is pretty much what Sanders had to say. He might phrase it as “I don’t need a plan for addressing structural racism because fixing the economic problems of the 99% makes it unnecessary”, though.
smintheus
The problem is that TNC’s complaint about Sanders is just petulant. Reparations is his hobby horse, almost nobody else’s. Why should his hobby horse serve as some kind of litmus test for a candidate?
D58826
@KS in MA:
And those policies were popular all over the country. If Clinton had lost in 1996 we could have started the GOP march back in time four years earlier. We still have a choice the imperfect Hillary (or Bernie) or the likes of Scott/Walker/Brownbeck in the White House. I’ll even take the 1996 version of Bill Clinton in a heartbeat. At least he didn’t poison an entire city.
debbie
Exactly! The poutrage over calling Hillary Hillary in contrast to calling her competitors Saunders and O’Malley is ridiculous for all its falseness, considering her logo names her as Hillary. I hate PUMAs.
gwangung
No, it is not strange. It would be using the lessons of history, because black citizens were excluded from policies, either by intent or in application.
There is a fear in the black community that such broad measures will somehow exclude black communities. It is not unwarranted, and any approach needs to account for such historical occurences.
kped
@chopper: I’m glad that TNC and Krugman have class and a backbone, and refuse to back down from the clowns. Even if I didn’t agree with them (which i most certainly do), they should not back down from their honest beliefs.
And Krugman had the exact same valid complaints about Obama – can the rainbows and hope talk, how are you actually going to get things done. He’s a wonk, he worked in government (crazy to think he was in Reagan’s white house!), he sees things as they are and knows how hard things are to do. Which is why Obama still had trouble passing the ACA despite 60 senators and a house majority. And Sanders is going to pass all these pie in the sky fantasies with what? Magic? The force of his “revolution”. Give me a break.
Mandalay
@randy khan:
Your estimate for the likelihood of reparations looks about right, but you are way off on the probability of the banks being broken up.
If (when?) the banks next need a bail out, there will be massive pressure on the government from the public, the left and the right (especially the Tea Party) to really kick the big banks in the nuts. Any politician opposing that would be committing electoral suicide. The mood of the nation has changed a lot since Hank Paulson got his begging bowl out, and enabled the bailed out banks to have become even bigger and wealthier.
Cacti
@randy khan:
And if we want to give the least charitable interpretation to everyone’s actions as youth to young adults, you could say that Bernie followed up his civil rights activism by white-flighting out of Brooklyn to the least diverse State in America, rather than saying he moved to Vermont after college.
randy khan
@Mandalay:
I think you underestimate the power of the people with the money.
Besides, in the scenario you describe, the most likely result in the absence of a bailout is the survivors being bigger, not smaller.
Roger Moore
@smintheus:
I think nutella has it right. Reparations may be Coates’s particular hobby horse, but they serve as a stand-in for attempts to address structural racism generally. Even if you don’t support reparations, there are better and worse ways of saying so. Even if you don’t support them, it’s important to show you understand the importance of structural racism, and making a different proposal to do something about it (e.g. police reforms) is a good way of doing so. Blowing reparations off as unrealistic and unnecessary if we have economic justice is a sign that you don’t take structural racism seriously- something that minorities rightfully ought to find troubling.
MomSense
I was just hearing my boys say the same thing, Cole. They have told me that Barack Obama is their once in a lifetime leader. They don’t think they will ever experience another like him and they are ok with this. My oldest said that there is nothing wrong with getting to vote this time for merely a good president. They can’t all be once in a lifetime presidents.
My middle son is undecided. My parents are Bernie but questioning. My oldest is solidly Clinton not because he is particularly excited about her but because he thinks she is most likely to protect the progress we have made and advance it in key ways. Sounds right to me, too.
dogwood
@hilzoy:
I agree on TNC and Prince Jones. It’s the experience that defines him in ways only people who have been so wronged can imagine. And it’s not just the injustice of no one having to pay for what happened to his friend, it’s the sorrowful realization that only society as a whole can change the system that allows it to happen in the first place. It’s having to watch it happen over and over to people you don’t know that keeps the wound inflamed. I imagine the parents of the Sandy Hook children must struggle in much the same way.
schrodinger's cat
@kped: It may sound hipstery, but it is true. Before he hit the big time his writing was varied, he could be funny. He wrote about a lot of different stuff from gaming to the Civil War. He was refreshing to read. Now he has become so predictable that I know what he is going to say before he says it. Of course YMMV.
Mandalay
@randy khan:
We’ll have to agree to disagree.
If the bigger banks need help from the government again then structural reform will be imposed on them no matter how much money in brown envelopes gets tossed around. It’s not just Bernie who would be happy to see them broken up. There are plenty of Democrats and Republicans as well, and tens of millions of voters.
Lord Baldrick
@randy khan: She read ‘Conscience of a Conservative’ before signing up with AuH2O, so not all about parents direction. My point is that Sanders deserves a fair hearing from AAs. Let’s see if he gets it.
smintheus
@Roger Moore: I find it hard to believe that Sanders doesn’t understand the need to address structural racism. He’s capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. He’s just stressing the core arguments of his campaign, and I suspect people are overthinking his supposed failures to focus on what they’re most concerned with. If TNC wants to argue that Sanders should say more about structural racism, he could make that argument straightforwardly and more persuasively without all the posturing about reparations.
schrodinger's cat
Does anyone really care what candidates who are 65+ did when they were in their teens and early twenties?
singfoom
@nutella: Ahem: Bernie’s Racial Justice part of his platform
Bernie said (if you don’t want to follow the link):
I think one could argue that those points are all steps toward combatting structural racism. I certainly see them as such.
