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It’s Not About Race

Texan

Well-known member
September 18, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
No, It’s Not About Race
By DAVID BROOKS

WASHINGTON

You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I go running several times a week. My favorite route, because it’s so flat, is from the Lincoln Memorial to the U.S. Capitol and back. I was there last Saturday and found myself plodding through tens of thousands of anti-government “tea party” protesters.

They were carrying “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, “End the Fed” placards and signs condemning big government, Barack Obama, socialist health care and various elite institutions.

Then, as I got to where the Smithsonian museums start, I came across another rally, the Black Family Reunion Celebration. Several thousand people had gathered to celebrate African-American culture. I noticed that the mostly white tea party protesters were mingling in with the mostly black family reunion celebrants. The tea party people were buying lunch from the family reunion food stands. They had joined the audience of a rap concert.

Because sociology is more important than fitness, I stopped to watch the interaction. These two groups were from opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrum. They’d both been energized by eloquent speakers. Yet I couldn’t discern any tension between them. It was just different groups of people milling about like at any park or sports arena.

And yet we live in a nation in which some people see every conflict through the prism of race. So over the past few days, many people, from Jimmy Carter on down, have argued that the hostility to President Obama is driven by racism. Some have argued that tea party slogans like “I Want My Country Back” are code words for white supremacy. Others say incivility on Capitol Hill is magnified by Obama’s dark skin.

Well, I don’t have a machine for peering into the souls of Obama’s critics, so I can’t measure how much racism is in there. But my impression is that race is largely beside the point. There are other, equally important strains in American history that are far more germane to the current conflicts.

For example, for generations schoolchildren studied the long debate between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians. Hamiltonians stood for urbanism, industrialism and federal power. Jeffersonians were suspicious of urban elites and financial concentration and believed in small-town virtues and limited government. Jefferson advocated “a wise and frugal government” that will keep people from hurting each other, but will otherwise leave them free and “shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”

Jefferson’s philosophy inspired Andrew Jackson, who led a movement of plain people against the cosmopolitan elites. Jackson dismantled the Second Bank of the United States because he feared the fusion of federal and financial power.

This populist tendency continued through the centuries. Sometimes it took right-wing forms, sometimes left-wing ones. Sometimes it was agrarian. Sometimes it was more union-oriented. Often it was extreme, conspiratorial and rude.

The populist tendency has always used the same sort of rhetoric: for the ordinary people and against the fat cats and the educated class; for the small towns and against the financial centers.

And it has always had the same morality, which the historian Michael Kazin has called producerism. The idea is that free labor is the essence of Americanism. Hard-working ordinary people, who create wealth in material ways, are the moral backbone of the country. In this free, capitalist nation, people should be held responsible for their own output. Money should not be redistributed to those who do not work, and it should not be sucked off by condescending, manipulative elites.

Barack Obama leads a government of the highly educated. His movement includes urban politicians, academics, Hollywood donors and information-age professionals. In his first few months, he has fused federal power with Wall Street, the auto industry, the health care industries and the energy sector.

Given all of this, it was guaranteed that he would spark a populist backlash, regardless of his skin color. And it was guaranteed that this backlash would be ill mannered, conspiratorial and over the top — since these movements always are, whether they were led by Huey Long, Father Coughlin or anybody else.

What we’re seeing is the latest iteration of that populist tendency and the militant progressive reaction to it. We now have a populist news media that exaggerates the importance of the Van Jones and Acorn stories to prove the elites are decadent and un-American, and we have a progressive news media that exaggerates stories like the Joe Wilson shout and the opposition to the Obama schools speech to show that small-town folks are dumb wackos.

“One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy,” the economic blogger Arnold Kling writes. “The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice versa.”

It’s not race. It’s another type of conflict, equally deep and old.



http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/opinion/18brooks.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
 

Texan

Well-known member
...pointing at racism as the chief source of rage is a trap into which liberals have fallen too often, for reasons we'd better face quickly.


This Anger Isn't Just in Black and White

By Jim Sleeper
Sunday, September 20, 2009

Jimmy Carter is a southerner who grew up witnessing Jim Crow segregation in all its forms, so when he told NBC News that he believes "an overwhelming portion" of the public animosity directed at President Obama recently is "based on the fact that he is a black man," many Americans listened. But pointing at racism as the chief source of rage is a trap into which liberals have fallen too often, for reasons we'd better face quickly.

