With U.S troops poised on the outskirts of Baghdad, a surreal political phenomenon is unmistakable: So far the loudest establishment voices criticizing the Bush administration’s war plan belong to retired generals, unnamed active military leaders and former Republican officials, while most prominent Democrats either proclaim their support, or remain silent.
Yes, Rep. Dennis Kucinich has called for an end to the bombing, and hundreds of thousands of Americans have demonstrated against the war. But most leading Democrats have muzzled themselves. When Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle noted, accurately, on the eve of the war that the conflict was a result of President Bush having “failed so miserably at diplomacy,” Republicans savaged him. Attack dog Tom DeLay told him to shut up in French (labeling war critics “French” is the slur du jour), and Daschle basically did. The day after the first attacks on Baghdad, House Democratic leader and war critic Nancy Pelosi shocked her San Francisco district by voting in favor of a resolution that expressed “unequivocal support and appreciation” for the way Bush handled the war and its buildup. “The [Democrats'] rhetoric has toned down considerably, which I greatly appreciate,” a smug DeLay told the New York Times this week.
On Wednesday Massachusetts senator and presidential candidate John Kerry broke his self-imposed silence on the war and took up Daschle’s critique, deploring Bush’s “end-run around the U.N.” and calling for “regime change” in the U.S. But when reporters asked him about his remarks, the senator immediately began to backtrack. “It is possible that the word ‘regime change’ is too harsh. Perhaps it is.” Kerry’s backsliding wasn’t as silly as Madonna pulling her antiwar video because, duh, she apparently hadn’t thought about how it might seem once the war actually began, but it was a strange campaign misstep that overmatched Democrats can ill afford.
Why are so many war critics flummoxed by talking about the war? Isn’t it possible to critique the president without giving aid and comfort to the enemy? And is pointing out the effort’s shortcomings the same as glorying in them? I’ve been struggling with these questions since the war began. I’m not an antiwar Democrat; I’m just anti-this war, at this time. I think Saddam is a bigger menace than most of the left seems to; I think his flouting U.N. resolutions merited a tough international response; I thought the world was on its way to crafting one when the Bush administration pulled the plug on diplomacy. Yet even though I opposed its timing, once the war commenced I reflexively wished it would be over quickly.
It’s been a long two weeks. At first it seemed like it might be the cakewalk conservatives promised — Saddam was rumored dead, Iraqis were surrendering, tanks were on the move. Then the coalition bogged down in Umm Qasr, Basra and Nasiriya, and barely touched the north. Now, momentum’s swung back again, with U.S. troops already patrolling Saddam International Airport, but they still could be a long way from victory. And while I didn’t root for the administration’s setbacks in the war’s early going, I have to admit they served to prove its hubris, its dishonesty and the dashing arrogance of the administration’s frightening first-strike doctrine, which the war on Iraq was meant to kick off. Even if the battle for Baghdad ends quickly, there remains plenty to critique.
It’s obvious that in promising a cakewalk Republican neocons ignored the warnings of intelligence agencies and the military, and the soldiers who actually had to fight the war faced more intense resistance than they were prepared for: soldiers who fought desperately rather than deserting Saddam’s forces; guerrilla units, urban combat, even suicide attacks. Lt. Gen. William Wallace got wood-shedded for complaining that “the enemy we’re fighting is a bit different from the one we’d war-gamed against,” but that trivialized the dimensions of the administration’s hubris. Retired generals have blasted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for an unrealistic war plan that emphasized technology and air superiority and minimized the role of ground troops backed by heavy artillery. According to the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh, Rumsfeld nixed six different battle plans that called for more Army divisions. “He wanted to fight this war on the cheap,” one colonel on the ground told the New York Times Monday. “He got what he wanted.” With troops at Baghdad’s borders, commanders in charge of the offensive were still critiquing the shortage of personnel to the Times on Wednesday. “Do we have enough troops? No.”
Yet I won’t be able to enjoy the spectacle of Rumsfeld being proven wrong, if the battle for Baghdad is bloodier than expected, and the war drags on — though the news Thursday made victory seem closer than it did earlier in the week. After all, such miscalculations aren’t just a political blunder; they may cost American and Iraqi lives. (Though I confess to one guilty pleasure: watching his press conference persona shift from Uncle Rummy, the twinkly-eyed, mischievous old salt who used to have the Pentagon press corps eating out of his hand, to the bitchy uncle from Hell, hissing at his once-adoring charges.) Even before Andrew Sullivan — and, to a lesser extent, the Times’ Nicholas Kristof — warned war critics against seeming to glory in the unexpected difficulty of the war, I was feeling torn about whether to feel vindicated by the administration’s apparent misjudgment about the strength of the opposition they would face in Iraq. I never wished for “a million Mogadishus,” and neither did any prominent Democrat or antiwar leader — Sullivan had to search to find something that inflammatory and cruel. But I’m now stunned at the extent to which Republican bullying has worked to paralyze Democratic critics of the war, and I think it’s time to end the silence.