MomSense
@ruemara:
Well said. I completely agree.
schrodinger's cat
@ruemara: Reparations are a daydream and so are free college and single payer. I am not feeling the Bern at all. Bernie is raising important questions but I don’t see him as the President. I am by no means a Clinton fan but I think she is the better of the two. Too bad Obama can’t run again.
kped
@schrodinger’s cat: He talks about comics, music, travel, police brutality, structural racism now. Seems pretty diverse.
And I’m loath to tell a writer to write something else, especially when it’s something so important. If not him, then who else? His stuff after the killings of Tamir Rice or other young black men have been very powerful pieces. You know what he’s going to say (they are bad and there should be justice), but I’m not sure why that’s a bad thing.
dogwood
@Lord Baldrick:
And what was Bernie reading when he was 17? This kind of stuff is so ridiculous. No candidate deserves a “fair hearing” from anyone. Candidates have to make the overtures to groups. They have to do the work. I’m certainly not inclined to give any Republicana fair hearing. And I don’t always pay close attention to every democratic candidate. I certainly wasn’t interested in giving Jim Webb a serious look.
PhoenixRising
@Roger Moore:
Yeah, I differ with Coates on this, partly because I don’t think it’s fair to use actions in 1992 when she was helping her smart but not as organized choice of husband to the WH to characterize the views or likely policies of a 2016 candidate. But also because I’m old enough to recall the Dem primary in ’92. In Oakland. And guess what, Bill Clinton launched what has turned into the carceral state because he was fulfilling a campaign promise to the people who got him elected.
It’s easy from Mount Hindsight to say, Anyone who wasn’t stupid or racist should have realized that increased policing in poor neighborhoods, plus funding prison systems to end a revolving door based on overcrowding for dudes Richard Pryor described as ‘the reason we HAVE prison’, would lead to a disaster for black families. But please note that it was a response to a disaster and what the affected community ASKED the candidate for.
So can we stop with the ‘Hillary embodies the prison-industrial complex’? Unless someone has a policy position or vote to support it?
Bernie can imagine taking away my insurance to give me something better [that exists only in his mind], he can’t imagine fighting for John Conyers’ bill to study what reparations would even mean…it’s a real failure.
Mandalay
@Cacti:
Really? Even as a Bernie supporter, I am fiercely opposed to that. As many others have pointed out, why should the taxpayer be footing the bill for Trump’s kids and Romney’s kids to go to college for four years? It makes no sense to me, and I find it bizarre that Bernie still stumps for it.
kped
@Lord Baldrick: Who decides if he gets a fair hearing? TNC may think he is being entirely fair, but do you get to decide that he as a black man isn’t being fair? Seems awfully paternalistic.
randy khan
@Lord Baldrick:
Honestly, it didn’t sound that way. It sounded like a talking point about how he was more committed to racial justice than Clinton.
But if he wants a “fair hearing” from African Americans in the primaries, he’s going to need to do better than his response to TNC. There are reasons that Clinton is doing better than him with black voters, and they have a lot to do with what black voters are hearing him say (or, more specifically, not hearing him say). I note that someone above has quoted his website on police issues, which is all well and good, but I really don’t feel like I hear him talking about those things much. If, as a white guy, I’ve noticed that, you can be sure that black voters have as well.
Roger Moore
@Mandalay:
Part of the reason you should be for it is because it will be paid for by taxes that fall most heavily on people like Trump and Romney, so their “free” college will be anything but. More importantly, I am a firm believer that means testing government programs is a long-term political loser. It may seem like a smart way of sticking it to the man, but what it really does is divide the people who are benefiting from a program from those who are paying for it, so there’s a stronger constituency in favor of destroying the program. Make it benefit everyone, and it’s much harder to find people who want to kill it.
SatanicPanic
Bernie seems angry, and I just don’t feel the anger. Plus it seems like he’s the proverbial guy with a hammer who thinks every problem is a nail. But whatever. I agree with Cole, after BHO I don’t think I’ll be so excited about a president ever again.
Repatriated
@randy khan: This. One does not have to even get as far as figuring out who deserves compenaation; as soon you start adding up the monetary value of the damages it’s obvious that what’s been done or attempted in the last half century doesn’t even begin to set things right.
Trentrunner
@Mandalay: Well, if Romney or Trumps kids go to public K-12, their families don’t pay for that.
Why should they pay for 4 years of college? European countries have free college education. Why can’t we?
Mandalay
@PhoenixRising:
Well there was the tricky issue last summer of Clinton happily accepting donations from private prison lobbyists until she started getting confronted about it by BLM et al. Eventually she returned/donated all such contributions, but you can’t help feeling that if she hadn’t been publicly shamed she would have kept talking about incarceration reform while continuing to take money from prison lobbyists.
She has a strong track record of doing exactly the same thing for Wall Street, so it’s hardly surprising.
goblue72
@gwangung: That exclusion occurred in connection with certain New Deal programs, including how Social Security was structured. However, that same exclusion was essentially completely wiped out with the Great Society programs of LBJ (which included expansions of who was covered by Social Security). The exclusion of African-Americans from social welfare safety net programs (which social welfare state didn’t exist for the most part pre-New Deal) has ceased to be a meaningful problem since the mid-1960s.
The fear that these kinds of welfare state program would exclude people of color is by and large overblown and somewhat paranoiac. The one exception would be free college / college tuition assistance as a consequence of who goes to college and who does not. However even there, within the subset of African Americans aged 18-25 (or older) who attend college, on a race-by-socioeconomic status matrix***, African-Americans attending college would be disproportionately benefitted by free college as those households are the ones more likely than white households to need aid to attend college (and who disproportionately currently need to borrow money to attend college.) What also is a benefit – through likely quantifiably unknown – is what percentage of African-American households who do not attend college due to financial obstacles would otherwise do so if college was free.
