Tag Archives: racism

What Was Down Is Up (And Vice-Versa)

Random Blogging, , , , ,

Too often, reading the news makes me ill.

One recent example: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says he’ll pardon a White man who a jury had found guilty of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester–an announcement he made one day after the verdict and before sentencing.

No dog whistle there…

In 2016, I reluctantly concluded that the actions (and votes) of a significant minority of Americans could only be explained by racism. I’ve had no reason to modify that conclusion since.

We live in a time of unprecedented political polarization; it has brought reasonable policymaking to a halt  and transformed the Republican Party into a cult harboring White Christian Nationalists, QAnon adherents and a variety of disordered individuals nursing assorted grievances.

As a result, Republican party leaders have a problem.  To keep the malcontents who dominate their base happy, it becomes necessary to feed the beast they’ve created by framing everything as “us versus them.”  And in order to do that, the GOP has had to abandon virtually everything the GOP once stood for and reverse previous policy positions, no matter how awkward the result..

Remember when Republicans criticized the FDA for being too slow and risk-averse when it came to authorizing new vaccines?

So it’s sad or funny — or both — that Operation Warp Speed has already emerged as a vulnerability for Trump in the 2024 presidential campaign, with Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida moving to distinguish himself from Trump as a vaccine skeptic. And Trump, rather than touting his achievement, has been reduced to accusing DeSantis of only pretending to be anti-vaccine, noting (accurately) that DeSantis was enthusiastic about vaccinations when the program was first underway.

Watching Republicans compete to distance themselves from a major GOP policy success would be amusing if it weren’t so depressing.

Want depressing?

  •  The party of free trade enthusiastically endorsed Trump’s damaging tariffs on China.
  • The party that opposed government intrusion into corporate boardrooms has reacted ferociously–and legislatively–to corporations considering diversity and inclusion.
  • The party of  limited government and”individual liberty” has become highly selective about the individual liberties citizens are entitled to. Want to infect your neighbors and go mask-less? Fine. Want to control your own reproduction? Not so fast.
  • For the past several years, the party of fiscal responsibility has used the once-uncontroversial raising of the debt ceiling to blackmail Democratic administrations–threatening a default that would plunge the world into financial chaos by refusing to  pay existing financial obligations  for which many Republicans had voted.
  • The party that once opposed totalitarianism and autocracy and supported a strong and unified foreign policy now cozies up to Vladimir Putin and invites Victor Orban to speak at its events.
  • The party that trumpeted “law and order” now defends the “patriots” that  participated in the January 6th insurrection–and continues to support the ex-President who fomented that violence.

This list could go on and on. It’s instructive to read the party’s 1956 platform, to see just how dramatically today’s GOP differs from its former iteration. (For one thing, the party used to produce a platform…)

We are unlikely to be facing a “hot” civil war, although we are seeing increased domestic terrorism from the far Right, but the transformation of one of America’s two major parties into a White Christian Nationalist cult is enormously consequential. That transformation deprives reasonable Americans who differ on policy a mechanism for working out those differences, leaving genuine conservatives nowhere to go.

Indeed, few of the current GOP “stars” seem capable of discussing policies at all–what thoughtful analyses have we heard from the likes of Jim Jordan or Marjorie Taylor Greene?

Worse, the willingness of party members to publicly embrace racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic tropes encourages those who harbor those hatreds to express and act on them.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this situation is the fact that today’s GOP is a distinctly minority party. Today’s Republicans depend for their power on elements of American governance that have become obsolete and undemocratic.  Gerrymandering, the Electoral College and the Filibuster distort and obstruct government at both the state and federal levels; the composition of the Supreme Court facilitated its capture by political ideologues.

For the record, I believe that majority opinion will ultimately prevail. Demographics and culture change are inexorable. (For that matter, it’s recognition of those changes–and the fears they engender– that has triggered the GOP’s war on people of color, women, trans children–those who are in any way “other.”)

The question is: how much damage will we sustain in the interim?

