Race to the bottom
How delightful to see the punditocracy call out the entirety of Obama’s opposition for their evident reluctance to accept the fact that an African-American is President of the United States. What other explanation could there possibly be for their behavior? Divided We Stand waxes eloquent on the subject.
Wow. I thought you were being hyperbolic, but you’re not–that blog actually says, with no ambiguity, that everyone who disapproves of Obama as a president is racist. That’s disgraceful and frightening.
I have no doubt that a substantial number of people who disapprove of Obama do so at least partially because he is African-American, but there is hardly a logical identity. And surely there are some who approve of him who nevertheless wouldn’t want their kids marrying an African American.
That link makes me sad.
Comment by Talarohk — 9/14/2009 @ 8:52 pm
What, do you disagree or something? I’d have thought better of you.
Surely a name like “Divided We Stand” implies pretty clearly what the guy’s attitude is on race. Because whatever the text may assert, the subtext is ALWAYS racial.
Maureen Dowd is correct; there can’t be any other explanation for the interruption of a Presidential address to Congress. Andrew Sullivan is correct; there is no reason protesters would chant that they want their country back unless they meant to imply that the country didn’t belong to black people.
We knew that this election would bring the racists out of the woodwork, and indeed it has. And there’s more of them than we ever feared possible.
Comment by Rojas — 9/14/2009 @ 10:18 pm
Man, these people thinking it’s all about mindless race issues are silly. They should know better, after the way they freaked out over Clinton 10 years ago, it’s about mindless party issues.
The president could be O’bama McBride, born and raised in Boston with skin as pink as tulips and they’d still be freaking out about socialisms, conspiracies, and guberment. The witchdoctor Obamacare posters are a symptom. The disease is idiots with a capital ‘R’.
Comment by thimbles — 9/14/2009 @ 10:45 pm
A good post on the topic:
http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2009/09/like-virgin.html
Comment by thimbles — 9/14/2009 @ 10:47 pm
*sigh* You’re not helping rojas.
Comment by mw — 9/15/2009 @ 12:43 am
Okay, after reading the blog post again…
…it’s a joke, isn’t it?
I am very slow at times.
Comment by Talarohk — 9/15/2009 @ 1:07 am
It’s okay. The joke had a simple premise and was easy to miss, frankly because most of the protesters are motivated by simple premises which are easy to reduce to racism.
Especially when they didn’t protest when the white guy previous was doing such an incredibly bad job.
ps:
The white people are nervous
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/09/white-approval-of-obama.html
And Paulite rhetoric has been co-opted by the talk radio extremist crowds.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/09/ron-paul-rallies-v2009.html
pps:
There is no party greater responsible for the perception of racist overtones in these protests than the populists on radio and tv leading it. When the crazies monopolize the megaphone without dissent, people think you must be crazy. And petty little congressmen from South Carolina who support the hanging of the confederate flag and cuss out their elected black president publicly as a liar aren’t helping either. His excuse iss he got the town hall spirit. Looking at his background, one can be easily lead as to what that town hall spirit might be.
Comment by thimbles — 9/15/2009 @ 1:38 am
It’s one thing to get the joke that DwS is making, which is a good one. And it is indeed worth being vigilant about, because there are plenty of partisans and shucksters eager to proffer racism as a motive.
However, Dowd is not wrong in that quote they pull of hers.
I think that is true, and it’s naive, I think, to rankly dismiss it or to straw man it into Dowd making the argument that all his critics are racists (to try to nail her to that argument, and then extend it to all who would dare broach the race topic in relation to some of the anti-Obamamania folks, is a shucksterism of a different sort).
I don’t think racism is really the core of 95% of opposition to Obama. But I do think that an unconscious sort of element is in play that his race directly affects. There are a substantial number of people in America who refuse to believe that Obama is himself American. There is a sort of underlying racial element that plays into that thinking (or do you believe the President McCain birther movement would have the same kind of strength). There is also, I think, a substantial racial element in a lot of, say, NRO type thinking. Remember the post over there during the election waxing intellectual about how, since his mother was white and father was black, that that was a common pairing of communist sympathizer circles in the 50s, that it would be reasonable to surmise that his parents were communist, and thus reasonable to surmise that maybe Obama is too? Or the sheer volume of extrapolation that occurred regarding Reverend Wright, the most “intellectual” of which wasn’t just that Obama went to a church where the preacher was an asshole, but how that ties him to the entire legacy of black separation theology and Al Sharpton and also there’s a mysterious Michelle Obama whitey tape? Despite the fact that much of that we (rightly) ignore, that is, or has been at least, perfectly respectable dialogue in a lot of conservative circles. Read National Review, read Jonah Goldberg and Mark Steyn, listen to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. Check out at least a portion or the tea party protesters. These people aren’t racists in the cross-burning sense of it, and in fact I think his ethnic and cultural background are as important in this as his race—the mere fact of his existence and background is practically designed to drive people like Mark Steyn and others harping on the “Islamization” of Europe/the world whatever up the wall and through the roof, by his mere existence (independent of his policies), and for those who buy into the notion that we are in the middle of a racial/religious war (more people than you’d think), wherein we must eradicate Islam (which even guys like Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs sees as being the heart of the matter for many).
But if your argument is that the fact that Obama is black and an ethnic to boot doesn’t play in to an almost pathological and frantic desire to define him as an “Other“, to push him out of the headspace we have reserved for “regular” politicians and instead put him into another division entirely, closer to where illegal immigrants, muslims, Communists, and space aliens sit, then I think you’re trying to will yourself into believing that rather than looking at it with clear eyes.
It is, of course, unfair to paint anti-Obama criticism in its general sense with that brush, and those that do should be rightly castigated for it. But it’s equally unfair to paint all people broaching or trying to discuss this (very real) subject with the “you’re just trying to call all critics racists!” brush as well. I think you can have those two separate conversations, and boo on the folks on both sides (and they are on both sides) that have decided not to.
Comment by Brad — 9/15/2009 @ 9:13 am
Joe Wilson engaged in a behavior that was practiced by Congressional Democrats against his white predecessor, and by Congressional Republicans against his white predecessor. There is, therefore, no basis at all for Dowd’s assertion that the behavior is racially motivated. Thimbles is right; it is characteristic of the tone of the political debate over the past decade.
Obama confronted a birther movement. Bush confronts claims that his administration deliberately blew up the WTC and killed three thousand people. Clinton confronted claims that he had Vince Foster assassinated. Again: there is no basis, when you examine recent context, to assert that birthers are motivated by race. They are motivated by a political desire to de-legitimize the President, and every President from this point on is going to confront similar lunacy.
Are there racists among Obama’s critics? By definition I am sure there must be, simply because any given racist is virtually certain to oppose the Obama presidency. Can one extrapolate to the claim that a substantial portion of tea party protesters are racists? Not if one is sane.
And is that what Obama’s supporters are trying to do? Yes, it is. Full stop. Dowd is quite explicit about it. Sullivan (who has lost his mind) is only marginally more subtle; he’s now presuming, without the benefit of any actual training, to psychoanalyze entire groups of people none of whom he has ever met.
The discussion of race where the Obama protesters are concerned is not productive in any way, shape, or form. If you want to discuss individual actions, feel free. But mw has been correct on this from the very beginning. This is a sideshow. It’s an attempt to de-legitimize Obama’s political opponents and marginalize perfectly legitimate policy objections to the democratic agenda. It is race hucksterism of the Al Sharpton variety.
The difference is, when Sharpton practices it, nobody suggests that we ought to have “two conversations”, one of which is about his allegations. We react with scorn. As well we should. Accusations of racism are as blunt and ugly a tool as exists in American politics. It has been disgusting how quickly Obama’s supporters have resorted to this.
Comment by Rojas — 9/15/2009 @ 10:04 am
I’m not sure why you have so much invested in categorical denial that race plays any role in cultural and political reactions to Obama, full stop. It strikes me as wishful naivety.
Look, attempts to play the racism card to de-legitimize political dissent against President Obama is, unquestionably, a bad thing (though weirdly you seem to take it as a given and something we should ignore and dismiss when flowing in the other direction; you’re doing the same thing in reverse). Nobody can disagree with that, I don’t think. And of course any President has critics, and any President has conspiracy theorists. In that sense, I’m not sure that Obama has it worse than anybody. If it’s not one thing it’s another. But that’s a far cry from simply categorically denying that there are cultural elements in play here that revolve around race and muslimness. The subtext is not always racial, and even when it is that’s not to say it is totally or even mostly racial. But you’re committing a pretty big fallacy here to extend the argument to imply that racial subtext is non-existent save of the easily-identifiable cross-burning kind of racism*
I agree with you on Joe Wilson, although that certainly has a race element to it as well, just one that has nothing to do with Obama (instead: Mexicans). The tea parties this weekend represented as many motives as people, but I think the cultural package of Obama, including his race and background, was certainly a very big, even dominating factor (and by the way, lest you start getting angry that people dare lump in the tea partyists with anything but William Buckley style conservatism, let’s remember why it was held on 912 in the first place). My argument here is not that opposition to Obama is BY DEFINITION racial, and of course anybody that makes that argument is being a dumbass at best or huckster at worst. But your kicking and screaming to try to sever of the matter from all appraisals of the opposition leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
OF COURSE race and muslim-ness plays a factor. I would argue a pretty big factor. There is a significant chunk of America that views Obama not as a politician that they have a mainstream political disagreement with, but as something closer to a fucking space alien who is trying to enslave us all. Glenn Beck (and other rather mainstream voices) think Obama hates all white people and is out to enact some kind of racial vengence. Mark Steyn (and other mainstream voices, including at one point the cover of National Review) think he is a Manchurian candidate for radical Islam. A plurality of Republican voters, in a lot of states think he is not an American at all, and if you think that’s a value-neutral misguided observation on their part you’re crazy. Some in Congress believe him to be a communist/Marxist/socialist, and that’s not just a word of invective interchangeable with liberal or a word of description meant to identify his political ideology, but rather a holdover of all the connotations it was meant to convey at the height of its Red Scare use. When other Democratic politicians (think Bill Clinton or John Edwards) try for liberal economic or health care reforms, we get a lot of bitching about tax and spend big government liberals. When Obama does it, the most popular right wing mouth pieces and many sitting congressmen argue that we are looking at a President who is instantiating a dictatorial tyranny, and they don’t mean that rhetorical but literally, people start showing up at campaign events with assault rifles, and mainstream media pundits openly allude to the impending need to take up arms against the government. The guy that does a lot of that, by the way (Glenn Beck), just brought 500,000 people or so to Washington D.C. this weekend under those auspices. Maybe it’s just a reflection of our political discourse (and it is surely that too, even mostly that), but I have a hard time buying that racial and cultural subtexts don’t play into that.
These things do not overpower the substantive opposition to Obama, but they’re there, and I would argue they are mainstream cultural subtexts within the Republican opposition writ large. Now, making that observation and USING it is another thing entirely, and I’m more or less with you in that, in that I believe they’re mainstream subtexts but I don’t particularly care and don’t particularly want to fight the battles there. But closing your eyes and sticking your thumb in your eyes or trying to shove it into a tiny corner I do not agree with.