*** What I mean by race-by-socioeconomic state is African-American households being disproportianately represented at lower SES, such that race-neutral policies that target lower SES households will disproportionately benefit African-American households. The ACA, as an example, is a race-neutral policy that as a consequence of providing the largest portion of its benefit to lower SES (via enhanced Medicaid eligibility and/or the exchange subsidies), the ACA disproportionately benefits households of color.
Dmbeaster
@JPL: Which is also bs.
gene108
@Mandalay:
Long ago (varies from state to state) college education at a four year institution was either free (in CA’s case) or at the worst could be paid for by working part time.
If we ever figure out why colleges are charging so much more, year after year, we could maybe address the issue of affordable college education and return to an era, when college education was more affordable.
We’ve had affordable college tuition in the recent past. I do not think we need a radical overhaul to figure out how to get their again.
Edit: I do not want to throw money at colleges, until we figure out why they need to keep jacking up tuition.
goblue72
@Mandalay: We foot the bill for Trump and Romney to collect Social Security. That’s what happens with a universal benefit program. Something else happens with a universal benefit program like Social Security or Medicare – its really hard to racialize it and it adds the more politically powerful social classes (the middle class and the upper class) to the pool of beneficiaries and thus supporters.
Social Security/Medicare is the 3rd rail of politics for a reason. Nobody calls the Section 8 program or food stamps the 3rd rail of politics.
Mandalay
@Trentrunner:
Well AFAIK most European countries don’t have free education – Britain certainly doesn’t – but even if they did that in itself is not an argument in favor of doing it here.
What’s inherently wrong with means testing college education? What’s inherently wrong with college students having to contribute to the cost of their education?
There are plenty of thing I see as higher priorities than free college education. Subsidizing healthcare would be a far more important and worthwhile way to spend government money.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Roger Moore: I agree.
Also, it takes people to figure out who qualifies, and doesn’t, who can apply for an exception, etc., etc.
It can be made universal much cheaper and easier than making an income-based cutoff. And if you’re worried about Trump’s kids billing the government to attend some $200k/yr private school, one can structure it like the way the New VA Bill works. Namely, IIRC, the benefit is limited to the cost of the nth highest public college cost. The benefit wouldn’t have to be full tuition for everyone at every school in the country. In fact, it would invite massive college inflation if that were the case…
Bernie’s proposal is for free tuition at public colleges and universities.
Cheers,
Scott.
elmo
@Roger Moore: My hobbyhorse is similar and possibly complementary: require equality of funding between prosecution and public defenders, with each having full access to the investigative machinery of the State. Possibly combine the two functions into “Criminal Legal Department,” with attorneys assigned at random to either side.
gwangung
@goblue72: Interesting. Coates wrote about programs in Chicago that lasted into the 80s. Shirley Sherrid was working in reparations for recent discrimination against black farmers. And redlining persists in this age where fears against such practices are supposedly overblown.
Color me vastly unconvinced.
goblue72
@gene108: Prof. Campos at the U. of Colorado puts a lot of the blame on administrative bloat – http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-college-tuition-costs-so-much.html?_r=0
Others add public funding cuts and privatization to the mix – http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-good-point-in-paul-camposs-bad-new.html
dogwood
@SatanicPanic:
There is always a market for an angry candidate. For many political junkies politics is sport and anger, vengeance, and resentment are the motivating passions. It appears that the Republican Party is overwhelmingly composed of these sorts. But we have them on our side as well. In 2004 they were the Howard Dean crowd. In ’08 they gravitated toward John Edwards. Angry candidates are probably less appealing in general elections than their supporters realize, but it’s hard to say because they seldom get out of the primaries. Like you I’m not angry. Sustained anger and resentment is toxic for me. But some people thrive on it and find it motivating. We’ll see how it all shakes out.
SiubhanDuinne
@Flukebucket:
I was born about a year and a half into FDR’s third term. I can’t claim to remember his presidency — he died when I was not yet three years old — but he still falls within “my lifetime.” That’s my disclaimer when I state unequivocally that Obama is the best U.S. president of my lifetime. Notwithstanding all the good things LBJ did (I find it hard to get past Vietnam), he didn’t have the obstructionist Congress or quite as lazy a media environment to contend with.
A little piece of me wishes Obama could stay President forever, but since that’s neither possible nor, actually, desirable, I will just say that I can’t wait to (a) read his memoirs, and (b) see what he makes of his post-presidency. Michelle, too.
schrodinger's cat
@kped: I find his relentless negativity hard to take. I see where he is coming from and I respect that. I just don’t enjoy reading him as much as I used to, that’s all.
Dmbeaster
@JPL: Which is also bs.
@randy khan:
I dont think this is TNC’s point, but lets go with it anyway. As a basic matter, I am troubled by criticism based on the idea that someone who promotes a particular issue can be faulted because they fail to promote some other issue. It is almost always a bogus argument. I think it clearly is as to Bernie – that his emphasis on class issues somehow means he is dissing racial issues.
The real argument would seem to be that he should stress racial issues over class issues as they are more important. That is a debate we could have, but implying that he is indifferent to racial issues because he promotes primarily economic and class issues is bogus.
As for reparations, why stop with blacks? Numerous groups have been harmed by bigotry over the last 300 years of our history, and all are deserving of some degree of redress if the reparations argument is legitimate. Clearly blacks would top
gene108
@Roger Moore:
A lot of states are running their college systems poorly.
Putting Federal dollars into making tuition free (and I am assuming only tuition will be free in Sanders’ plan and not room/board, etc.) will allow state governments to pull more money from their public university systems and funnel it to various patrons.
The idea is nice, but the devil is in the details.
Either the Federal government imposes a minimum each state must spend on their public university system or the Federal government will get stuck holding an ever larger share of college costs.