Here’s why the administration’s early miscalculations matter, even if the pace of victory picks up again. First of all, Rumsfeld wanted to fight the war “on the cheap” not because the Pentagon is broke, but because the administration’s outrageous new military doctrine of preemption requires it. What good is declaring you’re for preemptive protective strikes if you can’t go in and prove you mean it? The new Bush doctrine required that the war in Iraq be a cakewalk, so as to send a message to our enemies in Iran, Syria, North Korea — wherever evildoers lurk — that they must tremble before our crushing military might. And if they didn’t get the message, we would have enough troops and firepower left over from Iraq to deliver it more directly. Tragic as the setbacks were for the Americans and Iraqis who lost their lives, from a historical perspective they might serve to prevent more loss of life in rash or unjust U.S. military interventions.
The administration’s arrogance and misjudgments also deserve denunciation if you take seriously the notion that we are trying to liberate the Iraqis from Saddam, and bring democracy to the region. Poor Nicholas Kristof, having scolded doves who glory in the military’s difficulties, found himself in Basra this week, watching a looming humanitarian crisis there. But thanks to his own self-imposed restraints — to refuse to seem to be saying “I told you so” in a time of war — he was unable to call it what it was: the entirely predictable result of our all-but-unilateral strike on Iraq.
Those of us who argued for more time, to bring more of our allies onboard, if not the U.N., did so not because we’re Saddam lovers or Bush haters or we’re secretly French; it was because the difficulty of winning the war, securing the peace and rebuilding Iraq required an international coalition. As one moderate Egyptian told the Times’ Thomas Friedman (who was himself a little too sanguine about the incredible gamble with human life that this invasion represented): “Maybe the Iraqis will eventually stop resisting you. But that will not make this war legitimate. What the U.S. needs to do is make the Iraqis smile. If you do that, people will consider this a success.”
It’s not too late to make the Iraqis smile, of course. But it is too late to take back the pictures, broadcast around an already hostile world, of dead Iraqi children, grieving parents, wounded civilians and the comparatively lucky Iraqis who are merely having to drink sewage-tainted water and scavenge for food, due to delays in humanitarian relief. And let’s be honest: Making Iraqis smile, even belatedly, is a much tougher job than it would have been had this invasion been backed by the U.N., or at least by a more genuine “coalition of the willing,” in which more partners were doing the tough work of bringing humanitarian aid to Iraq even as American forces did the lion’s share of the fighting.
The anti-Saddam alliance built by the White House — which militarily consists almost entirely of the U.S. and Britain, with a small number of Australians and a handful of Poles — would be comical if its impact weren’t so tragic. In 1991, for the first Gulf War, Bush’s father amassed a coalition of 32 nations that sent thousands of troops and committed $70 billion in aid; this time around most leaders of the 40-something countries supposedly backing Bush did little more than affix their names to a “Best of luck with the war!” greeting card. (And as Jake Tapper has reported, some of them are trying to retract even that.) Bush and Rumsfeld are dissembling when they say this coalition is larger than the one assembled in ’91, and they deserve to be called on it every time they say it.
Clearly the administration has sold this war with a combination of deception and distortion. A poll last week found that a majority of Americans think Bush didn’t tell the truth about the cost of the war, either in fiscal terms or in terms of the loss of human life, and I thought once again how silly polling is: The fact that Bush didn’t tell the truth about this war and its costs is not a matter of opinion, it’s fact, and he should pay for it.
But as U.S. forces close in on Baghdad, what should war critics do and say? The antiwar left loses me with talk of a quagmire in Iraq. Some of it sounds like wishful thinking, and it will likely be proven wrong: This war will probably be won in months, not years, and it could still end in only weeks — though the battle for Baghdad is so fraught with potential nightmares it makes realistic predictions impossible. (Coalition forces still do not decisively control any Iraqi city.) Yet all week the lefty news site Common Dreams has been awash in stories about the coming U.S. defeat, with headlines like “It Will End in Disaster” and “The Monster of Baghdad is Now the Hero of Arabia” and “The Bright Side of War.” I recognize that reporting bad news isn’t the same as enjoying it, but some on the left seem to be wallowing in it, a little too self-satisfied that the war has seemed to be going badly.
