I am late to this discussion, but I hope not too late. I've been musing about this issue of race and the welfare state myself for some time and find it one of the most interesting topics, among many, in Paul Krugman's excellent book.

I read the paper he cites (pdf) in this post back in 2004, when I was mulling over Howard Dean's campaign rhetoric about how to appeal to southern Republicans, and became convinced that the class argument and the argument for social programs among people with racist bent was doomed to fail.

That paper says:

"Our bottom line is that Americans redistribute less than Europeans for three reasons: because the majority of Americans believe that redistribution favors racial minorities, because Americans believe that they live in an open and fair society, and that if someone is poor it is his or her own fault, and because the political system is geared toward preventing redistribution. In fact the political system is likely to be endogenous to these basic American beliefs." (p.61)

Subsequent work by others, especially the data on racial attitudes and voting patterns in Tom Schaller's "Whistling Past Dixie" has further confirmed my intuition that "class" has a different dimension in American politics and it stems from our original sin of slavery. Indeed, I think it's possible that this contributed as much to our vaunted sense of individualism as the frontier: some Americans' exalted view of their own self-sufficiency can at least be partly attributed to the fact that they see themselves in contrast to a despised minority which is dependent upon government to provide for them. (One theory holds that much of this attitude stemmed from the fact that early American welfare associations were affiliated with ethnic charities and the church leaving the government as the primary provider of the one group which had few institutions --- the despised African Americans.)

It's a complicated set of arguments but I find them on the whole to be persuasive. America is the only first world country to have resisted building a solid safety net for the working and middle classes and it seems to stem from our history of slavery and the pervasive, simmering racist resentment that followed the civil war. It's been so strong that even appeals to economic self-interest fail to penetrate.

Still, as Krugman makes plain in the book, it's pretty clear that we are making progress on the racial front. The despicable racist appeals of the past are no longer acceptable and cultural norms are changing rather rapidly. Outside of hard core conservatives in the South, (which are still, unfortunately, plentiful) the numbers show that overt racist attitudes toward blacks are changing rather dramatically, especially among young people. This is very good news.

But when it comes to racism, it's always something:

1955 - "They" are an inferior race

1965 - "They" aren't good workers

1975 - "They" make old white customers uncomfortable 1985 - Affirmative action means "their" diplomas are bogus

1995 - "They" are a litigation risk for discrimination

2007 - making people live and work with "them" creates depression and hopelessness.

And the horror of Katrina brought out something that dwells in the depths of the primitive racist brain: fear of the black mob, which goes all the way back to the beginning and repeats itself over and over again in the popular imagination. That form of racism is not so much an overt loathing but rather a fear of reprisal for what people know has been very bad treatment by the white minority. And it manifests itself as further oppression, ghettoization and conservative "law and order" campaigns that serve the right wing so well.

So while I agree with Paul Krugman that we can be somewhat optimistic, the ongoing resilience of the racist lizard brain in old and new forms makes me worry about the contours of the universal health care debate. I fear that the combination of rightwing populism and lingering racial attitudes toward public services and income redistribution may just cause conservatives to successfully demagogue the issue, using many of the same dogwhistles and rhetorical ear worms that have worked so well in the past by merging illegal immigration with health care. As Tom Schaller points out in this post, that may move the ball outside the conservative South where the hard core anti-African American dogwhistles have more and more been confined. (Mexican migration is different than European and Asian immigration, always has been. I'm not sure previous patterns of immigration bashing and assimilation are useful guides here.)

If it's the case that Americans believe income redistribution favors minorities who don't deserve it and that our society is so fair and open that anyone who is poor deserves to be poor, racial tolerance toward blacks isn't the end of it. Those attitudes may be easily shifted to Hispanics, who simply assume the mantle of the despised minority who is demanding that hard working Real Americans give them their hard earned money when they don't deserve it.

This is, of course, irrational in light of the real economic factors at work. But this kind of racist assumption is one of the core characteristics of American culture whether we like it or not and it's not going to die an easy death. Certainly, the fact that there are so many Latino citizens, that vast majority of whom are native born and as "American" as Taco Bell, means that this is not an easy task. The Proposition 187 debacle in California serves as a great example of what happens when you take this stuff too far, and that happened during a much stronger period of conservative political domionance than we have now. With the positive trends and attitudes towards race in general this is a complicated path for conservatives to take.

However, this isn't an easy path for liberals either. (Eliot Spitzer can certainly testify to that.) Long standing beliefs in American individualism, forged as they were in part by racist assumptions, are quite easily tapped with demagogic language claiming that universal health coverage will result in "those people" getting health care --- Mexicans, frankly, who will be stealing from the hard working American taxpayer. The argument against health care will, of course, be couched in other terms as well, using boogeyman language like "socialized medicine" and the usual lies about care in other countries and the government picking your doctor for you. (And old fashioned rightwing populism a la Lou Dobbs, has never been kind to immigrants, no matter what race.)

But I believe that the immigration debate will play a large part in this because it plays into Americans' original sin of slavery and the racism that undergirds its long standing philosophical resistance to a strong government safety net. I'm optimistic that this can be done, but I think rather than a relaxing of racist attitudes it will (sadly) take a critical mass of white middle class workers finding themselves economically stifled and without health care options and a business community that wises up and realizes that universal health coverage is good for the bottom line.

The good (and bad) news is that we may be almost there. But there's little doubt in my mind that the factors that have held us back from enacting a strong safety net are still potent, if less than they've been in the past. Certainly we can expect the enemies of reform to tickle that racist id in order to keep from enacting what Krugman (and William Kristol, in a rare point of agreement) rightly point out will be the program that establishes progressive political dominance for a generation. The stakes for them are very, very high.

*By the way, I really enjoyed this book. It's very accessible, informative and written with the right mixture of professorial wonk and passionate Krugmania to get the mind thinking and the blood flowing.