And even if most people benefit, I can easily see this as being branded as government overreach. The same way environmental laws benefit most people, with the exception of some affected parties but are strongly resisted by many more people than are impacted by them.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@gene108: States have dramatically cut-back on funding of their public universities. Virginia provided 5.8% of UVA’s direct funding in 2013.
Of course, there are different ways of looking at it, but Universities get very little direct funding from their states. In 1980 the US average for state support of their universities was 46% of the budget.
It is unsurprising that tuition costs have gone through the roof while state support in particular has fallen.
Cheers,
Scott.
msdc
@Starfish:
Both sound like fine ideas, things that ought to be done and should have been done well before now. But why attach them to one of the most unpopular policies in American politics? They’d stand a better chance of passage if you called them mortgage relief and tax credits.
Policies that directly address structural racism–sentencing reform, police reform, etc.–actually enjoy more support than reparations. I don’t understand why progressives have decided this has to be the hill to die on.
goblue72
@gwangung: Those are some very narrow examples.
First off, redlining has absolutely nothing to do with Federal or state programs. None. To the degree that “redlining” that occurred during the Housing Boom, it was entirely due to the actions of private mortgage lenders and banks. So I’m not exactly sure what the point of bringing it up is.
As for Shirley Sherrod, the USDA lawsuit she was involved dealt with discriminatory actions by USDA officials between 1981 and 1996 – as is not the consequence of a federal program that by its structure or nature was intrinsically discriminatory. Any government program can be implemented in discriminatory fashion by bigoted bureaucrats and officials. If the argument is that “X govt program could be corrupted by bigoted bureaucrats”, then we shouldn’t have any government programs because somewhere at some point, they may be implemented discriminatorily. And that’s just silly.
And in the long record, the social welfare safety expansions from the Great Society onward have been of benefit to households of color, regardless of any particular instances where they have been implemented in an egregious fashion. Welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, Section 8, Pell Grants – etc. All programs designed to help people of lower SES and thus disproportionately benefiting AA households compared to whites. And you can draw a direct line between GOP led cuts to those programs and increasing number of households at the lower end of the SES spectrum – which disproportionately harms households of color.
Mandalay
@Roger Moore:
Not so. One has nothing to do with the other, and I see so many better ways of spending the taxes that Trump and Romney pay.
Using their taxes to pay for their kids to go to college for free doesn’t appear on my list of wise ways to spend government money.
Dmbeaster
@randy khan:
I dont think this is TNC’s point, but lets go with it anyway. As a basic matter, I am troubled by criticism based on the idea that someone who promotes a particular issue can be faulted because they fail to promote some other issue. It is almost always a bogus argument. I think it clearly is as to Bernie – that his emphasis on class and economic issues somehow means he is dissing racial issues. The same criticism would apply to Warren.
The real argument would seem to be that he should stress racial issues over class issues as they are more important. That is a debate we could have, but implying that he is indifferent to racial issues because he promotes primarily economic and class issues is bogus.
As for reparations, why stop with blacks? Numerous groups have been harmed by bigotry over the last 300 years of our history, and all are deserving of some degree of redress if the reparations argument is legitimate. Clearly blacks would top the list as slavery was uniquely evil, but what is the logic that excludes all others except blacks from redress based on past bigotries and systematic harms? And how is it good policy to start redistributing wealth between current citizens based on past histories of racial, ethnic and religious bigotries?
gene108
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
I know state funding has fallen dramatically, and thank you for the links.
But how do you explain the rise in tuition at private colleges and universities?
Something besides loss of funding is driving the need for universities to raise tuition.
Betty Cracker
@PhoenixRising: “Mount Hindsight” — that’s a keeper! ;-)
msdc
@hilzoy:
I think this is probably correct, or at least as plausible as any bit of armchair psychiatry can be; a reading of Between the World and Me would certainly support it.
But this just points out the bitter irony of proposing a fix (reparations) that, had it been in place in September of 2000, would have made the Jones family a little more prosperous but would have done nothing to prevent a police officer from killing their son and getting away with it.
If you start from the assumption that greater economic prosperity will not end structural racism (and I agree), why pin everything on a strictly economic remedy?
goblue72
@msdc: Exactly. Sentencing reform is a topic which can have traction with white voters – or at least a meaningfully sized portion of the white electorate therein. And be framed in a race-neutral fashion in order to secure progress within the our electoral process. But which, since incarceration disproportionately affects persons of color – and African-Americans in particular – would benefit African-Americans per capita more than whites.
goblue72
@gene108: Prof. Paul Campos at U. of Colorado blames administrative bloat and the rise of an over-compensated “1%-er” class within university administrations –
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-college-tuition-costs-so-much.html?_r=0
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@gene108: Lots and lots of things have driven up costs. I can’t find links to back the following up, but I don’t think they’re controversial. I started college in 1979 – just as prices started going up dramatically.
1) Cuts in Pell Grants and other federal support. That meant that schools has to spend more on loan officers and the like so that students could come up with the funding needed.
2) General inflation making continuing operations (staff, maintenance, etc.) more expensive.
3) Increased numbers of students meaning more instructors needed, and more competition for good instructors.
4) Final rules and implementation of Title IX and similar programs requiring more investment in facilities, instructors, etc. for women.
5) Lots of state universities were ~ 75-150 years old and needed to spend lots of money to renovate and replace outdated facilities.
6) Competition among “good schools” to maintain their selectivity and exclusivity by continually increasing their fees above their peers. Pressure to have better dorms, better recreational facilities, etc.
7) Increased competition for research funding from the NSF and other 3-letter government agencies. It became more and more important (or at least perceived to be more and more important) to have state-of-the-art facilities, Nobel Prize winners, etc., etc. to get the funding to support state-of-the-art research and for general educational infrastructure support. That drives up costs.