The other problem with all the talk of a “quagmire” is that it seems to lead to comparisons with Vietnam, from which it’s just a short but dishonest intellectual hop to thinking of defiant Iraqis as the Viet Cong. But it’s obvious that the “resistance” to American and British forces can’t be considered any kind of mass popular uprising; so far it’s mostly the result of Saddam’s brutal coercion. The reports of fedayeen shooting soldiers who try to desert and civilians attempting to flee from combat are chilling. Read Phillip Robertson’s haunting report from northern Iraq on Saddam’s “execution committees” that keep soldiers from deserting. On Wednesday, Iraqis were once again cheering invading troops as liberators in the city of Najaf. There will no doubt be more scenes like that to come.
Opponents of this war can’t be invested in the quagmire theory, or in the myth of widespread popular Iraqi resistance to the U.S, or a pan-Arab uprising against the coalition. For starters, it’s morally corrupt to root for a dictator like Saddam under any circumstances. And those banking on a “big muddy” scenario in Iraq risk further political marginalization if the pace of victory accelerates again. If the war was wrong — and I believe its timing and unilateralism certainly were — it will remain wrong even if Saddam’s regime is toppled sooner than the quagmire theorists expect.
So what do opponents of the war, and the president’s policy in prosecuting it, do now? I can’t support Kucinich’s call to stop the fighting immediately; it would only let Saddam’s regime come in and crush those who’ve risen up against him, and submit the country to further terror and chaos. On the other hand, I think Rumsfeld’s sneering insistence that a cease-fire is completely off the table is frightening: Should the battle of Baghdad bog down, should there be a reasonable chance to resume diplomatic efforts to remove Saddam Hussein, why wouldn’t we stop the killing and talk about it? Democrats should be ready to call for that if there’s evidence there’s still a diplomatic solution to this tragedy.
Even with the war yet to be won, the Bush administration is trying to impose Rumsfeld’s military model on postwar Iraq, handing power to the Defense Department while marginalizing Colin Powell’s State Department, not to mention the United Nations. The indefatigable Powell is of course fighting back, but Democrats need to speak out against the Pentagon power grab. Meanwhile, another military leader marginalized by Rumsfeld, Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki, told Congress it would take hundreds of thousands of troops to occupy Iraq after the war, and was slapped by deputy Paul Wolfowitz as “wildly off the mark.” The cakewalk conservatives’ arrogance about the war will be extended to the peace, whenever it comes, and they deserve to be fought at every opportunity.
Some Democrats still insist silence is politically wise. “Democrats don’t need to do any criticism of the Bush administration right now,” consultant Jenny Backus told the Times. “The unnamed generals are doing that job for us.” But top Democrats have been preaching silence as strategy since before the midterm elections, and the party’s shellacking at the polls cost them all credibility. Americans won’t let them sit this fight out. Yes, Democrats must choose their words carefully, they should critique the president fairly and cogently, they should always think about the impact of their words on the troops. But the GOP attack dogs will come after them whatever they do.
In a dishonest piece of writing in the Weekly Standard this week, “The War for Liberalism,” cakewalk conservative William Kristol described the Democrats as divided between brave “Dick Gephardt liberals,” the “patriots” who back the war-supporting former minority leader, and the despicable “Dominique de Villepin left,” — there’s the French slur again, after the foreign minister who led the U.N. opposition to Bush’s war — whose adherents “hate conservatives with a passion that seems to burn brighter than their love of America, and so, like M. de Villepin, they can barely bring themselves to call for an American victory.” And though Kristol’s list of de Villipin leftists is short on names, one of the handful he includes is Nancy Pelosi — despite her vote “in support and appreciation” of Bush’s conduct of the war.
Kristol is wrong: Most war critics still hope for an American victory, one that results in as little loss of life and as much freedom for Iraqis as possible. But it’s already clear that he and his neocon friends designed a war that wouldn’t ensure we could do either, and they and their war deserve criticism. There will be a reckoning for bullies like Kristol, and all the pampered, pink-cheeked scions of no-sacrifice who sold this war dishonestly. Yet I fear there will be a lot more Iraqis and Americans dead before that day comes.
On Tuesday, a Senate Appropriations Committee vote effectively highlighted everything that is stupid about politics.
The Transportation Security Administration, a universally loathed government agency, is facing a shortfall, despite its more than $8 billion budget. Instead of having a debate over what effective airport security might actually look like and how much should reasonably be spent on the honestly rare threat of commercial-air-travel-based terrorism, there was a debate over how best to come up with the money needed for all the radioactive naked picture machines and bomb-sniffing dogs. The Democrats suggested passing on the cost of ineffective, cumbersome and intrusive security theater to citizens, via higher fees on airfares. The Republicans, even more predictably, suggested cutting spending that directly helps poor people to ensure there is enough to spend on stopping imaginary future 9/11s.
