Paul Krugman as Pollyanna?
When Paul Krugman writes things like "even the tacit appeals to race are losing their effectiveness. And that’s why I think the movement conservative era is just about over, I fear that he is being much too optimistic.
I find myself much less optimistic. There are, in general, three ways to compete for the majority of the votes:
1. To demonstrate that you will implement policies that will make themajority of potential voters freer, more prosperous, and happier.
2. To convince a majority of voters that they are under an obligationto vote for your party because that is, fundamentally, who the are.
3. To convince a majority that they are threatened by vicious anddeadly enemies--and that the other party is, at some level, in league with those enemies.
The northern Democratic Party has by and large mostly pursued the first. The northern Republican Party used to mostly pursue the second--with Civil War memorials and Lincoln Day speaches and how the sainted martyr Abraham had saved in the Union and it was our duty to his memory to carry forward his banner.
Starting early in the twentieth century, however the Republican Party has been increasingly pursuing the third: excoriating immigrants, Catholics," that communist Roosevelt," Russian spies in the State Department, appeasers and other advocates of "better red than dead,"
rootless cosmopolitans, advocates of "peaceful coexistence" and other graduates of Dean Acheson's Cowardly College of Containment, uppity Negroes, Hollywood, liberal socialists who want to control your life, the nattering nabobs of negativism in the press, Mexicans, muslims, homosexuals, China, atheists.
You get the drill: rally the people against an enemy, hopefully both an external and an internal enemy, and be sure to pick an enemy weak enough that it is not a real existential threat that requires any form of sacrifice that would disrupt the comfort of those you truly work for.
Four generations of Republican political activists have now been trained in the art of busying giddy minds with foreign (and domestic) enemies. They can't engage in the kind of rational-win-the-center politics. I don't see where a recovery for the Republican Party can come from--and if you'rewatching the dame debates I am, I don't think you can see it either.
There is, however, a big problem here: strategy 2 works more often than not. Ask the southern Democrats who ran the South and crushed the Populists by pointing out that the Populists were Negro-lovers. Rallying the people against external and internal enemies works.
Comments (15)
- Senators Schumer and Feinstein will vote to confirm a nominee for Attorney General who is unclear on whether waterboarding is torture or not.
- I don't think anyone sees any serious challenge from the left to Schumer or Feinstein, they will not suffer any real consequences of this decision.
- The Democrats fear the movement conservatives and cave under the slightest pressure.
Forget about race or winning elections. Movement Conservatives have their hands on too many levers of power that canny politicians like Feinstein and Schumer know that no amount of public support will be able to overcome them. So cave in tactically, cave in strategically.
November 2, 2007 3:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Brad, Can you get a comment on your post from any of economists that you respect who are Republicans.
What would they say?
Don't you think it's kind of boring to have a debate when Krugman is saying that Republicans are really evil and you are saying that Republicans are really really evil?
November 4, 2007 8:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
But that's still two kinds of boring which doubles your monotony of boring.
November 4, 2007 9:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
What you're saying is along the lines of what I was thinking as I read his book. Racism, like any other ism, is something that answers a deep-seated need in people. If blacks or hispanics aren't there as a target, then gays will do; if not gays, then muslims (the process has already started); if not them, something else will come along. People need an "other" to focus their problems on. Our country may be browning, but human beings are human beings.
But. I also wonder ... isn't the same true of other countries? Why is it that the European countries, a region with a long, bloody, and divisive history, have been able to overcome this natural tendency of human beings, and implement functional welfare states? It's not an easy question to answer, but I think it holds the key to whether or not Krugman is right. If the Euros and the Japanese and so on were able to do it, why not us? It's possible that the history of racial relations in this country vis a vis blacks is so uniquely charged, so poisonous, that once the reservoirs of all the hatred ... move on and aren't replaced, the dynamics of our polity will be permanently changed -- we'll become a lot more like Europe, and a lot less like Texas. It doesn't seem all that Pollyannaish to me, and I'm generally pretty cynical.
Crooked cops, crooked lawyers, crooked judges, crooked politicians, crooked doctors, crooked scientists, crooked clergymen -- but no crooked journalists. An amazing record for an amazing class of people.
November 4, 2007 9:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes and no. True in part, but also a bit backwards and presumes stasis.
1) All animals have problems to begin with. Scarcity of resources, from goods to services, is the fundamental problem.
2) Two solutions: improve the condition by creativity, OR, predation to steal or exploit from others.
3) Those who lack enough creativity will gain more from predation. THEN they need enemies to prey upon. Predation is at best zero sum however, and very dangerous.
4) Those who are creative are by definition advantaged against a predatory zero sum strategy. A productive and creative tribe will in the end always beat out a predatory one.
So that's the game. It doesn't necessitate eternal predation. In fact, it dictates that over time as cultures become more advanced, predatory patterns wane, including racism.
For a concrete example, look at the tech boom. You have the smartest and most creative people coming from around the globe to form a "tech tribe" which is increasingly the most powerful in the world. Racism has little place in its values. Others see this and emulate it. That is how culture inevitably changes.
Anyways, yes it looks like some reactionaries and wackos are still rallying racism against Hispanics, Muslims, etc and seeking out new enemies. But, it's becoming increasingly difficult for them and I do agree we've reached a tipping point where racists (including people who are culturally intolerant) are categorically holdouts and losers.
Hopefully these transitions occur smoothly without any major shocks like civil strife. But one way or the other, the outcome is inevitable.
November 4, 2007 10:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Corvid
Weren't the European countries able to institute effective social safety nets before there was any significant degree of "browning"?
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To a degree I buy your notion about picking an "other" to blame for our problems, but I don't think it's a necessity. It becomes likely, I think, only when there is indeed an other that can fairly easily be identified as such. Absent that--which is something that affects us all, not just the "giddy minds" that Brad DeLong makes reference to--social progress becomes more likely.
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Robert Putnam, the liberal sociologist at Harvard, has observed this phenomenon, with dismay. Studies have shown that people just naturally react negatively to faces that are racially distinct. This is, as some have said, our "reptilian" brain at work.
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While Republicans certainly take advantage of this, I wouldn't absolve the Dems. Identity politics, regarless of its merits, sets the perfect stage for demagoguery and even by itself amounts to just another stick poking at that reptile in us all.
November 5, 2007 6:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
Racism is still alive, but losing its effectiveness as a post-Civil Rights generation becomes demographically dominant.
For instance, the Democratic party in Louisiana used racist and anti-Catholic appeals against Republican Bobby Jindal, but the rural white Protestants for whom these appeals had worked four years ago this time voted for Jindal as the reform figure in a state too long dominated by an inept, racist machine.
There will remain a racist old guard, like the Democratic party in Louisiana, and affirmative action policies may well prolong racism and stoke its fires on both sides for many years, but as Jindal's election proves, a change is gonna come.
November 5, 2007 6:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
With due respect to Brad, it would appear that Krugman would quarrel with his history, by insisting that the GOP did more starting with the defection of the Dixiecrats and Nixon's southern strategy to milk strategy 2.
I can see why. First, strategy 3 requires always finding new enemies, and it's not always easy. Bush was awfully unpopular until bin Laden handed him the gift of 9/11 (with perhaps an assist from a negligent administration). Iran is not working out for them politically as well as they might have hoped, and Iraq is hard to milk longer, at least in both cases outside of a base that the candidates for the nomination are so actively courting (risking narrowing support later).
Immigration is thus the next best thing, and they get another free ride in rapid media voices like Lou Dobbs, but it's got some limitations. The Bush strategy of courting hispanic voters is out, and business interests that exploit labor are part of their base, too.
Second, race appears to have an amazing ability to persist as a factor in America, so there I'd agree if not with how Brad phrases it but with his point that Krugman is too optimistic. Hey, it's lasted this long, and it's easy to use as a marker of other things (poverty, urban centers) as long as America is slow to outgrow the effects. It's also flexible enough to allow some play after all of the immigrant issue.
Last, it's also helpful as a marker in practical strategies for stealing the election, like denying black voters in Florida in 2000 or stacking supplies of voting machines in Ohio in 2004. For evidence that this recourse is still on the post-Rove agenda, and for evidence that, yes, Virginia, there really is a difference between Democrats and Republicans, check out the Times editorial today on stacking the handling voting rights.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
November 5, 2007 7:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's not race, it's race+class or to be exact race+underclass.
November 5, 2007 7:34 AM | Reply | Permalink
davai said:
It's not race, it's race+class or to be exact race+underclass.
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When you look at delivery of high-tech medical care, race still remains an issue even when income and insurance plans are equal.
Upper class Blacks still express stories of racism, be they young or old. Ellis Cose's "Rage of A Privileged Class" and an more academic study "The Black Elite" by Lois Benjamin report on this phenomenon.
From recent history one can point to the Don Imus case. While it can be argued whether or not Imus should have been taken off the air, it can't be argued that Gwen Ifill felt abandoned by her White MSM colleagues when Imus turned his attention to her. It also seems apparent that Black staff at NBC and MSNBC did not find Imus as tolerable as did Chris Mathews, Tim Russert, and other White NBC reportes and staff. Note that the only voice that these African-American journalists have to express their feelings is the NABJ whose name is tut-tutted or accompanied with eye-rolling by White MSM reporters when the group's name and opposition to Imus is reported.
The idea that one can "buy a way out of racism" has yet to be proven.
November 5, 2007 11:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
Maybe not completly, but to a large degree.
November 5, 2007 12:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
On November 5, 2007 - 4:08pm davai said:
Maybe not completly, but to a large degree.
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Based on what evidence or personal experience?
November 5, 2007 1:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re: Weren't the European countries able to institute effective social safety nets before there was any significant degree of "browning"?
There may not have been many Africans in Europe then, but I don't think skin color is really the issue with racism. Racism is about an Other on whom all woes and troubles and failures can be blamed. In Europe the Jews played this role, along with several lesser minorities like the gypsies, unpopular religious sects, and often enough "foreigners", meaning the folks on the other side of the river that marked the national boundary.
November 5, 2007 4:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
there's no question race defines inequality --- and it's structures --- in america today, including the economy.
http://www.movementvisionlab.org/blog
November 6, 2007 4:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
there's no question race defines inequality --- and it's structures --- in america today, including the economy.
http://www.movementvisionlab.org/blog
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Agreed. The point I was going to make to davai is that if you use a baseline of segregation and lynching as a baseline, there has been progress. But, that is a ridiculous starting point. Many people who would want to claim "national credit" for the progress actually played no role or were not born at the time the changes occurred.
Blacks still face health care delivery discrepancies dispite equal income levels.
This knowledge allowed John Tanner, the Civil Rights Division head in the DOJ, to say without pausing that "Blacks die earlier" to rationalize for a biased voting ID sysytem. Prices paid for housing and automibiles also differ based on race. Davai's statement about the effects of face having been largely overcome suggests many have bought into a myth based on a faulty baseline used to make a comparison.
Women and gays have also made "progress", but I don't think either group would, as a whole, argue that things were equal.
November 6, 2007 6:15 AM | Reply | Permalink