8) The anti-tax movement that swept the nation at the same time, meaning funding from the state and federal government was likely to be decreasing just as these increasing costs hit. Meaning that colleges had to do riskier things to get funding (like effectively selling their name to companies, dumping money into expensive Division I sports, etc.).
That’s just a few reasons off the top of my head.
Investment in public education benefits all of us. We should be willing to pay for it from general revenues.
Cheers,
Scott.
msdc
@gene108: Administrative costs. Ballooning salaries at the top, new offices and divisions, proliferating deans and associate deans and assistant to the associate deans.
ETA: Jinx! Others have said it better than I.
Cacti
@Lord Baldrick:
Rubbish.
No politician deserves anything from any particular group of voters. It’s up to them to make their case to the people.
PhoenixRising
@Mandalay:
Their money is green. In an ideal world, no candidate I’d vote for would take it and screw them anyhow; in the world we share, a good-enough candidate gets caught taking it and puts it back.
What they want–a society in which no one questions their right to stay rich off the thoughtless incarceration of a certain hue of Americans, in guaranteed volume that insures their investors against losses–is something they can no longer have…thanks to the pressure applied by BLM as well as other better-aged organizations.
Let’s log that as a win for the good guys.
PhoenixRising
To Cole’s point: I was never an Obama fanboi. He’s been a good president; the best of my life on issues I care about, but tragically insufficient efforts (leaving aside results) on climate, which I believe is how our grandchildren will score this era.
8 years ago this week, I had met him and Hillary; I voted for him in the primary. Notes from their local appearances here, some of which are…pretty funny, in retrospect:
http://phoenix-rising-reports.blogspot.com/2008/02/super-tuesday-reviews.html
BruceFromOhio
Ah, the minutiae of civilization.
Makes it worth fighting for.
Reparations ain’t gonna happen until all three branches are significantly less bleached than today. My lifetime? Maybe.
In the interim, I’ll take Arthur Brooks, ‘fairness’ guy, head on a pike.
Mnemosyne
@goblue72:
We’re discussing the numerous barriers that were set up since the end of slavery to block African-Americans from moving forward economically and you have NO IDEA what redlining has to do with anything? Really?
I really hope you’re just playing dumb and not actually that dumb.
LanceThruster
Candidates and supporters are two separate beasts. PUMA’s are still out there.
rikyrah
Barack Obama saved this country.
PERIOD.
He was the man for the time…and, I didn’t see it in 2008. I think I began to see it in 2010.
By the time of his re-election in 2012, I knew it for certain.
Never had I wanted the 22nd Amendment to not exist…..but, alas, it does.
rikyrah
I understand Coates entire line of thinking with regards to reparations.
For those that believe in reparations, most think reparations should go back to slavery.
Hell, I’d be satisfied with an honest accounting of the economic impact of Jim Crow.
Cacti
@Mnemosyne:
Your hope is misplaced.
Even a perusal of the wiki article on redlining would show that “redlining has nothing to do with Federal or state programs” is just flat wrong.
Mnemosyne
Also, too, there seem to be two different groups here: people who refuse to understand that the aftereffects of 150 years of POST-slavery oppression are still at work today, and people who recognize that, but are trying to figure out how to slip restitution (aka reparations) for those ongoing wrongs past our racist electorate.
And, yes, I am in the group that is extremely skeptical that officially legalizing pot is going to benefit anyone other than middle class white dudes. History bears me out on that.
schrodinger's cat
@BruceFromOhio: He makes David Brooks look good. Op-ed contributor for NYT, also too.
Dr. Omed
I don’t love Obama; don’t hate ‘im either. Voted for him twice. I had hopes due to his 2008 campaign rhetoric that he mostly and fairly quickly disappointed. He got some things done in spite of massive and intransigent opposition from the radical revanchist party that is called conservative, but is not. I think he is smart, sane, and careful. Conservative, in the original sense of the word. I also think the tragic thing about Obama is that he is sane and careful leader in a insane and reckless time. My two votes for Obama were votes for slow, somewhat controlled decline. They were selfish votes, because I suspect that precipitous collapse (achievable by voting for any Republican) would be better for America and the world in the long run. In an insane time, I think one needs better insanity, brilliant insanity to oppose and overcome the ugly insanity rising all around. As to the choice between Sanders and Clinton, I lean toward Bernie, but would vote for Hillary if she becomes the nominee, because I simply can’t vote for a Republican even if they resurrected Eugene Debs and ran him as their candidate. I’m not in love with Bernie, and I don’t hate Hillary, either. I don’t think Bernie can accomplish what he says he wants to do, and I have strong misgivings about what Hillary might do, not so much domestically but in the world arena. I don’t think voting for someone because you love them or because they give you hope is advisable. There are no good choices in this election. I will vote because I can and I reckon it a dishonor to the country in which I was born and raised not to, not because I think voting, or electing any particular candidate, will make much difference. I think America choose decline and fall with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and we really haven’t done anything since to change that downward trajectory. I don’t think the United States will exist in 50 years. I only state my point of view here as a contrast, not to provoke argument or to change anyone’s mind.
Four years of President Trump (and yes, I think it possible that he could win it, and that it’s not the very worst thing that could happen) would be very embarrassing.
mclaren
This is delusional cult-of-personality horseshit.
Grow up.
Obama is a politician. He sold us on a pack of lies. He did a few things, like the ACA, that have created almost as many problems as the catastrophic situations they were designed to solve. (Read articles like “Many Say High Deductibles Make Their Health Law Insurance All but Useless,” The New York Times, 14 November 2015, and “After Surgery, Surprise $117,000 Medical Bill From Doctor He Didn’t Know,” The New York TImes, 20 September 2014, to see what the problems are.)