The newspaper account of the debate in The Hill just reinforced the Republican spin, highlighting the Democrats’ decision to make people spend more money on the hated TSA and downplaying the actual existing Republican alternative to the proposal, which was not “spend less on the hated TSA” but rather “raise money for the hated TSA by slashing needed aid to states.” The Democrats won, or “won,” and now they will earn the fruits of that victory: well-deserved scorn from everyone. And Ben Nelson (D-Troll Town) voted with the Republicans. (Though surely having users pay the fees for supposedly necessary security measures is perfectly conservative, isn’t it? Am I missing something here? I mean besides the fact that the two sides in this debate weren’t actually “liberal” and “conservative” but rather “people who want to come up with a way of paying for the oppressive and useless national security state” versus “people who want there to be an oppressive national security state but hate government spending on feeding and sheltering impoverished people.”)
I don’t know of anyone not employed by the TSA or some other arm of Homeland Security that believes the TSA does a good job and deserves its massive budget, but everyone in Washington apparently feels differently (and is terrified of being blamed for “voting to cut TSA funding” if there is another terrifying and deadly underwear bomber, of course). This is why everyone hates politics and Congress and Washington. This and Iraq. And the drug war.
The growing likelihood that Richard Lugar will lose next Tuesday’s Indiana Republican Senate primary is the latest in a string of unexpected developments that have bolstered Democrats chances of hanging on to the Senate.
As I wrote yesterday, Lugar’s conservative primary challenger, state Treasurer Richard Mourdock, lacks the incumbent’s broad cross-partisan appeal and is closely identified with Tea Party-flavored Republicanism. Democrats, meanwhile, are poised to nominate Joe Donnelly, a moderate third-term congressman who defied the odds to hold onto his seat in the GOP tide of 2010. Mourdock would still probably be the favorite over Donnelly in the fall, just because of Indiana’s red tint, but the seat would be in play – something that would never be the case with Lugar as the GOP nominee.
The implications of a Democratic pick-up in Indiana could be huge. The party entered the 2012 campaign cycle in a defensive crouch, nursing a 53-47 edge in the upper chamber and facing a very challenging slate of races. The basic problem: Because of strong years in 2000 and 2006, the class of senators up for reelection in 2012 is dominated by Democrats, many of them representing marginal and Republican-friendly states. With a close presidential contest, the party won’t be benefiting from the national tide that lifted its congressional candidates in ’06, leaving Republicans with a host of pick-up opportunities – and Democrats with very few.
Well, that was the case early in the cycle, at least. Back then, there was only one clear Democratic pick-up opportunity on the board: Nevada, where John Ensign, the one-time rising GOP star, was forced into retirement by scandal. The race to succeed him, between the appointed GOP incumbent, Dean Heller, and Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley, is a toss-up.
But since those bleak early days, Democrats have caught some breaks.
The first came in Massachusetts, where the state’s biggest Democratic names all begged off from running against Scott Brown, leaving an assortment of B- and C-list options to a vie for a nomination that looked worthless last summer. But then Elizabeth Warren stepped in and proved herself to be a powerful communicator and a prolific fund-raiser. The Massachusetts race is now among the most competitive in the country, giving Democrats a 50/50 chance of knocking off Brown.
Then came Olympia Snowe’s surprise February announcement that she wouldn’t seek a fourth term in Maine. Quickly, the state’s former independent governor, Angus King, announced his candidacy. King, who won by 40 points the last time he was on a Maine ballot, is now the overwhelming favorite to win in November. While he won’t say which party he’ll caucus with, Democrats in the state and nationally are treating him like one of their own. Chuck Schumer, one of the top Democrats in the Senate, referred to the Snowe seat this week as “ours.”
Two other races that weren’t supposed to be competitive are also on the radar now. In Arizona, Democrats have recruited a candidate with a compelling biography: Richard Carmona, who served as George W. Bush’s surgeon general only to turn on the administration. A Democratic poll has shown Carmona within striking distance of Republican Jeff Flake, while a recent nonpartisan survey put President Obama only two points behind Mitt Romney in the state. There is hope among Democrats that Arizona, with its growing Hispanic population, is more winnable for them than most assume – and that without favorite son John McCain on the ballot, the state would have been theirs in 2008.