Sullivan, who has gotten as erratic as Ebert, is not really helpful to read on this subject, but Ta-Nehisi Coates sure is. Here’s a thoughtful musing on the subject.
*On this point, by the way, can I just add that one of the unexamined premises on the subject of race that cheeses me off the most is the lazy assumption that racism only exists among those that consciously identify with hating black people? Racism, like sexuality and a lot of other things, is not a binary—it’s not that you either are, or are not, racist. It is a spectrum, and a very broad one at that. There is a nearly infinite range of possible reactions and inclinations on the question of race; it is certainly not true that there’s a line where, if you’re on the right side of it, race doesn’t matter, and if you’re on the other, you’re a Klansman.
Comment by Brad — 9/15/2009 @ 10:53 am
Don’t get me wrong Rojas. Just because I said it was only a symptom of the disease doesn’t mean I’m discrediting it’s role in the disease’s progression. The disease is coming from media enabled populists and freedom works like organizations who would say anything to tear down the enemy. They are the graduates of the Lee Atwater, Nixon, Southern Strategy school of politics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#Atwater_on_the_Southern_Strategy
they don’t believe the stuff they are saying and when you see Dick Armey talk (god he is slime)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8Sac_DZ2Sk
you know that to him it’s just a game
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN7D-oixVWk
“Politics is inane, take what amusements you can from them but don’t take them seriously.”
like he’s Glen Beck with a frontal lobe.
These people breed the idea that they are the real America and that other segments of the population are from an alien, liberal, pro-minority, false America. And their party is the Democratic party. And their masters are the overlords of ACORN and Louis Farrakhan. They don’t believe in the stereotypes, but they’re there amongst the populations they want to motivate, and the evidence is clear that they are major theme in these protests:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UASS1qFAIQ8
The suckers believe every damn thing they hear. They are conditioned for it.
If it was a white democrat, they would be waving berets because of his french background or they would find some thing else for the populists to push. The alien narrative shows up every time. The strategy never changes because it works.
They latched on to the word Czars for Christ sake.
They want the population to feel paranoid and stoking race fears and works.
This is much different then the liberal push back against Bush. He was elected under curious conditions. He did lie to the public and congress. He did try to stop investigations into 9-11. He did put awful and radical people into powerful positions and he did use those positions to improve the political fortunes of the political party.
There weren’t the corporate funded, disinformation industries on the left as there were on the right. There were lots of grassroots people who were assembling collections of disturbing information and presenting it to the public, there were lots of people who disliked the president when he allowed New Orleans to drown, but there was no effort like this to walk around with handguns and threaten to spill the blood of tyrants and the like.
The suckers and the clerics who manage them have become a radical movement, unlike the movements that protested Bush, and should be recognized for what they are without damned equivocation.
There are people who believe in the permanent republican majority and will not go quiet when they see that dream die. They will go to what they know, and they know race. They know the fear of the other. The enemy is within.
Comment by thimbles — 9/15/2009 @ 1:31 pm
I made a few errors in the scribe above, because of the late hour, and I am even more convinced I need a skilled editor or, dare to dream, an edit button.
Still, the gist is pretty clear, no?
Comment by thimbles — 9/15/2009 @ 2:02 pm
I still think the “But it’s okay for Bush because he deserved it” argument is about the weakest of Thimbles (presumably, Obama critics feel he deserves it too).
But I will add, in response to Rojas’ Bush comment, that maybe my memory is just a little fuzzy, but I seem to recall Bush getting a relative free pass for his three years in office (save the election itself). He certainly got pockets of pushback for this or that (before 911), but the marches and State of the Union boos and whatnot didn’t begin until his second term, and even when it did it was considered verboten for the media to pick up on the outrage until damn near 2006.
Obama is getting all this, congresspeople comparing his every program (youth service, health care, etc.) to nazi inspired mass genocide, mainstream media figures regularly claiming he’s a power-hungry tyrannical dictator, virtually nobody within mainstream Republicanism being willing to proffer even a meek condemnation of the Limbaugh’s Bachman’s Beck’s et al, and we’re not even into the 9th month. I’m pretty sympathetic to even unhinged opposition, but I think, for people like Sullivan et al, and certainly for me, it’s the sheer drop-of-a-hat nature of it that strikes a discordant tone, and makes me highly suspect that much of it doesn’t necessarily revolve around his policy choices (indeed, a lot of the rhetoric predates it, and as for the rest, I’m fairly convinced that it would have come this fast almost no matter what his policy choices had been).
Comment by Brad — 9/15/2009 @ 2:19 pm
To put that another way, it took two wars, the legalization of torture, Medicare D, “deficits don’t matter”, The Patriot Act, McCain immigration reform, and a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage before people started to really rail against Bush with this kind of passion (or at least for it to be reported).
For Obama, it took a more or less inherited stimulus package (TARP wasn’t his at all) and a pretty damn centrist health care package and suddenly everyone loses their minds. A plurality of Republican voters in many states don’t believe Obama is an American, the most popular Republican talking heads believe he hates white people and has instituted a tyrannical dictatorship, and a few Republican governors even openly flirted with secession and nullification. That does not strike me as par for the course.
Maybe Thimbles is right though and you can chalk it all up to the state of political discourse on the right, and it would have been the same for any Democrat. I think that’s certainly true, to some extent. But I also have a very strong hunch that his being a black man named Barack Hussein Obama has gone a long way, and the sheer unhingement of so much of it strikes me as being of a different kind.
