The Elephant In The Room

NOTE: Apologies for the small font in the second half of today's entry; I have been unable to fix it. Use your browser's Zoom feature to make the type bigger and easier to read. -CK

The July 19/26 issue of The Nation features a series of brief essays on the economic theme of "Inequality in America and What to Do About It." The authors include Dean Baker, Jeff Madrick, Katherine Newman and David Pedulla, Orlando Patterson, Robert Reich, and Matt Yglesias. All are worth reading and make good -- if predictable -- recommendations such as raising the top marginal tax rate, taxing financial assets, additional stimulus, competitive trade policy, and financial aid to education. Reading the essays, though, I couldn't help but think of the poem about the blind men and the elephant: Each essay accurately described the animal, but none got to the true nature of the beast.

As a boy, I liked connect-the-dots puzzles. As the pictures emerged, I learned to discern patterns and trends. For example, consider the teabagger "movement":

• comprised almost exclusively of conservative whites
• reduces the Constitution to the 2nd and 10th Amendments (states' rights)
• refers to the president, clearly a mainstream liberal, in overwrought code words like "socialist"
• reacts with over-the-top hysteria to a health care bill grounded in old-school Republican policy
• dismisses the stimulus bill, which included tax cut for the middle-class, as "porkulus"
• blames the financial meltdown on Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the people who took out predatory loans rather than the institutions that made them
• supports the Arizona anti-immigrant law and blames only President Obama for the undocumented workers in the country
• assumes as an article of faith that the president hates white people (including, presumably, his loving mother and grandparents)

When I connect the dots, I see a gang of whites angry that President Obama is (supposedly) transferring hard-earned white wealth to lazy, undeserving, and often illegal minorities. Moreover, they want to arm themselves to prepare for the virtual (in their minds) certainty that Obama's government will come after them. (Think about the Oklahoman who want to form an official state militia to fight off the government.)


Ronald Reagan, that master of coded language, told the American people that government had become the problem. He hearkened back to the Puritan ideal of a shining city on a hill, invoking a time when American life was simple and uncomplicated by vexing social issues. What he meant -- and what many unquestionably believed -- was that government had stopped working for the heirs of this America, and that it was only interested in spending their tax dollars on undeserving welfare queens. The solution, Reagan claimed, was to remove the government from everyday life by drastically reducing taxes and eliminating regulations on businesses that only meant well, leave the unworthy to their own devices, and let society take its natural course. All would benefit, especially the dependent poor who would learn to stand on their own two feet. "Poor," of course, was one of many conservative code words for "minority."

It's unquestionably true that Reaganism enabled a very few Americans have become obscenely wealthy on the backs of everyone else. But it also encouraged the gut conviction in a huge swath of white voters that anything the federal government does benefits minorities at someone else's expense. And, the right-wing media fosters and reinforces this conviction with an assortment of code words (like "socialist") and the cynical argument that it is liberals and minorities who are the real racists. These voters have become impervious to any argument that the rich are screwing them; rather than blame fellow whites, they'd rather believe that blacks and browns are at fault. This is the true legacy of Reaganism.

The Nation ennobles this repulsive development by blessing it as "populist rage," when in plain fact it is racism, that eternal scourge of the American Dream. Racism has taken a new form wherein the advantaged imagine oppression at the hands of the disenfranchised, but it's racism nonetheless. Psychologically subtle and twisted, perhaps, and galling, but as plain as the sneer on Glenn Beck's face.


Until and unless progressives shift the terrain of the public political dialogue from race to class, they'll have to settle for frustrating incremental gains. Right now, progressives are at a distinct disadvantage: Their most obvious asset -- the president -- symbolizes what Orlando Patterson calls African-American success in the public sphere; his existence contradicts the very idea of racism as most people understand it. Moreover, the right has become adept at throwing the racism argument back in progressive faces: It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to stick and distract, and be constant and loud. The endless pounding of the essentially the same specious comments on news stories and blogs reveals a concentrated effort to accomplish no less than a redefinition of the term "racism." 


I don't know how progressives change the discourse, or even if they can. For starters, though, it would help if those progressives who occupy their time attacking President Obama would figure out that the real enemy is on the right.  But in the end it comes down to this: Too many people in this country would rather be bigoted and anti-intellectual than better off economically. In fact they're proud of it. It's not a pretty picture, but it's what we've become...


Don't miss the Media Matters take on the ridiculous assertion that the Obama DOJ won't investigate black intimidation of white voters...


Robert Reich needs to get out more. He's a good man with an unmatched grasp of policy, but he regularly falls into the progressive trap of believing that good, rational ideas will inevitably carry the day because, as he writes in his Nation article, "...we are a sensible nation." On what does he base this assertion?...

Gosh, what a surprise...

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose...