Of course, it is race that drives the Republican platform. But the pernicious influence of race isn't a new discovery. More recently, Michael Lind wrote a series of articles about the problems with letting Southern racial and feudal/economic attitudes dominate the national discourse. Less recently, there's Lyndon Johnson's famous speech to Texas rednecks who bolted from the Democratics every time anything having to do with justice for black people was mentioned. He didn't put it that delicately.

Another aspect of race to consider is that black people in the U.S. are not truly a race. Genetics has been proving that the one-drop rule makes American blacks and whites remarkably similar, rather than separate, as the racists had hoped. Black people in the U.S. are an economic caste--used as a threat against jittery white people, who will do just about anything, including subvert the Constitution, not to be forced into black status. Barbara Ehrenreich called it fear of falling, I believe.

Without the South, American politics would be something social-democratic like Canada or Germany. One of the many weaknesses of Clinton was that he spent way too much time on please-Bubba politics, which bit him in the butt in the end, and we all have spent too much time and money on the South's endless tantrum about the end of its revered feudal and slave society. I remember taking a tour of the historic quarter of Charleston, SC, with a guide who studiously avoided mentioning who actually built all those grand houses. That sort of poison has long-term effects.

Posted at September 11, 2007 7:53 AM in response to Crank Politics

Like mgmax, I live in Chicago, and if he can't figure out that there is income inequality here, he isn't looking very hard. The Republican attitute is always: Why don't you live in Kenilworth? Why doesn't your family have an inherited house in Lake Forest? You mean that you don't have a building named after granddad at Harvard?

More to the point, what you are seeing in these statistics, which point to income stagnation, is fundamentalist economics at work. Recently, I read an article in Espresso, in which Gary Becker of the University of Chicago gave an interview (note, to the Italian press) about the wonders of inequality. Inequality isn't a bad thing among fundamentalist economists.

So the question is, Do you want to live in a country dominated by the fantasies of the upper-middle class (mgmax), fundamentalist economics (the market is god), and fundamentalist religion (in which the free-market economy is now taken as an article of faith)? Somehow, I doubt that the Constitution was written to support such claptrap.

JJ.

Posted at August 22, 2007 6:26 AM in response to WH Incomprehensible on Inequality