 

 

Gerrymandering And The Tennessee Three

Public Policy and Governance, Racial Equality, , ,

I’ve repeatedly inveighed against gerrymandering on this blog. (Anyone who wants to revisit the multiple ills that flow from that nefarious practice need only put “gerrymandering” into the search box and re-read those periodic rants.) I wouldn’t test the patience of my regular readers by returning to the subject, but for the vivid and shocking example provided by lawmakers in Tennessee.

The bare-bone facts are these: Three members of the Tennessee legislature joined an estimated thousand protesters who had marched to the statehouse in the wake of that state’s school shooting, demanding gun reform. According to several reports, they had bullhorns, and disrupted the order of the assembly. The protest itself was described by the media as peaceful–giving the lie to the hysterical Republican lawmakers who compared it to the January 6th insurrection.

Tennessee has a Republican supermajority–courtesy of gerrymandering–and that supermajority responded by voting to eject two of the three–the Black ones.

The three lawmakers did violate House rules, and a reprimand of some sort would have been appropriate. They could have been censured, or removed from committee assignments. But as the Washington Post noted

Republicans charged them with breaking House rules of conduct, which they don’t deny. But the protests, while raucous, were peaceful, and according to the Tennessean, no lawmaker has ever been expelled for breaching decorum rules….

All of this mirrors a larger story. Red states are sinking deeper into virulent far-right culture-warring — banning books, limiting classroom discussion of race and gender and prohibiting gender-affirming care for transgender youth. GOP legislatures passing these things were of course legitimately elected by majorities, though in some cases gerrymanders increase their power.

I would amend that last sentence to read “in most cases, gerrymanders increase their power.”

Those legislatures are also finding onerous ways to use power to tamp down on the unexpectedly ferocious dissent their culture war has unleashed among numerical minorities, largely concentrated in cities and suburbs inside red states. As analyst Ron Brownstein argues, this often pits an overwhelmingly White, older, rural and small-town Republican coalition against an increasingly diverse, younger and more urban coalition.

“These Republican legislatures are stacking sandbags against a rising tide,” Brownstein told CNN. Call it the GOP retreat into Fortress MAGA.

As the article notes, Republican-dominated state legislatures are pushing “preemption” laws that restrict cities and counties from making their own policy choices. It listed examples from DeSantis’ Florida, and from Georgia (and could easily have found similar ones from Indiana)

Yet this retreat into Fortress MAGA faces a problem: Whenever state-level Republicans undertake another reactionary lurch, it often goes national in a big way. Attention has poured down on everything from insanely broad book bans to shockingly harsh proposed punishments for abortion to anti-transgender crackdowns with truly creepy implications.

The Tennessee super-majority expelled these lawmakers simply because they could–because their supermajority (courtesy of gerrymandering) allowed them to demonstrate their rejection of democratic norms and to display their animus toward colleagues who were young, Black and Democratic.

As the AP has reported

A growing chorus is pushing back against Tennessee Republicans seeking to oust three House Democrats for using a bullhorn to shout support for pro-gun control protesters in the House chamber, while the GOP has previously resisted removing its own members even when weighing criminal allegations.

Most recently, the Republican-controlled Statehouse declined to take action against a member accused of sexual misconduct, as well as those who have faced indictments or came under pressure for liking nearly nude social media posts.

Ah–but those members were White Republicans.

The Hill interviewed one of the two legislators, Justin Jones of Nashville, who said his race played a role in his expulsion from the state House on Thursday.

“I basically had a member call me an uppity Negro,” Jones, who is Black, told MSNBC’s Joy Reid after the 72-25 vote that expelled him….

“What we saw in Tennessee yesterday was an attack on democracy and very overt racism, as you can see that the two youngest Black lawmakers were kicked out, but our colleague, my dear sister, Gloria Johnson, a white woman, was not,” he said. “And we see clearly, the nation has seen clearly what is going on in Tennessee.”

What this incident very clearly underlines is the critical importance of systemic reform. It isn’t enough to elect better people–although that would certainly be helpful.

