The problem is that we have people like Lee Atwater saying that the racial appeal is important--that there is "dog whistle" politics going on in which "states' rights" means one thing to people like Bruce Bartlett and quite another to other groups:

>Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he’s campaigned on since 1964… and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster…

>Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps…?

>Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me - because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.'

Posted at October 30, 2007 9:17 AM in response to Reagan, Neshoba and the Politics of Race

By "dangerously eloquent" I meant dangerous to *me*. Jeff is very good at this, and very effective, and anybody who takes them on does so at serious hazard of life and limb...

Posted at February 28, 2007 7:04 AM in response to Sailing into Harm's Way versus the Dangerously Eloquent Jeff Faux

I plead guilty. I had always seen the Supreme Court as a minor player in the victory of the terrorists in the U.S. south in the 1870s. I saw it as an executive (and legislative) decision that the south was not worth it. But I don't have the knowledge to have an informed view...

Posted at February 21, 2007 7:18 AM in response to Amnesia on the Death of Reconstruction

I protest!

Nathan Glazer was a neocon for a decade, but he recovered from the kool-aid. Daniel Patrick Moynihan always said that he had briefly been a fellow traveler of the neocons, but never a card-carrying member. And Daniel Bell vociferously denies that he was ever any kind of neoconservative.

Posted at January 10, 2007 2:15 PM in response to One and a Half Cheers for Beinart and the Early Neocons

Matt--

I think you mistake my critique of Ricks.

I have tried to maintain a balance between two points:

A. _Fiasco_ is very good--the best thing I've seen on the military side of the misadventure in Iraq?

B. But why the *@%^*#* are we learning about this now, rather than back in 2003 and 2004?

The fact that _Fiasco_ is so good makes the gap between it and what we were told in the *Washington Post* back in 2003 and 2004 even more pitiful, and terrible.

Ricks has had one very interesting thing to say: he told Howie Kurtz that it was really congress's fault--because there were no big congressional critics of the war out there before it began, his editors told him to stop writing stories about dissent from the war plan and start writing stories about the war plan...

Posted at August 7, 2006 8:12 PM in response to Thomas Ricks on Max Cleland

Well, her real job is to be on assassination watch, isn't it?

Posted at June 4, 2006 3:29 PM in response to The Glam Factor

The crash of 1873 was horrific for the non-agricultural economy. And, yes, the rest of the 1870s turned bad to worse for those in debt as inflation took hold. And, yes, if you were a creditor by 1876 things were looking quite good. And, yes, real wages rose substantially over the decade.

Posted at June 3, 2006 1:55 PM in response to 1870s Economics

G. John Ikenberry writes: "In fact, the key argument at the heart of the Bush administration's new

national security vision is more liberal than realist..."

Why the pretense that there is a Bush administration national security vision?

There are a bunch of snap decisions made using his "gut" by the underbriefed

and incurious George W. Bush, and then there are a bunch of smart-but-craven

people working for him trying to fit them into some sort of coherent framework.

Count on the Bush administration being liberal rather than realist in the future--

count on it being anything other than inept--and you're likely to be disappointed,

right?

Brad DeLong

Posted at January 22, 2006 6:40 PM in response to Are Bush and Rice the New Liberal Internationalists?

And why does this document that Howell cites "direct" $220K of contributions to Republicvan and only $4K of contributions to Democrats?

Posted at January 20, 2006 8:59 PM in response to On One Level, This Is Pretty Funny

touche...

:-)

Brad DeLong

Posted at January 14, 2006 4:41 PM in response to On social justice, same-sex marriage, and not running for office