November 19, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

RACISM AT THE CORE OF CONSERVATISM

Some people are upset that Ronald Reagan's image has been "tarnished" by suggestions that Reagan was a racist. He wasn't personally bigoted, they tell us. But Reagan used race-baiting effectively in his political career, as did Richard Nixon. Racism was an issue they could use to attract the Southern white voters they wanted. Racism has played a role in California too. Proposition 187 a few years was targeted at Hispanics. When you hear rhetoric about illegal immigration from Republicans there's more then a smidgen of racism involved. The "war on terror" has a heavy racist influence. Some of the more extreme right are claiming that the Muslim world is out to destroy the white Christian world. This column by Paul Krugman is at www.commndreams.org:

The centrality of race - and, in particular, of the switch of Southern whites from overwhelming support of Democrats to overwhelming support of Republicans - is obvious from voting data.

For example, everyone knows that white men have turned away from the Democrats over God, guns, national security and so on. But what everyone knows isn’t true once you exclude the South from the picture. As the political scientist Larry Bartels points out, in the 1952 presidential election 40 percent of non-Southern white men voted Democratic; in 2004, that figure was virtually unchanged, at 39 percent.

More than 40 years have passed since the Voting Rights Act, which Reagan described in 1980 as “humiliating to the South.” Yet Southern white voting behavior remains distinctive. Democrats decisively won the popular vote in last year’s House elections, but Southern whites voted Republican by almost two to one.

The G.O.P.’s own leaders admit that the great Southern white shift was the result of a deliberate political strategy. “Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization.” So declared Ken Mehlman, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, speaking in 2005.

And Ronald Reagan was among the “some” who tried to benefit from racial polarization.

NEW WINE, OLD WINESKINS

Right-wing ideology is essentially about selfishness. You justify selfishness by suggesting that other people aren't as worthy of success. They're inferior and there to be exploited. It reminds me a little of the metaphor attributed to Christ in the Gospels. He spoke of new wine and old wineskins. You didn't put new wine in old wineskins. Conservative ideology is a consistent repackaging of the old ideas of social Darwinism, imperialism, and exploitation. You find some way to put an intellectual veneer on the old ideas, whether it be some racist tract like The Bell Curve or this book, A Farewell to Alms, that says some societies, such as the British, prospered because the rich and successful passed along the traits that made them successful to their children. This article by Daniel Brook is at www.thenation.com:

In his account of the relationship between literacy and economic growth, a relationship considered to be central to explanations of industrialization, Clark dismisses both the Marxist idea that the technological advance of the printing press was crucial to the spread of literacy and the Weberian insight that converting from a religion where the laity was forbidden to read the Bible on their own (medieval Catholicism) to one where they were encouraged to do so (Protestantism) increased literacy rates in Britain. For Clark, the rise of literacy is explained by the reproduction of a population that was better at reading. Similarly, Clark dismisses the structural arguments of both Jared Diamond, who in Guns, Germs, and Steel attributes the West's dominance to geographical good fortune, and Kenneth Pomeranz, who explains in The Great Divergence that Britain's resources--some naturally occurring, such as coal, and some pilfered, like the North American colonies themselves--were the keys to industrialization. Clark has little patience for those who suggest that democracy, which renders kleptocratic rule untenable, matters much at all. And the Adam Smith disciples at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank fare even worse. To Clark, the incentives of Smith's "invisible hand" work only for peoples who have already had the bourgeois virtues bred into them.

The most important question raised by A Farewell to Alms is not raised by Clark himself, however, but by the publication of his book. In the late nineteenth century, America's best-known social Darwinist, William Graham Sumner, a professor of political and social science at Yale, wrote, "Let every man be sober, industrious, prudent, and wise, and bring up his children to be so likewise and poverty will be abolished in a few generations." For Clark, this is exactly what came to pass in England. Clark eschews the term "social Darwinism," but it's an apt description of his thesis. The question raised by the publication of his book, then, is: why is social Darwinism back in vogue?