We need to reform the institutions that are not working properly. We can start with the Supreme Court, which has declined to notice that gerrymandering is incompatible with fair elections. The recent confirmation that Clarence Thomas’ corruption extends well beyond his refusal to recuse from cases implicating his wife’s political activities should provide a wake-up call.

Then we can move on to the Electoral College….

 

 

 

Trading Places

Racial Equality, , ,

A recent Vox article made an excellent point about identity politics. Although those on the Right use the term to label and dismiss what they scorn as special pleading by minorities, Vox’s definition is far more accurate.

Virtually all politics is identity politics, and the most powerful political identities are the biggest political identities — Democrat and Republican, which are increasingly merging with our racial, geographic, religious, and cultural groups to create what the political scientist Lilliana Mason calls “mega-identities.”

As political scientists all attest, those identities are not only stronger than they have previously been, they are also significantly different than they used to be. Thomas Edsall has taken to the New York Times opinion page to confirm those differences.

Edsell cites several research studies that show America politically divided “by levels of diversity; the emergence of an ideologically consistent liberal Democratic Party matching the consistent conservatism of the Republican Party, for the first time in recent history; and a striking discrepancy in the median household income of white-majority House districts held by Democrats and Republicans.”

Those of us of “a certain age” remember when it was the Democratic Party, then strong in the South, that resisted racial integration and civil rights. Back then, the GOP took pride in being the party of Lincoln and emancipation. Today, the parties have traded places sociologically, philosophically and geographically. As Michael Podhorzer has noted, during the first half of the 20th century, Democrats were solidly the party of the bottom of the income distribution, and Republicans were solidly the party of the top half of the income distribution.

No longer.

Podhorzer finds the parties have become “mirror images” of themselves. At the same time, America has seen a deepening of the urban-rural partisan schism.

“As recently as 2008,” Podhorzer writes, “40 percent of the Democratic caucus represented either rural or sparse suburban districts, and about a fifth of the Republican caucus represented majority-minority, urban or dense suburban districts. Now, the caucuses are sorted nearly perfectly.”

At the same time, divergent economic trends are compounding the urban-rural split.

In 1996, Democrats represented 30 percent of the majority-white districts in the most educated and most affluent category; by 2020, they represented 86 percent. At the other end, in 1996, Democrats represented 38 and 42 percent of the districts in the bottom two categories; by 2020, those percentages fell to 12 and 18 percent.

In examining these trends, political analysts have cited a growing educational divide, with better-educated — and thus more affluent — white voters moving in a liberal Democratic direction while white voters without college have moved toward the right.

Despite the significant educational divide, scholars persuasively argue that education is not the reason for our polarization. Racism is. The data shows that, as Podhorzer puts it, “racial resentment, does a much, much better job of explaining our current political divisions than education polarization.”

Podhorzer provides data showing that from 2000 to 2020, the Democratic margin among white people with and without college degrees who score high on racial resentment scales has fallen from minus 26 percent to minus 62 percent for racially resentful non-college white people and from minus 14 percent to minus 53 percent among racially resentful college-educated white people.

At the same time, the Democratic margin rose from plus 12 to 70 percent over those 20 years among non-college white people low in racial resentment and from 50 to 82 percent among college-educated white people low in racial resentment.

In other words, in contradiction to the education divide thesis, non-college white people who are not racially resentful have become more Democratic, while college-educated white people who are racially resentful have become more Republican.

Today, Republican districts are among the least ethnically diverse, despite the fact that   voters within those districts are quite diverse when it comes to policy preferences–especially economic views. Democratic districts tend to be ethnically diverse–but with voters who mostly agree on social and economic issues.

In today’s GOP, the remaining members of the older, pro-business elite share the Republican label with a white working class that is disproportionately rural and racially resentful. The question is, how long can that uncomfortable partnership last?

Everyone who harbors “racial resentment” doesn’t identify as a White Supremacist (which is fortunate, since 80% of ideologically-motivated mass murders last year were committed by White Supremicsts.)

)In the absence of other shared goals, how strong are the bonds forged only by hating the same people? 