Then take a gander at the PBS Frontline documentary “The Untouchables” to see why Obama’s department of justice has refused to prosecute Wall Street crime lords despite overwhelming evidence of their guilt.
Then take a look at Obama’s drone murders of women and children in Pakistan along with his endless unwinnable clusterfuck in Afghanistan.
After all that, tell me what a great guy Obama is. Try to tell me how he fulfilled the promises he cleverly implied without being specific during his campaign in 2008 (except for single-payer — Obama explicitly ridiculed an individual mandate for-profit health insurance, then once elected pivoted to that disastrous scheme he had savagely ridiculed when Hillary proposed it during the primary).
Mnemosyne
@rikyrah:
Affirmative action was supposed to go at least part of the way towards mitigating historical inequality. Of course, the Reaganites quashed that as soon as they could possibly manage it.
That’s part of the problem with arguing programs vs cash payment as attempts at restitution/reparations. We tried going the programs route, only to have conservatives defund, destroy, and de-fang them. I don’t blame people for being skeptical that, no, THIS time we’ll manage to make the programs bulletproof. Honest.
Mnemosyne
@mclaren:
I know, how dare Obama not be able to fix our entrenched problems of Wall Street immunizing themselves from prosecution throughout the 1990s and 2000s, healthcare becoming for-profit since 1995, and the ongoing massive problems Bush caused in the Middle East? If only he’d used his magic powers like you demanded, he TOTALLY could have completely solved all of our entrenched problems stretching back over 20 years with a wave of his hand. Clearly, he just didn’t want to fix them, because he hates you personally.
LanceThruster
What about Native American reparations for genocide and theft. Think of the dollar value of the real estate and mineral rights alone, ignoring the countless millions systematically murdered…and casi-nos don’t count.
Cacti
The simple answer to why we can’t have a national conversation about reparations can be reduced to the following:
A majority of white America, including liberals, doesn’t want one.
kc
@msdc:
I’m glad to see TNC finally getting some serious pushback from black and white progressives on this.
ellennelle
@Gin & Tonic:
i suppose that raises the question as to why that should matter?
i mean, i know why that matters to the knuckle draggers who need reality in their faces, and that may well have been your point.
but, it seems, we have a lot to learn from those peoples the world over who have had to wait decades and decades to find restorative justice, as it was referenced with the truth and reconciliation commission in south africa, as just one example.
even argentina’s disappeared, japan’s comfort women, trying slobodan milosovic for his crimes, heck, even the nuremberg trials and the many trials of those war criminals since then. for that matter, it took over 40 years for killen to face justice for murdering chaney, schwermer, and goodman in MS.
agreed, we must stop ongoing wrongs and keep them from happening as we are in the midst of them. but something there is in humans that loves justice. not revenge, but justice. as this is what can begin to restore respect and healing.
ooh, sorry; preachy, and likely to the choir. but TNC convinced me of the power of reparations with his stunning piece on the topic from a few years back.
i get it. at least, as much as a privileged ol’ (born and raised in the south) white lady can get it, i do get it. and i vow to keep trying.
ellennelle
i had not felt as strongly about a candidate since bobby kennedy, and we see how that went.
was in memphis when king was shot, and just weeks later, our golden hope – cut down when he was winning.
that summer was so disturbing and depressing, i thought we would never recover as a country, nor would i ever see another such candidate.
obama sparked that, though i did not decide for him until about this time 8 years ago.
like most here, so much admiration for that man, but also many disappointments. i’ve come to believe those disappointments have just about everything to do with his being beholden to the big money he relied on in the GE (that and the shadow MIC control over, well, every damn thing).
which is THE reason i am feeling that excitement again for bernie. he has walked the walk for decades, so i feel the odds are that he’ll continue to do so if he wins.
so damn tired of fighting big money. that’s ultimately what killed abraham, martin, and john. and bobby.
it has to stop.
Fellatio Alger
I’m way too late to the party, but I am puzzled by one of the objections to reparations being “it divides people by race.” Was slavery based on race? Why not the remedy?
Fellatio Alger
@gwangung: Ding ding ding!
Fellatio Alger
@A Ghost To Most: Actually, I think that this is the biggest fear of people who resist reparations for slavery. If you go there, and then the Natives come for you, you are well and truly fucked.
pete
I think TNC’s main argument is that the socialist view that all conflicts are at root class conflicts is hopelessly naive. There are a lot of people who think that if we get rid of class inequalities, racism will somehow magically disappear. These people spend a LOT of time on Twitter and feel the Bern white-hot. And they want to think they care about everyone but are simply uncomfortable with a victimhood structure that doesn’t center them and validate their delusion that they are the noble vanguard.
J R in WV
I am 65, and I cried with happiness all the way through President Obama’s first inauguration. It was so wonderful, I feared that something equally horrible would happen to destroy our happiness.
He is so handsome, his wife is so beautiful, his daughters are growing up so well. He has done so much more than I ever expected a Democratic president could do with such opposition from 45% of the nation. The Republicans announcing that their only goal from 2008-2012 would be to insure than President Obama wouldn’t be re-elected, that borders on treason to me.
They spent four years opposing the improvement of America in a vain attempt to make a political point – and then President Obama won re-election with nearly the same numbers he first was elected by. How anti-American, how evil, does that make Mitch McConnell and his minions look?
I expect to live another 20 years or so – my grandparents managed that age. So I hope to see another American leader in my lifetime who compared to President Obama. Surely we won’t see another president as evil as Bush/Cheney!
Cacti
@pete:
Not surprisingly, this view tends to find greatest acceptance among bourgeois white males.
pete
@Cacti: Funny how that works…
randy khan
@Dmbeaster:
But of course you can talk about both. And when you say (in paraphrase) that racial issues will be taken care of by addressing class issues, you sure sound like (a) you don’t want to talk about both; and (b) you think the racial issues aren’t that important.