There are subtler clues of an unexpectedly competitive race in North Dakota. When Democrat Kent Conrad announced that he wouldn’t run again, the state was written off as an easy Republican pick-up – and it still might be. But some early developments at least offer a glimmer of hope to Democrats. As Politico reported this week:
With a dearth of public polling, the case for former Attorney General Heidi Heitkamp is based on a body of clues.
A Democratic poll showed Heitkamp with a 5-point lead; no Republican data countered the finding. The latest Crossroads GPS air strike included $76,000 to bruise Heitkamp — a sign she’s on the radar of the cycle’s most notorious super PAC. Even Berg blasted an email to supporters recently claiming the state is “Harry Reid’s #1 target.”
Add Indiana to this mix and Democrats have a total of five opportunities (or potential opportunities) for pick-ups that didn’t exist at the start of the cycle. Obviously, they won’t win all of these races, and they may still get routed in a few of them. But when you’re clinging to a 53-47 majority, any seat gained could be the difference between majority and minority status next year.
Victories in two Pennsylvania House districts over two conservative Democrats who voted against healthcare reform gave liberals something to cheer about this week. And they’re quite right to focus on primary elections: Nomination contests are really fights over who will control the political parties. And yet liberals appear to be missing some major opportunities to influence the next round of Democratic senators, just when they have the chance to do so. A look at the websites of the 10 Democratic candidates most likely to become U.S. senators reveals that few of them are interested in several of the issues that have been the hallmark of liberal activism and often frustration during the Obama years: marriage equality, a public option on healthcare, filibuster reform and civil liberties.
Why should we care what candidates have on their websites? The truth is that politicians generally try to keep their promises once they are elected. Moreover, the more visible the promise, the more likely it is that the politician will consider herself bound by it – and face consequences if she votes the other way. Ideally, one would want to see what candidates talk about on the stump, and what they advertise in mailers, TV ads and other formats. But websites have some advantages, too. In addition to being easy to access, they also are open-ended. Presumably, candidates will list every issue they believe is important. Or at least, every issue they want to talk about. And those are the issues, again, that they’re likely to act on if they win.
So I looked through the Issues sections of the 10 Democrats who are most likely to be elected – either challengers rated as having a good chance, or open-seat candidates in Democratic or swing states. In Hawaii and New Mexico, that meant both candidates fighting in a contested primary; in six other states, it meant the odds-on favorite for the nomination.
The results should be disappointing for liberals. Two of the 10 candidates, Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, don’t even have an Issues section on their websites. For the other eight, I’ll run down the numbers quickly. None of them mentioned support for adding a public option to ACA; indeed, three had no healthcare issues page at all, unless you count a page about protecting Social Security and Medicare, which was quite popular. Two of the eight support marriage equality, both of them in New England (Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts and Chris Murphy in Connecticut). Only two other candidates mentioned LGBT issues at all, Tim Kaine in Viriginia and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, who featured it in her bio page. Filibuster reform also received only two mentions. For civil liberties and the array of issues related to torture and detention, only Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, who opposed renewal of the Patriot Act, had any mention at all.
By contrast, seven of the eight candidates had a whole section of their Issues pages devoted to veterans, usually alone but in two cases bundled with something else. Now, it’s certainly true that most liberals support help for veterans, but as campaign issues go, this is surely one of the most bland.
I was pretty surprised by all of this, but I was most surprised by the candidates in competitive primaries. In Hawaii, Mazie Hirono is attempting to beat Ed Case from the left, and yet Hirono doesn’t hit at any of these issues that might help her with liberal activists in Hawaii and nationally. And it’s not as if either Hawaii or New Mexico, the two states with contested primaries, is exactly Alabama; there are plenty of liberal Democrats who are going to be voting in those primaries, and liberal positions shouldn’t be the kiss of death in the general election.
So what’s going on? It’s possible that the candidates are being overly cautious. I suspect, however, that what’s really happening is that Democratic interest groups, activists and other party actors are not pushing hard on any of these issues.
And that’s a serious mistake. It’s almost certainly the case that the best time for partisans to influence legislators is while they are running for election to some office for the first time. After all, that’s when they need party support the most – especially for those who have tough primaries, but really for all of them. Once elected, they begin to build personal connections with their constituents, based on bringing home pork or on other personal relationships. Party becomes relatively less important. Certainly, that’s what politicians have an incentive to do – to increase support based on who they are, rather than being constrained by specific policy commitments that, odds are, will make someone unhappy.
Now, it’s true, of course, that it’s still early in the cycle, so some of this could change going forward. And as I mentioned, websites are only one form of candidate advertising. It’s certainly possible that some of these Issues sections were put together exactly how I suggested – by volunteers who didn’t have the authority to commit the candidate to potentially controversial positions – and that as the year goes on things will change.