I guess we’ll find out.

 

The Way We Are

Public Policy and Governance, , , ,

Persuasion’s Yascha Mounk recently interviewed Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Kleinfeld’s response to a question about interpreting the midterm results, and whether those results showed a rejection of  extremism and election denialism, was–in my opinion–an important summary of just where we Americans find ourselves politically, and although it was rather lengthy, I’m quoting it in its entirety:

The election showed that with a gigantic amount of work on behalf of many, many organizations, you can move a tiny percentage of independent and right-leaning swing voters away from election denialism and real authoritarianism in swing states. That mattered a lot, because it means that the 2024 election will be free and fair. But what it didn’t do was fundamentally shift the dynamics in the Republican Party. While Trump might be losing steam, Trumpism, Christian nationalism, othering people to build your base with wink-and-nod authoritarianism, is still alive and well. We’re seeing DeSantis do it. We’re seeing other front runners do it. We saw candidate intimidation. We still saw election deniers win in deep red states. We have about 16 states now where there’s trifectas—a state in which the governor, the attorney general and both chambers of the legislature (basically all of your major executive roles that would control elections) are all of one party. In about 15, maybe 16 states, those are all Republican and a number of election deniers were elected to those positions. It’s worth remembering that the Jim Crow South was only 11 states, really, in its full form of election suppression against African Americans and poor whites. It doesn’t take the entire United States to have an authoritarian enclave somewhere. The role of the RNC in Arizona was notable. Arizona is really the only place we saw any kind of election violence, with the supervisor of Maricopa County elections going into hiding. An RNC phone call seems to suggest that the Republican National Committee was possibly threatening that the mob would be released if certain things didn’t happen. 

A significant minority of Americans continue to embrace “Trumpism, Christian Nationalism and ‘othering'” and the most obvious question is why?  Those of us who follow politics and policy answer that question with various allocations of racism, anti-intellectualism and (especially) fear of loss–loss of privilege, loss of social dominance.

As Kleinfeld highlighted, attacks on the bases of America’s governing philosophy are being nurtured and encouraged by today’s GOP. 

Devoted Republicans with whom I worked “back in the day”–when the GOP was a very different animal– bemoan the reality that the party that bears that name has no resemblance to the party we once knew. The lack of  two respectable, adult parties in America’s two-party system is more than troubling for a multitude of reasons, many of which I have previously explored, but in a recent column, Jennifer Rubin discussed a  consequence that had not occurred to me: the GOP’s disdain for objective fact attracts voters and candidates who also believe facts to be irrelevant and governance beside the point.

Rubin calls this “politics as performance art,” and references GOP fabulists besides George Santos. She says that Republicans have moved on from the party’s lies about climate change, vaccines and voter fraud — they’re increasingly lying about themselves.

Granted, it would be hard to beat Santos for lying, and no one else (to the best of our knowledge) comes close. But not for lack of trying. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna has claimed to be Jewish– to have been raised as a “Messianic Jew.” (Messianic Jews aren’t Jews, for one thing, and it seems her father was Catholic and her grandfather fought for Nazi Germany.)

She changed her last name from Mayerhofer to Luna, and The Post found no evidence for her claims that her father was incarcerated for long periods. Other claims that she was traumatized by a home invasion in 2010 did not check out, either.

Rep. Andrew Ogles is not an economist, despite claiming to be one during his campaign-he has no degree in economics and was never employed as an economist. He also wasn’t a “trained police officer and international sex crimes expert,” as claimed; he was actually a volunteer reserve deputy. (Shades of Hershel Walker…)

It isn’t only in folks running for Congress. Arizona’s Republican attorney general investigated election fraud, then buried the findings when  no evidence emerged. (The documents were just released  by his Democratic successor.)

If it is “harmless exaggeration” to fabricate a life story, and “politics as usual” to insist that your election loss was due to vote fraud, what are assertions that “those people” want to replace White Christians, or that “woke” people are indoctrinating your children?

When such people hold office, how can we hope for governance based upon evidence and reason?