And tactically, it’s unwise. We’re talking about a key constituency of the Democratic Party here (and it’s not just blacks – there are a lot of other people in the party who care about racial equality). It’s no less important to address that constituency’s interests than to address the interests of people who want to send their kids to college or who are worried about big banks.
planetjanet
That was a most thought provoking post, Mr. Cole. Thank you,
J R in WV
@Southern Beale:
I disagree. I feel like President Obama erased the Bush/Cheney era while he was inaugurated in January, 2009.
It was the most moving political event I have seen since Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were killed in 1968. And those events were terrible, as opposed to the uplifting appearance of President Obama and all the wonderful folks who turned out and participated in that amazing inaugural ceremony.
Not to criticize you, Southern Beale, you’re another wonderful part of this blog, and of your own Tennessee blog. Keep up the great work! Just making a point about my feelings.
J R in WV
@Elizabelle:
The fake government IDs they used in their “sting”.
randy khan
@goblue72:
Sadly, this is incorrect. Redlining was, at a minimum, reinforced by the FHA.
eemom
Excellent point re reparations and Native Americans. Does TNC have an answer to that?
mclaren
@A Ghost To Most:
This is hallucinogenic.
So Obama did something more and better than desegregating the U.S. military? Show me. (Harry Truman did that.)
So Obama did something more and better than presiding over the forced desegregation of Southern K-12 schools? Show me. (Dwight Eisenhower did that.)
So Obama did something more and better than passing the Civil Rights Bill and medicare? Show me. (LBJ did that.)
You’re either on hard drugs, brain-damaged, or suffering from dementia praecox.
Cacti
@eemom:
Not sure why you would think this is a silver bullet for the reparations argument.
I doubt TNC would be bothered at all by Native peoples seeking remediation of harm suffered from US policy.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
This post is one of the many examples of why I think this blog should be at least as widely followed as, say, Talking Points Memo.
mclaren
@J R in WV:
Yes indeedy, that’s why Obama’s justice department argued vehemently in favor of all those atrocities that the Bush/Cheney administration rammed through.
Obama’s justice department argued before the supreme court that Obama could order a U.S. citizen murdered without trial and without charges, and that the citizen didn’t even have standing to contest that murder order in a court. (the Al-Awlaki case)
Obama’s justice department argued before the supreme court that Obama could order U.S. citizens who revealed evidence of U.S. government crimes should be sent to prison under the 1917 Espionage act, while the CIA torturers who committed their atrocities not only went unprosecuted, but retired to multimillion dollar mansions in Virginia because torturing people for the CIA is very very very profitable.
Obama’s justice department argued before the supreme court that Obama had the authority to kidnap U.S. citizens without a warrant and without accusing them of a crime.
Obama ordered the mass murder of women and children by drone in a country at which we are not at war, then ordered back the drones hours later to murder the medical personnel who were trying to help survivors. This last, incidentally, is called the “double-tap,” and has been used by the U.S. as evidence that people are engaged in terrorism. People who murder aid workers are, according the U.S. definition, terrorists.
Sounds like the Bush/Cheney era to me.
Obama is Bush/Cheney’s 3rd and 4th term.
mclaren
@J R in WV:
Are you talking about Barack Obama…or Juan Peron?
mclaren
@rikyrah:
As a practical matter (and let’s sedulously genuflect to the idea of “practicality,” as the starstruck worshipers of the pol Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are wont to do), where do the reparations stop?
Reparations for black people: great.
How about reparations for the Chinese who were forcibly imported or otherwise mistreated, and not even allowed U.S. citizenship though they were born in America until 1897?
And how about reparations for Mexico? What we call “New Mexico” and “California” and “Arizona” were stolen from Mexico. Sounds like a super-duper double-down case of reparations are due there.
And then we have reparations for native American Indians. That’s a big one, since we’d have to give back the entire United States, or the monetary equivalent of its land.
And then what about reparations Mexico should pay to the native Indians who lived there until the Spanish stole their country? And how about the reparations Australians should pay to their aboriginal peoples? And how about the reparations the Canadians should pay to their native indians?
And then there are the yoooooooooooooooooge reparations America owes England for basically stealing their colonies…
This is turning into a real can of worms, isn’t it?
Can people see why reparations might be problematic?
randy khan
@mclaren:
This routine needs a bit of work. Maybe better writers.
eemom
@Cacti:
uh, I didn’t say it was a silver bullet. I was just asking a question.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
@randy khan:
Nothing can help that routine.
sparrow
@randy khan: This was how I understood TNC’s point when I heard him speak in Baltimore (well before primary season). It hasn’t ended. That’s the point.
Monala
@msdc: Because it’s not about money per se. The reason why TNC left the actual details of reparations vague is because what he really wants is the reckoning – for all of us as Americans to be very honest about the ongoing systematic discrimination and oppression that African-Americans have endured, certainly during slavery and Jim Crow, but continuing into the present day. That’s what he really wants dismantled, and he’s looking at a discussion of reparations to get us to make that reckoning. Had we as a nation come to terms with our history earlier, it might have saved his friend.
It seems to me that a lot of people opining on his article didn’t read it, and are just reacting to the term “reparations.”
Monala
@Dmbeaster: True, numerous groups have been harmed throughout U.S. history, but no group (within our borders) has been harmed as deeply and for as long as African-Americans, except for Native Americans. Furthermore, there have been some attempts to compensate Native Americans, even if those efforts are insufficient.
But again, what TNC is really looking for is the discussion.
Raven on the Hill
They’re not in Sanders platform because the advocacy of reparations would lose him the candidacy, and possibly the Democrats the elections. Are we to swell the ranks of Trump supporters for the sake of ideological purity?