Comment by Brad — 9/15/2009 @ 2:27 pm
Are we finding objection to the act or the basis for the act. Because if you look at just, acts without context, the libs during the Bush years seem to have acted just the same as the conservatives during Clinton and Obama.
But I think the basis of our protests were a lot more objective on the whole than those derived from Drudge Reports, American Spectators, and Glen Beck rants.
And I think our reactions were a bit more considered, especially when we knew we could get detained for wearing the wrong slogan on a t-shirt.
So I don’t like it when people equate what we did with what conservatives do based on a lot less cause and a lot more delusions.
As This Modern World puts it:
http://www.salon.com/comics/tomo/2009/09/08/tomo/
Comment by thimbles — 9/15/2009 @ 3:22 pm
Heh. +1 on that Modern World linkage.
Comment by Brad — 9/15/2009 @ 3:24 pm
As to Sullivan and race baiting and the GOP et al:
He’s not wrong. Witness both Malkin and Limbaugh taking the non-story of some white high school student somewhere getting beat up by a couple of black high school students and immediately making it into, in their words, an issue of “Obama administration” and “Obama’s America”.
These are, respectively, the most popular right-wing blogger and most popular right-wing radio host and, dollars to donuts, the most popular right-wing television host (“President Obama hates white people”) will jump right in. Two things:
1. How can you read those reactions and NOT say race is a huge subtext in Obama oppositional politics…
2. …and how can you say that the likes of Malkin, Limbaugh, and Beck are not, at the very least, significant leaders of the opposition? Unlike, say, Truthers, this isn’t a tiny fringe we’re talking about. This is as mainstream as it gets.
The more I think about it, the more I’m leaning with Thimbles on this one. That Modern World sums it up pretty well. I think we all might wish that these are just fringe nutters, but the truth is these are the most powerful right-wing voices going right now. And I think we all might wish that this were perfectly equivocal with the sort of garden-variety partisan opportunism that any President would get regardless of party, race, or any factors beyond policy. But that’s a polite fiction, at best.
Comment by Brad — 9/15/2009 @ 9:27 pm
I too am leaning with Hugo Thimbles on this. Caveat: With respect to out blog friend DWS, the concept of a satirical post assessing all opposition to Obama as race based requires that the people referenced as actually say that. In this case, it seems quite a strawman.
On the gripping hand: There is, to my mind, a clear racial, nativist, and fear-of-the-other aspect to the more aggressively voiced oppositional memes. It is the Southern Strategy on populist steroids.
Comment by Jack — 9/15/2009 @ 10:02 pm
Waldermort covers another angle on this topic that I see in the the protest rants, the aspect of taking from one side – the productive side – and giving to the other side – the lazy, no good, parasite side.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/09/14/resentment/index.html
(He also talks about the Clinton persecutions:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/09/12/conservatives/index.html )
I see how some can use that language as a racial dog whistle, but what I see more of is the mainstreaming of another, more ethnically diverse narrative which is similar to the libertarian movement but is vastly more stupid.
And that’s the Randian, greed is good, screw the commons and the parasites hanging on the lower rungs, narrative which is the screed of sociopaths and investment bankers who believe themselves oh so very special. http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/randy-conservatives
A recent Johnathan Chait piece
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/wealthcare-0
This is not to deny the racial elements, but I think the group defined as parasites has gotten more ecumenical over the last 40 years.
But why does this narrative have such power when the counter narrative is “One Nation. United we stand.”
Krugman says it’s income inequality:
When incomes become stratified and scarcity sets in, people don’t feel unified and they want to keep what’s theirs. And they don’t want to give up what they have to “people that don’t deserve it” even if they are in the set of the undeserving. The real undeserving who receive the lion’s share of benefits are never the focus of hostility because of the peasant mentality:
http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/04/14/americas-peasant-mentality/
that those guys are the “producers” and never the “parasites”.
Obama had an opportunity to change that narrative and came really close in some of his speeches following the Lehman Brothers collapse, but he dropped it because he wanted to incorporate the criminals into his consensus.
Man. Are we sick of post partisan consensus yet?
Comment by thimbles — 9/16/2009 @ 12:34 am
On cue, a screed about consensus abuse:
That was a bit Hayekian.
Comment by thimbles — 9/16/2009 @ 8:42 am
@Brad,
A few random notes.
First, you offer an interesting requirement for satire. Should I assume by extension that that the Irish should have been shown to actually to be selling their children to the English to be cooked and eaten as a solution the “Irish overpopulation problem” before Jonathon Swift wrote “A modest proposal”? No need to answer. I just appreciate the opportunity to compare myself to Jonathan Swift.
BTW – this is an example of the strawman you offer repeatedly throughout this thread:
No one – not Rojas, not me, is “categorically denying that race plays any role”. Pure strawman.
This is the problem with the argument over the role of racism in the opposition to Obama from both sides. It always seems to immediately devolve to strawman accusations of the other side of the argument. Anytime this argument (or characterization of the opponents argument) is expressed in terms of absolutes (as you do in the example above) it is a false statement setting up a strawman.
Of course racism exists. Of course it is a factor. Of course racism is present in some of the opposition to Obama. The logical leap comes next, when you seem to want to imply that it is a primary or driving force in the opposition to Obama.
The non-strawman argument is about whether it is necessary to invoke racism to understand and explain the level of opposition to Obama and his policies. You seem to think it cannot be explained unless racism is involved. I think the bulk of the opposition is completely consistent the kind of partisan opposition and vehemence seem by both Democrats and Republicans in recent administrations.
The comparison to the first three years of the GWB administration does not hold water. First, GWB did virtually nothing in his first nine months in office, except get his cabinet in place, promote a new “star-wars” missile defense system,and ignore Richard Clarke’s warnings about Bin Laden. His popularity was dropping and his administration was being presented in the media as incompetent. Then we were attacked. Once we were attacked all bets are off. The country rallied behind the President as it always does. You cannot compare that period of time to anything else except the period of time after Pearl Harbor.
Obama, by contrast, in his first nine months has quadrupled the deficit, rammed through a trillion dollar pork laden stimulus bill that does not stimulate, aggressively pushed a massive energy tax that has passed the house, taken control of 2/3 of the domestic car industry, fired CEO’s in the private sector, bailed out Wall street investment banks to the tune of another trillion or so, sought the power to control compensation, and is now aggressively pushing to add yet another $1T of spending on health care entitlements. Frankly I don’t understand why opposition to these policies is not even more widespread, vocal, and strident.
Racism is very real and is a very serious charge to level at anyone. The word and the charge is trivialized by those who must invoke imaginary words (like Dowd) or psychological mumbo-jumbo (like Sullivan) to find it. No one is well served by those who find it under every Obama opposition rock. Net net – my thesis is simple. It is there it is real but you don’t need it to explain the opposition to this presidents policies.
Postscript: After the relentless (and mostly deserved) Sullivan bashing in this thread, I feel compelled to (somewhat) rise to his defense. He accepted the trackbacks from my piece on his racism posts, which is as close as he gets to permitting unedited critical comments. As a result I got quite a bit more traffic for the post than usual on my widely unread blog, and for that I am grateful.
Comment by mw — 9/16/2009 @ 11:51 am
Heh, you’re right in your characterization of how susceptible both sides are to straw men in this one. Example: I don’t want to imply, nor had it occurred to me to imply, that racism is the “primary or driving force in the opposition to Obama.” I am saying it is a major factor.
Let me reiterate one thing that I should have put front and center instead of foot-noting: part of the problem with discussing this sort of thing, and part of the reason why both sides are susceptible to straw men, is the idea that racism is a binary. It’s either racist or it’s not racist. That’s the real straw man.
I would NOT argue that the opposition to Obama is racist (note the construction). As you say, there are very good reasons to oppose Obama, and there is opposition to any president. But where you’re taking it is, since opposition would exist for a white president, and since it exists for a black president, said opposition has no element of racism in it. That’s the seductive logical fallacy. The other side does it too (say, Jimmy Carter): since I am sure that racism plays a role in the opposition, the opposition is based on racism. That’s not true either, and for the same reason.
The better way to state my position is I believe that race is a factor in the opposition, a factor which colors its nature, its intensity, its texture. I even declined to put a moral value on it—i.e. I’m even consciously trying to avoid making that a worse/better comparison (i.e. since opposition to Obama has a racial element, it is worse than opposition to Bill Clinton). I obviously lean that way, but in terms of the argument I’m making it’s not really germane. It is neither worse nor better. It is just different.
One need not be a racist to have your views affected by racism. I’d use myself as an example. I don’t consider myself racist, and I don’t think anybody I know would characterize me as such either. But, I freely admit to having a lot of strains and natural inclinations towards prejudicial thinking (either justified or, often, unjustified) based on race. I don’t have to burn a cross in his lawn to view a black man as, in some way, fundamentally different than me or even, in certain situations, judge a man solely by the color of his skin (which I find, when I’m honest with myself, I frequently do).
How people react to that will differ in as many ways as people differ. For some people, it will lead to an unreasonable lowering of expectations on Obama (the “he’s so articulate!” type of racism). For others, it will mean that, combined with him not being a Republican and having a muslim background, they are simply unable to believe he is an American.
You change any one of those things, you change the nature of the opposition (i.e. if Obama were a Republican it would be different, or if he didn’t have his specific background (Kenya, Indonesian) it would be different, etc.). But it’s not academic, I don’t think, to note that for a healthy segment of the population, he is a decidedly “other” creature. Policy disagreements play to, obviously, but when you add policy disagreements to partisan disagreements to a fundamental disparity in how human he is (or, to put that in less charged fashion, how easily or not easily you can relate to him as a person), that adds a certain character and texture, which, I believe, is substantially informing the opposition.
I DO think if Obama were exactly who he is now, but white, the nature of the opposition would be significantly different. That is my fundamental premise.
Comment by Brad — 9/16/2009 @ 12:40 pm
mw–I like a lot of what you said, and agree with most of it. Here’s my only quibble: you state:
with the implication that the strident and vehement opposition has been primarily to those problems (and I agree that they are serious problems, slthough some were inherited from GWB).
It’s possible that this is only the effect of what the media choose to cover, but much of the vehement opposition I have seen to Obama has been about issues like whether he is secretly a Kenyan citizen or a Muslim.
To be sure, there has been plenty of principled opposition to real and serious policy matters, and I see no reason whatsoever to make racism the obligate source of those objections; it may or may not be involved, but there’s no need to assume it. On the other hand, portraying him as a secret Kenyan/Muslim/whatever–well, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that that kind of opposition is either coming from a) someone who is simply desperate to get rid of him and searching for any attack at all, or b) someone who is afraid of him because he’s not an old white man.
Comment by Talarohk — 9/16/2009 @ 12:46 pm
I guess what I find amazing about this discussion is that we are treating the racism claim about Obama’s opposition as if it were some kind of productive conversation starter.