Racism is only one of many factors driving the backlash against the president in town hall meetings and in demonstrations on Capitol Hill. Obama has been right to discount it, because a white president would feel some scorching heat, too. Just hours before Rep. Joe Wilson's brazen "You lie!" interrupted Obama's address to a joint session of Congress, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court welcomed arguments against restricting business-corporate funding of "Hillary: The Movie" -- a relic of rage on the presidential primary campaign trail that presaged what Hillary Rodham Clinton would be enduring now were she, not Obama, in the White House.

But sexism and racism aren't the only pretexts; recall the swift-boating of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) during the 2004 campaign and the unending conservative rage against former president Bill Clinton. Republican House leader John A. Boehner got close to the truth when he told ABC News last spring that people he met at "taxpayer protests" are "scared to death . . . about the future . . . and the facts that the American dream may not be alive for their kids and grandkids."

Boehner lacks credible answers for these Americans, who are viscerally and legitimately afraid that they'll never again make $28 an hour, afford health insurance or own a home after losing the one they're in. It's the absence of honest answers, more than racism, that's turned out people brandishing signs that liken Obama to Hitler and demanding, with stupefying illogic, that government keep its hands off their Medicare. Are liberals going to deliver the answers the other side does not -- or will they be sidetracked, yet again, by their constant preoccupation with identity politics?

Fear and rage that ran far deeper than race were palpable at the 2008 Republican National Convention, where Sen. John McCain -- who, to his credit, refused to trade on racism in his campaign -- found himself coping anyway with a large contingent of young delegates whose repertoire of political expression consisted mainly of shouting "Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay!"

No matter how subtle, subdued or dignified McCain's appeals to patriotism in his acceptance speech, the chorus grew so loud and insistent that at times it seemed an eruption of the GOP's militaristic id, and even the war-hero candidate looked annoyed.

Yet it would be a mistake to feel disdain for these guys, for their buffoonish chanting was only one side of them, and not necessarily the dominant one. They haven't curdled into fascists, as some on the left seemed to think. More likely, the thwarted decency in them is trying to find a political home, a sense of civic standing that is slipping away.

And now, such individuals are looking for someone or something to blame. With encouragement from Rush Limbaugh and some Republican leaders, they're taking the path of least resistance and blaming an easy mark -- a government they can vote out of office, a leader who looks unfamiliar -- rather than the immense, private bureaucracies they're beholden to, can't touch at the polls and will find even harder to resist if John Roberts's Supreme Court voids restrictions on corporate "free speech" in campaigns.

Some of them listen to Limbaugh while commuting to work or driving anxiously from one job interview to another, and they recycle his wisdom as their own at the bar, the family dinner table or the diner in western Massachusetts where I sometimes have breakfast. Racism, sexism, Islam, "big government" -- anything will serve, if it spares them having to face being had by the unaccountable powers and riptides that are destroying their dreams.

Wilson's "conduct was asinine, but I think it would be asinine no matter what the color of the president," said Dick Harpootlian, who, far from being Wilson's apologist, is the former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party.

Condemning racism in this context, as President Carter and many well-meaning liberals do, won't deflect the demagoguery and folly that foreclose bold new strategies in the provision and regulation of capital, health care, energy and defense.

The mistake of crying racism is especially tempting to upscale, influential liberals who, no less than protesters on the right, are ducking the true causes of dispossession, fear and rage: the premises and practices of financial capital, predatory consumer marketing and a national-security state boondoggling.

Liberals who've done well by those practices aren't always serious about redressing their inequities and disruptions. But they can't bring themselves to defend them very wholeheartedly, either. So they grasp at symbolic gestures against racism that short-circuit political currents for necessary change as surely as Rush does.

Remember the moralistic passion plays over the dubious black church "arson epidemic"? Or the supposed "ethnic cleansing" in congressional redistricting in which black incumbents actually won in majority-white districts? That politics of "anti-racist" paroxysm eclipsed the real challenges, which have only worsened since then.

Carter is hardly wrong to condemn racism when he sees it in the protests. But to blame racism for an "overwhelming portion" of the fear and rage rising around us would be to consign legitimately frightened and angry people to demagogues and shut out real change. That would be a strategic blunder, and ultimately a moral one, too.



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/17/AR2009091703598.html?sub=AR
 

hypocritexposer

Well-known member
“One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy,” the economic blogger Arnold Kling writes. “The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice versa.”

this "crisis" will only last until 2010, but does it matter?

to a certain degree you can almost see an illegitimate Congress in the eyes of this administration, with all these czars.

Wide open bills, that are being controlled/massaged by the POTUS, after they are passed.
 
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