Class is not only about wealth; rather wealth underpins class. What else is white supremacism if not the ideology and practices of a class system?
mclaren
@Monala:
And those Mexicans who lost vast amounts of money and land when we threw ’em off their land in what we now call California and New Mexico and Arizona and basically stole it all.
Oh, and those Brits who owned vast tracts of land in the American colonies and derived fabulous amounts of wealth therefrom. Until we basically stole it and said, “Blow me, we’re here and your army skedaddled, and now you can’t do anything about all that stuff you used to own, so suck on this.”
There are lots of people who got treated very poorly in the process of American “Manifest Destiny” AKA “killing shot-tons of people and stealing everything they owned and calling it God’s Will.”
mclaren
@randy khan:
Or maybe a glance at the headlines:
Source: “Bush Policies Still Alive in Obama White House,” The Washington Times, 24 April 2013.
mclaren
@randy khan:
Writers like Marisa Taylor at the McClatchy newspapers?
Source: “Obama quietly continues to defend Bush’s terror policies,” McClatchy DC newspapers, 22 January 2010.
Also see “Obama administration tacitly backing Bush environmental policies,” The Chicago Tribune, 14 June 2009.
Also see “Bush policies he reviled are crux of Obama’s arsenal,” The Washington Times, 15 May 2012.
Also see “Obama continues, extends some Bush terrorism policies,” NBC politics, 6 June 2013.
And the list goes on…
mclaren
@Raven on the Hill:
Get with the program. Sanders is evil and a fake because he’s not going to provide instant perfection for everyone forever, right now this minute. Pushing back on economic inequality that will disproportionately help blacks and single women with children isn’t good enough, because we need to elevate identity politics above all other considerations. Why? Because shut up, that’s why.
Those are the new Hillary talking points. Hillary is the cold hard practical realist who appeals to all that vast Democratic majority of voters who love endless unwinnable foreign wars (Oops! “Poll Shows Only 1 in 4 Americans Wants More U.S. Involvement Abroad; Cuba and Iran Low on List,” Juan Cole, Truthdig, 17 August 2015) and despise the idea of breaking up the too-big-to-fail banks (Oops! “The Progressive Change Institute has found that 58% of likely voters would like to break up big banks, with 71% of Democrats and 51% of Republicans saying they would support the measure, as first reported by Christina Rexrode for The Wall Street Journal.”) and loathe the idea of forcing a federal increase in the minimum wage (Oops! “75 percent of Americans support raising the federal minimum wage to $12.50 by 2020, including 92 percent of Democrats, 73 percent of Independents, 53 percent of Republicans,” Hart Research Associates, 21 January 2015).
Well, who ya gonna believe? Those lying laws of arithmetic, or Hillary Rodham Clinton?
hilzoy
@Keith G: I think a *lot* depends on what you take Sanders’ candidacy to be about. If you think it’s designed not so much to actually win as to enlarge our sense of the possibilities and, in so doing, to push Hillary to the left, then I think it’s a completely valid comparison. But if you think he’s actually running to win, then a whole lot of considerations Sanders has more or less gotten a pass on come in to play.
Like: would he actually have any chance at all of implementing his policies, given the Congress he’s likely to confront? Especially if, as seems likely, he would have fewer Senators than Hillary would? Are his actual proposals at all realistic? (My health care wonkery says: not on single payer. People I trust, like Mike Konczal, say not on financial reform either. Etc.) What about foreign policy? Does it matter that he’s 74 now, and will be 75 if/when he takes office? (I say yes: there is an age at which you do not get to count on your continuing to have your full mental acuity for the next 4/8 years, especially in a high-stress job like the Presidency, and he’s past it.) — Maybe in this context it helps to be old enough to remember Reagan’s second term.
If, on the third (?) hand, you think (as I tend to) that he started out just trying to enlarge our sense of the possibilities and nudge Hillary to the left, but now finds himself in a position in which he needs to decide whether or not he wants to run to win, then I think he really needs to think about the stuff in the preceding paragraph.
For the record: I would much rather have a candidate who had Bernie Sanders’ general views, but with a lot more serious policy chops and twenty years younger. But that’s not the choice we face.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
How can a self described “revolutionary” who repeatedly calls for and promises “revolution” say reparations isn’t practical?
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’
Monala
@mclaren: I specifically said length of time and severity, not that no one else suffered. Sorry, British loss of land after the Revolution doesn’t compare nearly two centuries of slavery, one hundred years of Jim Crow, and ongoing oppression to this day. No other group within this country except for Native Americans has suffered as long or as much.
eemom
@Monala:
And yet you appear to think they have less of a claim to reparations.
What attempts are those? If you mean things like this, those are hard won victories after years of expensive litigation. That’s not the kind of “reparations” under discussion here.
Monala
@eemom: I never said Native Americans have less of a claim. In fact, I said that efforts to compensate Native Americans have been insufficient.
As far as “kind of reparations,” there has been no agreement on this thread about what that means. And it seems, few people are willing to work on what it could or should mean.
Ecks
@debbie: Yeah, how sexist IS Clinton anyway for promoting her by her first name, and not her last name? Saunders gets his last name! Trump gets his last name!
And what about that poor guy Bush? Everyone refers to him as Jeb! Clearly an indication of our reigning prejudice against rich white aristocrats.
/snark.
randy khan
@mclaren:
I might buy your argument if I had even the slightest belief that the ACA, the financial reform bill, the end of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, or the nomination of justices like Sotomayor and Kagan would have happened under Bush and Cheney. Or the removal of troops from Iraq, or successful negotiations with Iran.
And the list goes on, as you say.
KnittyGall
@Gin & Tonic: But as Coates explains, red-lining and predatory lending policies are still happening today. So reparations would not be just about slavery, but for people still being affected by institutional racism now.