It isn’t that, nor is it intended to be by those that offer it. It seems to me that whenever and wherever this argument is initiated, those initiating it do so in order to de-legitimize Obama’s opposition in its entirety and stop the policy conversation. Opponents are not portrayed as being influenced by a racial agenda, but as being controlled by it. The entire purpose is to deny them the sanction of reason so that their arguments may be ignored.
And that is garbage. Pure, unadulterated swill. If opposition to the policies of the President is going to be categorized in racial terms, then no national discussion is possible; there can be no negotiation with a fundamentally irrational opponent.
The tenor of the discussion over the last few weeks has put paid to any claim that Obama can be the first “post-racial” president, or any kind of transcendental figure on the issue. His own supporters have demolished that promising myth. I fear that from this point forward the conversation will always be about race–and in America, a conversation about race can’t really be a conversation about much else.
Comment by Rojas — 9/16/2009 @ 1:12 pm
With a lot of help by his public opposition, which is in the thrall of clowns such as Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck.
Ron Paul probably has a set of reasonable objections to the policies Obama has set forth, but he ain’t the one with the microphones. The mobs are inspired by Beck, Limbaugh, Rand, and Jonah Goldberg.
If you don’t want the opposition to be characterized as a circus, you shouldn’t give the clowns center stage. That is what has been done. Why? Because analyzing the actual policy decisions is hard for the news guys to execute and harder for the general public to consume.
Taibbi can do it, Greenwald can execute it (lots of people TL;DR his stuff), but most media personalities are mediocre at actual communication and most politicians are even worse.
The republican strategy is to tell a good story, not to inform. Their stories have distortions of your valid arguments, if not completely made up lies. The protesters who show up at town halls and 9/12 marches then share the contents of their heads, which contain largely made up stories with racial subtexts – if not undeniable racism, and somehow it’s Obama’s fault that the public face of his opposition is ridiculous and racial.
If you want a post-racial culture, tell the public representatives of the conservative movement to stop bringing it up. Your beef is with Beck and company. File your complaints with them, not Obama supporters.
Comment by thimbles — 9/16/2009 @ 2:20 pm
And nobody, in this thread at least, is disagreeing with that, nor have some of the people that, say, mw is quoting. Some people certainly HAVE done that, and indeed fuck them, but I don’t view having a conversation about race as mutually exclusive with having a conversation about policy. Believe it or not you can do both.
However, I don’t believe that because some DO conflate the two, that any bringing up the one is by extension an attempt at suppressing the other.
There ARE racial issues about Obama’s presidency and the opposition to it, just as there ARE policy issues about the same. There exists a Venn diagram of those two things, and for the record I think MOST of both the opposition and support exists within the intersecting area. The extent that that matters is up for debate, of course, but just as you are saying that racial discussion shouldn’t be used as a blunt weapon to stomp out attempts at policy discussion, I am adding that policy disagreement doesn’t vanish the racial element either.
Though for the record, both in the primaries and during his Presidency, I don’t know that I’d be comfortable at pointing the finger at Obama supporters as the ones who make the racial element a live wire. I think the opposition does just as much, and frankly I think they do it a little more, just along the aforementioned spectrum (i.e. when the supporters do it they make it explicit, but when the opponents do it they do it a lot more codedly and perhaps unconsciously). Just as Bush’s Presidency started out with questions about his electoral legitimacy (for which they had a point), Obama’s has started out with questions about his American legitimacy (for which they have rather less of one). The thing is, the fringe left didn’t dictate the terms of the debate to its policy actors (or to the media) in quite the same way that the right does now. And the level of both militancy and vehemency and the mainstream nature of both strikes me as a different animal this go-around and not just “par for the course”.
Comment by Brad — 9/16/2009 @ 2:37 pm
And tried to get ANWR opened up and let California get raped by Enron and took a holiday six months into his term.
As a profoundly unserious president bearing a well founded air of illegitimately after the Florida hijinks and the Supreme Court debacle, the level of protests against him were muted. People felt sorry for the guy because the mean ol’ Clintons stole the W keys from typewriters and ‘trashed the whitehouse’. The media and the supportive public were expecting a new politics free of the scandal and corruption from those nasty Clinton days. Bush had the CEO Cabinet, everyone a millionaire. Happy days were here again.
You don’t remember any of this?
See this is the kind of thing that is annoying about the ‘legit’ arguments people present. You claim Obama has quadrupled the deficit.
That is incorrect. Obama changed the way the budget was being done because Bush kept the Iraq war off budget and did a bunch of other spiffy Arthur Andersen tricks to make the books more solid than they were.
Obama’s deficit also comes after the republican negligence cratered the economy. As I have explained in the past, in a recession government expenses rise and government revenues fall.
In other words, your using Obama’s efforts to try and present honest budgets and respond to an economic Hiroshima to question his economic judgment. Lame argument.
And you claim that the stimulus bill has done nothing by using a time frame only months after it passed. Now most economists are claiming the opposite because the stimulus money is making its way into the economy. However, many economists and progressives made the case it was insufficient to the task and that it would not do enough.
The conservatives pushed to sabotage the most effective parts (gotta have more tax cuts) and weakened the bill so that it did even less. Then conservatives make the claim, after they’ve weakened the bill, that it’s done nothing way too soon. Lame argument.
Global warming. It’s more than about energy taxes, it’s about global warming. What do you suggest? Because the people I know say it’s too weak. (and needs more government/stimulus investment to spur green tech) Lame argument.
2/3rds of the domestic car industry failing in the middle of global economic free fall. Failing in no small part to the credit collapse. It’s not an easy black and white decision when national economic well being and people’s families are at stake. (Sentimental me) Lame Argument.
‘Fired” an incompetent CEO who’s private company came to the government for help. If they want government help, the government sets the conditions. Nobody forced GM to beg, They needed the money. Lame Argument.
Then you got wall street bailouts started by the bush admin and continued under Summers and Geinther. Legitimate argument. The government should have gotten fair value for the money put in as shares (which meant they would have nationalized them ala AIG) or let them die. If they let them die, the global credit system would have collapsed. What would you have done?
By not getting fair value for money, they allowed the same people who ran the banks into the ground using private capital, because of their desire for short term profits and bonuses, to run the banks for more short term profits and to pay out more bonuses, using public money. Maybe instead of writing a law preventing AIG financial products staff from collecting their crap CDS bonuses, they should have taken control of the nationalized entity and told them no bonuses. Maybe they should have a whole bunch of FBI forensic accountants going through culprits books looking for the fraud responsible. But that would be radical and, though we expect Obama to fix everything, we will have a fit if he does anything radical like fire people or have them arrested.
And finally healthcare.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/09/a_number_is_worth_a_thousand_w.html
That’s a mess that takes a trillion over 10 years to fix.
Sunset the Bush tax cuts and you have a trillion to spare.
But, on the other hand, the Healthcare bill is being weakened by Obama’s need for “consensus”. If the shit Max Baucus is producing becomes the framework for law, you’ll have a legitimate argument.
Having a mandate but no cost control / non-profit insurance option to be a member of is the kiss of death for Dems.
So anyways, not to be an asshole but if you want to present legitimate arguments, as contrasted with straw men, really.. study the policies and come up with some. Hucking numbers and facts around removed from context gives you the straw like framework of arguments, but, like the scarecrow of old, they appear to lack brains.
Comment by thimbles — 9/16/2009 @ 3:33 pm
Huh. And here I thought I was simply giving examples of why people might be opposed to Obama other than racism. Well. Thimbles has certainly demolished that argument. So, with all opposition to Obama for any rational reason removed from consideration (execept for the possibly legitimate complaint that he is not liberal enough) – that only leaves… a la Sherlock Holmes… just racism as a plausible reason for opposing Obama or his policies. I am convinced. Thimbles, please reread my original post, only this time I am voluntarily withdrawing any claim on sarcasm or satire. Straight up. This ones for you.
Comment by mw — 9/16/2009 @ 4:02 pm
Sorry, if you were giving examples other people’s straw men and not making a list of valid legitimate anti-obama arguments, then I rescind any personal admonition and leave my counter arguments up for the benefit of the reader.
And thanks for removing the satire and sarcasm. It tends to be patronizing and not productive towards debate.
Isn’t it nice to be having a discussion on facts, just as you intended?
Comment by thimbles — 9/16/2009 @ 4:19 pm
Great. We are in agreement. The only factual basis for understanding anyone who opposes Obama or his policies (other that the legitimate complaint that he is not liberal enough) is that they are racist.
Comment by mw — 9/16/2009 @ 4:42 pm
Heh. Alright, I have to give mw that last round. Right cross haymaker on comment 28.
Comment by Brad — 9/16/2009 @ 6:00 pm
Yes, that’s exactly what I said. It’s nice to see you’ve stopped using straw men and sarcasm. We should do more of these factual discussions.
PS. Quit the attempts at judo. If you just want to throw a bunch of arguments in the air and have no one try to clear it, you have your own blog. Most of the time, people here come prepared to defend their claims.
And if I was the type who just wanted to hear my own voice, I wouldn’t be here. People here disagree with my interpretation of the letter ‘a’, never mind mind my interpretations of economics and politics. I don’t mind disagreement, I just expect solid reasons for it.
I’m sorry if that’s too high an expectation for you.
Comment by thimbles — 9/16/2009 @ 9:41 pm
PS: The paranoid style of American politics
http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/conspiracy_theory/the_paranoid_mentality/the_paranoid_style.html
has a long history.
Comment by thimbles — 9/16/2009 @ 10:46 pm
So, I think we’re long past the point where we’re talking past each other uselessly.
What’s more, on the core issues, I think we’re taking up two different sides of the same Venn Diagram but don’t necessarily agree.
Rojas and mw: I certainly concede that attempts to use discussions of race as ways to delegitimize real policy disagreements is hucksterism, and ought to be treated as such. I also certainly concede that one need not be racist to oppose Obama, and I would guess 99% of those who oppose Obama do so without race being a singular factor.
I would hope you’d be prepared to concede that there IS a racial subtext to the Obama oppositional movement writ large, and that one can attempt to have that discussion without A. delegitimizing policy disagreements, or B. painting with that binary brush I mentioned earlier, that someone is either a racist or not.
I think we’re essentially arguing on our defense mechanisms right now. You guys are automatically heckled by any entry of the word “racism” into a discussion where it may not be the primary issue, or certainly may not be the issue that most concerns you. That’s certainly understandable given the way the race card is played.
My defense mechanism is that I get heckled when I perceive an attempt to shut the door on a discussion of race which, while surely not what you’re saying, is the impression I had been getting. As I keep reiterating, I think there is a very real racial subtext to MOST of the opposition to Obama, but listen very carefully here: that does not mean I believe racial issues is the primary, most important, or even most worthwhile motivating factor. I just think it’s there.