But what they’re showing right now certainly isn’t what most liberals would like to see. If activists want change on these issues after November, they need to start targeting these candidates now, before it’s too late.
My March 4 post “What’s the matter with white people?” was Salon’s top story that week, and it got a lot of comments and online attention. I went on vacation a few days later, but I’ve wanted to address a few arguments, if belatedly.
I asked “What’s the matter with white people?” because my people are increasingly coming under fire from the right and the left. Republicans have begun to blame not the economy but “dependency” on government and rising rates of single parenthood for the economic troubles of the white working class. On the left, meanwhile, whites are dismissed as the backward base of the increasingly radical GOP, and working class whites, in particular, are derided as racists who won’t vote for Democrats because the party is now led by a black man (ignoring the fact that a larger share of working class whites voted for Barack Obama than for Caucasians John Kerry, Al Gore or Bill Clinton.)
The fact is, working and middle class whites have supported too many Republicans who’ve dismantled the opportunity structure that created the vast (white) middle class from the 1930s through the 1960s – but that’s at least partly because too many Democrats turned their backs on those policies, too. The larger point of the piece, if a 4,000-plus word article can be said to have a single point, was this:
The emerging multiracial Obama coalition has the potential to transform the way we all think about race and politics as we invent the next America — but only if we can all forgo petty racial score-setting and 20th century conceptions about identity. And only if more white people wake up to what they’ve let the Republican Party do to the country in the last 40 years, in the name of holding on to what they think they have.
I was making two related arguments: that whites must begin to face up to economic and political reality – that the party most of them support now stands for destroying not only the social programs they (incorrectly) believe benefit “other people,” but also programs they support, like Social Security and Medicare, food stamps and unemployment, as well as protections for workers who have jobs. My second point was just as important and less commonly heard: I asked that the multiracial left have more empathy for working class whites, and stop stereotyping them and dismissing their political choices, when we disagree, as merely “racist.” Interestingly, I got little or no push back on that point from anyone on the multiracial left, although I have been criticized for that argument many times, going back to the fractious 2008 Democratic primary. Maybe we’re making progress.
The criticism of my “White People” argument came almost exclusively from the right, and there were at least a few points worth engaging.
….
Of course, more than a few people reacted to the headline without thinking (or reading the piece), and I heard a lot of what I predicted I would in the article: I am a racist! How dare I generalize about white people? I would never talk about black people that way!
The best response along those lines came from Newsbusters, the fan club Brent Bozell runs especially to promote me. It featured a typically outraged harangue from Noel Sheppard: “Actual Joan Walsh Salon Headline: ‘What’s the Matter with White People?” and included this: “Maybe Walsh should check her own racist leanings given her hatred of white people.” Noel, I love white people! Some of my best friends are white. As I even revealed in the piece, that includes some of my own family. You can do better, Noel. Try again.
The reply from the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto was a little bit more substantive – although he kicked it off on Twitter by shrieking at Charles Murray that I’d accused Murray of “attacking white people!”
I didn’t accuse Murray of “attacking” all white people. I’d made the point that Murray now blames poor and working class whites for their economic struggles, much the way he has always blamed the black poor. Their poverty rate is climbing while their wages and family incomes are falling not because of huge shifts in the economy that favor the wealthy, but because they’re lazy and promiscuous and not terribly bright, and they just don’t follow the rules the way the poor are supposed to. This is the oldest argument around, of course, when it comes to explaining away social inequity and defending the economic status quo. You can find it in the Gospels, in clashes between that bleeding heart liberal Jesus Christ, and those who believed poverty was God’s punishment. In every age, the struggle for justice turns on how successfully the privileged can justify their wealth as the natural result of their hard work and superior talent and/or the innate shortcomings of their lessers.
In my lifetime, that argument has been racialized. As the nation struggled to right the wrongs of racism, some people began to argue that the problems of poor African Americans had more to do with their own personal and cultural shortcomings than society’s, and that our efforts to use government to help made the problem worse. But I was raised knowing that virtually every awful thing said about black people had once been said about Irish Catholics, and so I’ve spent a lot of my life refuting that racialized scapegoating, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
Lately, though, I’ve felt that we’re getting some help with that task from Republicans, as they scapegoat working class whites in terms they used to only use against blacks — their economic problems are due to the fact that they’re lazy, too many don’t get married and they want government to take care of them (Charles Murray’s argument). Taranto misunderstands the point I’m making about the new GOP line:
When Walsh accuses Murray of “attacking white people,” she seems to be hoping that persons of pallor will be open to a similar appeal–that they will finally wake up and start voting what the left considers to be their “interests.” Essentially that means embracing government dependency: “Today, many white folks who are voting Republican don’t seem to know one important fact: they are, in fact, the ‘takers.’ ” Once they figure that out, Walsh thinks, they’ll join the blacks and the Hispanics and the professional elite, and the Democratic hold on the electorate will be secure.
That’s not what I was saying, at all. I’m not someone who makes the simplistic case that the working class is voting against its interests by backing Republicans. This is a debate in which I think the right has the better side. Claiming that working class Republicans – or black and Latino Republicans, for that matter — are “voting against their interests” is hugely condescending, a vestigial Marxism that assumes the only thing that matters is material conditions. It can also sound like we’re saying: “How dare you presume you have anything in common with the wealthy, peon?”
The Republican allegiance of some working class people may well be aspirational, as conservatives argue. Liberals like John Rawls’ famous theory of justice, which held that most people would want to design a society in which, should they find themselves at the bottom, they would be protected. It turns out that a lot of people prefer social policies that would protect them if they make it to the top, however unlikely that kind of economic mobility is turning out to be in the U.S. today. Voting Republican may also reflect genuine cultural and religious values. Growing up Irish Catholic, I can’t pretend that my relatives who vote Republican over the issue of abortion are dupes suffering from some kind of “false consciousness.” They care about that issue passionately. We can disagree with conservative working class white people, we can wish they had different priorities, but when we “assume” they’re voting against their own interests, as though we, not they, know their interests, our condescension shows.
….
On the other hand, I do not mean to disrespect working class whites, but I have to say: it would be great if their politics reckoned with reality. As I pointed out in the piece, red-state Republican areas enjoy the highest levels of federal spending. That’s an inconsistency that can’t be totally explained by culture war politics. White working class Republicans are simply wrong about the way government has worked, in their own lives and in the lives of others, and Democrats need to talk about that, respectfully.
Taranto hints at the case other Republicans make more forcefully – that the more Americans become dependent on government, the more they’ll vote Democratic, and that’s Barack Obama’s not-so-secret plan. “Republican supporters will continue to decrease every year as more Americans become dependent on the government,” Tea Party Sen. Jim DeMint wrote in his last book. “Dependent voters will naturally elect even big-government progressives who will continue to smother economic growth and spend America deeper into debt.” I think DeMint’s notion is alarmist GOP propaganda. But I’d be happy to have a political debate about the role of government in our lives – one that’s untainted by racism, fears of a lazy, parasitic “other” or charges that Democrats are “socialists” seeking to impose some Soviet-style or lefty-European system on America. I think it should be clear that Democrats love capitalism, because twice in the last 75 years, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt and then under President Obama, we saved capitalism from itself.
Finally, Taranto (and a lot of letter writers who didn’t seem to read my piece), claimed that the “demographic doomsday” scenario, in which a declining white population leads to the gradual extinction of the GOP, is “overblown.” I agree – and I said so in the article. I regularly quarrel with liberals who insist that a magical “people of color” alliance is going to move the country to the left, permanently. It’s not going to happen. In the 80s and 90s, it was easy to imagine that Latinos and Asians might be receptive to Republican messaging around family, small business, religion, as well as hostility to big government, given that immigrants often came from countries ruled by oppressive governments (whether of the left or the right). Certainly Karl Rove once believed that. Republicans chased many Latinos, Asians and even conservative African Americans into the arms of Democrats by allowing racism and xenophobia to flourish in their party unchecked. As the GOP gets beaten in coming election cycles, it’s going to have to figure out a way to appeal to more than just white people — or perish as a party.
Also: most scenarios in which the white majority “disappears” in the next couple of decades ignore the fact that about 50 percent of the fastest-growing “minority” – Hispanics or Latinos – consider themselves white. (That’s why the Census has a category for “non-Hispanic whites.”) So do most mixed-race Americans in many studies. Besides, the definition of “whiteness” has regularly shifted throughout American history – Irish, Italians, Jews and other non-Nordic, Anglo immigrants all took turns in the “non-white” category in the 19th and 20th centuries. It’s quite possible that our notion of whiteness – or let’s just say “the American mainstream” or “real Americans,” in Sarah Palin’s language – will expand to include some categories of Latinos, Asians and mixed-race folks, not to mention Clarence Thomas, Herman Cain and Condoleezza Rice.
To build a better, more inclusive country – to invent the next America – both parties are going to have to forgo identity politics and appeal to voters around principle and policy, not fear and contempt. Democrats are getting there; Republicans still have a ways to go before facing up to the fact that the identity politics practiced by the Tea Party represents a divisive dead end.
Look at it this way: If the Wall Street banking crisis had taken place in 2007 instead of 2008, George W. Bush wouldn’t be able to leave home without being jeered. (As it is, he rarely leaves Texas.) Hardly anybody would buy the brand of tycoonomics GOP presidential candidates are selling. People would understand that save-the-millionaires tax cuts and deregulation had dramatically failed. President Obama would get more credit for pulling the economy out of a nose dive.
Alas, people have short attention spans and a weak understanding of abstract economic issues. You have to tell them a story. The failure of policymakers to do that has been driving progressive MVP Paul Krugman crazy. How can it be, he asks, that governments foreign and domestic are repeating the mistakes of the early 1930s — slashing government spending to reduce budget deficits, putting more people out of work, reducing demand, and inadvertently increasing deficits? Rinse and repeat.
Part of it is that the lessons of the Great Depression belong to history, and, as such, are infinitely malleable. Arguments your grandfather would have dismissed — such as Mitt Romney’s plans to assure prosperity by topping off Scrooge McDuck’s bullion tank — are given credence today. Granddad may not have grasped Keynesian economic theory, but he remembered “Hoovervilles” and bread lines. Scrooge McDuck wasn’t a cartoon figure for nothing.
Professor Krugman acknowledges that some kinds of economic thinking seem counterintuitive. “Thus,” he writes, “it’s normal to think of the economy as a whole as being like a family, which must tighten its belt in hard times; it’s also completely wrong.” Yet it makes him crazy that even President Obama has used the belt-tightening analogy.
While deeply misleading, the family metaphor works politically because it sounds like common sense. Sometimes I wonder if Grandpa didn’t also have an advantage in living closer to the farm. Though innately conservative, rural people do understand that if you skimp on fertilizer in April, you’ll have a poor hay crop come September and a hard time getting your livestock through the winter.
But nobody ever puts it to people like that. Even somebody like Krugman can be brilliant at argumentation, less gifted at storytelling. Democrats generally have lost the knack.
The key is to stress government investment. In Arkansas, where I live, nothing could be clearer than the relationship between public investment and economic prosperity. It’s practically written on the landscape, yet many need reminding.
I recently read a beautifully written memoir called “A Straw in the Sun,” by Charlie May Simon, an Arkansas writer who homesteaded in Perry County (where I live) during the 1930s. Back then, rural Arkansans basically lived in the Third World. Simon and her neighbors grew their own food, made their own clothes, music and home brew. They had no electrical power, telephones, indoor plumbing or paved roads. Few in Perry County did. They walked to town, or hitched rides on mule-drawn wagons.
Enchanting as Simon makes it sound, the world she evokes feels not 75 years distant, but 175. After World War II, what brought Perry County into the 20th century was government investment. My 65-year-old neighbor was in high school when the main highway through the county was first paved after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers bridged the Arkansas River at Conway.
So it came as something of a surprise to read that my ambitious state representative, a genial former neighbor now living over in Conway, has conceived a plan to return us to the bad old days. Supposedly by eliminating income taxes from 40 of the state’s less prosperous counties — along with concomitant cuts in public spending — GOP visionaries envision that nothing less than an economic miracle will take place.
Never mind why no such thing happened during Arkansas’s first 150 years or so of statehood. Thankfully, the proposal got nowhere. What’s amazing to me, however, is that otherwise intelligent people could be so blinded by ideology as to entertain so preposterous a scheme. Believe me; these fellows are rapt with sincerity. What’s more, their ideological brethren are taking over state governments from sea to shining sea.
That Conway, a pleasant town of approximately 60,000, should serve as the epicenter of this backward revolution strikes me as comically ironic. Although filled with Republicans, there are few cities of like size whose prosperity depends more obviously upon public largess. Located along Interstate 40, it’s also home to three state agencies and the University of Central Arkansas, a rapidly growing public institution. Trim UCA’s budget 20 percent, and Conway’s economy would go into a tailspin.
The city’s two private colleges are greatly dependent upon state-sponsored tuition scholarships, just as its nonprofit medical center relies upon Medicaid and Medicare. I could go on. Even Conway’s two newest large private employers are Internet- (hence government) dependent.
Around these parts, alas, Democrats have lost control of the story line.
(Credit: Reuters/Frank Polich) 
Charles Schumer and Harry Reid (Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst) 
(Credit: AP Photo/Gregory Bull) 
(Credit: AP Photo/Susan Walsh) 