 

 

The Roots Of Our Polarization

Racial Equality, Religious Liberty, , , ,

There is an analytical rule–really, a problem-solving principle– called Occam’s Razor. It is sometimes called the principle of parsimony, and is basically a reminder that the simplest explanation is usually the best explanation.

A recent poll has confirmed my belief that there is a simple, albeit terrifying, explanation for America’s current deep polarization: White Christian Nationalism.

Although I have long believed that worldview to be the source of a lot of our current unrest, before this particular poll, I really had no clue just how deeply entrenched and widespread that worldview is.

A new survey finds that fewer than a third of Americans, or 29%, qualify as Christian nationalists, and of those, two-thirds define themselves as white evangelicals.

The survey of 6,212 Americans by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution is the largest yet to gauge the size and scope of Christian nationalist beliefs.

The study found–unsurprisingly–that Christian nationalists tend to be older (some two-thirds are over the age of 50). They are also far less educated than other Americans. At most,  20% of Christian nationalism supporters have a four-year college degree, far fewer than the 79% of respondents who were labeled “skeptics” because they rejected the principles of Christian nationalism.

Christian nationalism as a worldview is not new but the term is. Indeed, a third of respondents said they had not heard of the term. For that reason, it’s impossible to say whether the ranks of Christian nationalists have grown over time.

In their book “Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States,” sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Sam Perry found that about 20% of Americans strongly embrace Christian nationalist ideas. The PRRI survey is more in line with a 2021 Pew Research survey that found that 10% of Americans are what Pew identified as hard-core “faith and flag” conservatives.

The survey did confirm that Americans overall reject a Christian nationalist worldview by a ratio of 2 to 1.

In an essay for the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin considered the implications of the survey. As she noted, most of us have only a vague understanding of the term.

When you hear the phrase “Christian nationalists,” you might think of antiabortion conservatives who are upset about the phrase “Happy Holidays” and embrace a vaguely “America First” way of thinking. But according to a Public Religion Research Institute-Brookings Institution poll released Wednesday, Christian nationalists in fact harbor a set of extreme beliefs at odds with pluralistic democracy. The findings will alarm you.

Rubin enumerated the beliefs held by these adherents:

“The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.”
“U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.”
“If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.”
“Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.”
“God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.”

PRRI found that 10 percent (“adherents”) of American adults believe in these ideas overwhelmingly or completely; 19 percent agree but not completely (“sympathizers”); 39 percent disagree (“skeptics”) but not completely; and 29 percent disagree completely (“rejecters”).

Nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants are Christian Nationalists–either sympathizers (35%) or adherents (29%).” More troubling, the poll found that thirty-five percent of all Whites are adherents. 

Those percentages mean that tens of millions of Americans hold these views. And as the poll confirmed, those Americans are overwhelmingly Republican.  Republicans (21%) were found to be about four times as likely as Democrats (5%) or independents (6%) to be Christian nationalists.

Fortunately, the news isn’t all bad.

 There are fewer adherents and sympathizers among younger Americans. “More than seven in ten Americans ages 18-29 (37% skeptics, 42% rejecters) and ages 30-49 (37% skeptics, 35% rejecters) lean toward opposing Christian nationalism.” Support is also inversely related to educational attainment.

You will not be surprised to discover the depths of racism and racial grievance among these adherents. A stunning 83 percent of them think Whites are being discriminated against, and that “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.”

More than 70 percent embrace replacement theory, and nearly one-quarter say that Jews hold too many positions of power; 44 percent believe Jews are more loyal to Israel than America. More than 65 percent agree that Muslims from some countries should be banned. Almost 70 percent believe “the husband is the head of the household in ‘a truly Christian family’ and his wife submits to his leadership.”

If you think this sounds like MAGA tripe, you’re right. This is the hardcore MAGA base. More alarming: “Nearly six in ten QAnon believers are also either Christian nationalism sympathizers (29%) or adherents (29%).”

Rubin says that believers in American values have our work cut out for us.

No kidding.