Bear in mind also, it’s mere presence says NOTHING about the value of the specific ideas or policy differences proffered. One can, of course, be a screaming racist and be perfectly right about health care reform (N.b. mostly I am not at all talking about the screaming racist variety of racial subtext, just using it as an example here). One can also be the most colorblind kumbaya American possible and have that lead you down a path of idiotic anti-tribalism tribalism where it concerns policy matters. Those are the two polar extremes, but even anywhere along the rest of the spectrum (where most of us live), that you are influenced by race does not discount your myriad other influences, or the ultimate worth of your idea(l)s.
That said, I will offer one sort of value-laden thought. It is my hunch that the racial subtext does not dominate the opposition, or is even a very conscious element of it, but that it does feed into the militancy, vehemency, and intensity of it. I don’t know that it’s even as an important a contributing factor to it than just the present state of partisan game-playing politics (which I would guess is the chief contributing factor), but it’s there, and it’s significant. That is just a hunch on my part, but it’s not just an academic thought. It directly negotiates into the thought that the present level and character of opposition to Obama is all just a clean ideological division (a thought I sort of advance in my Ron Paul post, or at least play around with), and is not instead a complex soup of factors which includes ideological divisions but also includes a lot of cultural/political/social divisions that are important and sometimes just as important (those might include partisanship/tribalism (the “us vs. them” mentality fed, at least in part, by Obama being very Not Us), racial issues, a sort of kick-back alienation of conservatives freed from the yoke of the Bush years and now metaphorically running naked through the streets that they can argue based on principles again, etc.).
So, about the furthest I am going to go in terms of the significance of the racial subtext is say that it feeds mightily into the intensity of opposition to Obama, in large measure because it dehumanizes him and makes him more of an “Other” in the us vs. them calculation than would be the case if we were talking about, say, a John Edwards type (even accounting for the fact that Edwards would be governing far, far more liberally).
Comment by Brad — 9/17/2009 @ 12:16 pm
The strategy they would use on Edwards, which was the one they used during the Kerry campaign
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-july-15-2004/talking-points
and the one they use on most of their opponents: liberal, out of the mainstream, and throw in some sexual deviancy for spice.
If the economy is good, emphasize social values and the how the liberals are fighting a culture war.
If the economy is bad, talk about how how the liberals are spending your money on the lazy and shiftless.
They will always make you an “other” and find a stupid wedge to stick in your gut somewhere and hammer it in. That’s how the GOP organization rolls. Total war.
With people like that, I wouldn’t want to engage even their legitimate issues because I know they’re not interested in legitimate discussion. Label them back and walk away, they aren’t interested in compromise.
Though, in the spirit of accuracy, I would not categorically label them racist.
I’m much more comfortable with the Van Joneian epithet ‘assholes’.
PS> If people are going to get touchy about certain parties being unfairly labeled racist, can we see some criticism about other parties who are being way more prolific with socialist, communist, fascist, nazi, radical, terrorist, etc?
Rojas and others really seem to hate things a bit more when the dems do it. From the republicans, all savagery is expected, but from the dems we expect better. “Rise above it, you’re supposed to be idealistic. I’m so disappointed.”
I think both sides could do with some improvement, but one side has earned a few kicks in the pelvis. I don’t see that often mentioned.
And I suspect it has something to do with racism.
Comment by thimbles — 9/17/2009 @ 1:56 pm
If anyone wants to hear about how the stimulus and the the economy is actually doing under Obama, they should listen to this:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2009/09/obama_economics_in_english.html
I have had a lot of criticism for the Obama economic team (Summers and Geinther, looking at you) but Austan Goolsbee is pretty damn cool:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-august-11-2009/austan-goolsbee
Comment by thimbles — 9/19/2009 @ 8:51 am
A very good response, I think, from The New Republic, taking up for the quotes being objected to above and coming to almost precisely the same conclusion I did, although unsurprisingly much more concisely.
That’s what I meant when I kept caveating with “keep in mind, when I say racism plays a role, I mean that in a value neutral way” statements, expressed a lot better.
Comment by Brad — 9/21/2009 @ 1:50 pm
Then we’re going to need to call it something else. Because “racism” has a very specific cache and connotation as a political accusation.
Comment by Rojas — 9/21/2009 @ 1:58 pm
Well sure, which is why, I think, context matters, and why I’ve been bending over backwards to try to paint it in the way I mean it and not as an accusation of a cross-burning nigger-hating bigot (and a lot of the quoted stuff, I thought, tried to get the point across too, racism as a cultural context versus a cartoon evil, but obviously the extent that that is effective depends on the extent to which the reader is pre-cocked in a specific way to the entire subject matter).
Although, to be honest, I don’t think the problem is the word, but the binary thinking that goes with it. Racism, as a concept, is just fine…we just need to think of it as a spectrum rather than an on/off switch.
Now that I think about it, we need to move away from a black or white interpretation of racism. :)
Comment by Brad — 9/21/2009 @ 2:13 pm
Anyone who is a student of conservative politics and/or conservative history should watch this:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/09182009/watch.html
and read this:
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/conservatism-dead
and give your impressions.
Mine are quite favorable.
Comment by thimbles — 9/22/2009 @ 10:08 am
Thimbles, I think part of the problem is you argue/debate just like Jonah Goldberg: simply label anyone’s disagreement as “lame”, then move on to aggressive condescension, and finally top it all off with an indirect, though obvious, ad hom. (Which, by the way, is somthing that you quick to point out in others). Prime example (and but one of many)
It is simply annoying as hell, and frankly it makes people take you less seriously. I both love and hate reading your stuff; love it because I know there is something to be learned from a point of vew that I might not always consider, and hate it for the reasons given above. This of course makes me react badly, and thats on me, but still, just saying.
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