I don’t know if everyone is talking about race because Congress is deadlocked and, well, we have to talk about something more than Ukraine and the missing jet airplane, but I think Jonathan Chait’s cover story for New York Magazine probably has a lot to do with it. It obviously touched a nerve. There’s a point in his piece where he makes a reference to “the ubiquitous Atwater Rosetta-stone confession,” which we are all obviously supposed to be familiar with. If you want the full background on it, Rick Perlstein wrote it up for The Nation right after the election in November 2012. The short version is that legendary GOP strategist Lee Atwater gave an interview in 1981 (which survives on audio tape) in which he confessed (not for the record) that, among other things, calling for tax cuts was really just an abstract way of saying that you don’t want any of your money going to black folks. The way he actually put it was a bit more colorful.
“You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.””
When Chait refers to this quote as “the ubiquitous Atwater Rosetta-stone confession,” it’s meant to be dismissive. He uses “ubiquitous” to mean that the quote is over-referenced, and he uses “Rosetta-Stone” sarcastically to argue that you can’t actually translate every conservative belief into a form of abstract racism. And he follows this up by flat-out refuting the main thrust of what Atwater confessed to:
Impressive though the historical, sociological, and psychological evidence undergirding this analysis may be, it also happens to be completely insane. Whatever Lee Atwater said, or meant to say, advocating tax cuts is not in any meaningful sense racist.
It’s a rather argumentative tone to take, suggesting that he’d given up on using logic to further his position. It’s plainly not “insane” to object less to taxation because it costs you money than because of who (you think) your money will go to. There are people who don’t like paying taxes because a lot of it goes to buy weaponry used to fight wars they don’t support. Those people don’t necessarily object to paying taxes for roads and bridges; they just don’t like violence and death.
But this kind of turns things around a bit, because Atwater isn’t talking about why people don’t like paying taxes; he’s talking about politicians who make subtle racial appeals to white people by suggesting that all their tax-money goes to black welfare queens. If we’re talking Rosetta Stone, it goes something like this:
Language A: Very wealthy people stand to benefit greatly by even slight reductions in the tax rate, but most people will not benefit because all the lost revenue from very wealthy people will have to be made up elsewhere, unless services and investments are cut.
Language B: Since winning at politics requires a majority, very wealthy people have to convince a lot of people that a reduction in very wealthy people’s tax rate is a good thing or else they will never see that reduction. Convincing them that their taxes are being misallocated is the key.
Language C: The way to convince people that their money is being misallocated is to tell them the money is going to racial minorities who are lazy and undeserving.
Language D: The more stigma is attached to nakedly racial political appeals, the more abstract the language must be so, eventually, you don’t even talk about welfare queens anymore. Except, sometimes.
Does this mean that all requests for lower taxes are racist? Of course not. Lowering taxes is a tool that can be (and is) used to juice a slumping economy. It’s a tool that can encourage or discourage certain behaviors. For the very wealthy people who started this anti-tax campaign, racism was a necessary tool but not necessarily a belief. I’d point out, though, that being so greedy that you’re willing to enflame racial animosities for your personal financial gain is probably worse than not wanting your taxes to go to racial minorities.
I’d put the question to Chait this way: “Do you think that very wealthy people would have been so successful in restoring wealth disparity to 1920’s levels if they hadn’t had a party out there telling white people that their taxes were going to welfare queens? If so, how would they have convinced a majority of the people to go along with it?”
What’s disturbing to Chait is that he sees the left as making a tautological argument in which everything conservative is racist because of racism. And, he’s right that you can go too far with that kind of analysis, particularly when you are ascribing feelings and motives to individuals rather than explaining political strategies and movements. Chait gets to the core of his argument here:
One of the greatest triumphs of liberal politics over the past 50 years has been to completely stigmatize open racial discrimination in public life, a lesson that has been driven home over decades by everybody from Jimmy the Greek to Paula Deen. This achievement has run headlong into an increasing liberal tendency to define conservatism as a form of covert racial discrimination. If conservatism is inextricably entangled with racism, and racism must be extinguished, then the scope for legitimate opposition to Obama shrinks to an uncomfortably small space.
Can we begin our response by asking Chait (since he didn’t mention it) to stipulate that questioning the legitimacy of the president’s birth certificate is not within the scope of “legitimate opposition” to the president’s policies?
Yet, I get his point. You can’t explain every conservative belief by reference to racism. At some point, you have to debate things on their merits. The problem is that Chait is concerned about the wrong thing. He is concerned that liberals are too quick to lob accusations of racism around, but the bigger problem is that the Republican Establishment has lost control of the beast they created to get these historically low tax rates.
When Wall Street bankers and the Chamber of Commerce and the evangelical community and agricultural industry, collectively, can’t outweigh the racists in the Republican Party and pass comprehensive immigration reform, you’ve reached the point where there isn’t anything left to prove.
One would imagine from reading it that Liberals crying racism was an important obstacle to intelligent debate in today’s American politics.
But it’s not. The obstacle is the crazy, fact-free discourse spewing all over the conservative half of the political spectrum. “Intelligent” conservatives either pretend to believe the BS or hold their tongues.
The sheer stupidity and hate of it all is why folks like John Cole and I have left the conservative movement and now vote Dem.
John Cole and Me (sorry for the grammar error)
You were right the first time. “and I left”
No, he was right the second time. “…folks like me left…”
Great. Now there’s six of ’em who’ve left just right there.
“…the conservative half of the political spectrum…”
Half
Half
Half
Half
Half
The worst mistake they could make (and often do) is to imagine that they are more than half.
The worst mistake we could make (and sometimes do) is to imagine that they are less.
Chait wants so much to be even-handed. But the truth is that while his argument was more true fifty years ago, it is less true as the result of Strom Thurmond-Jesse Helms logic of the 1980s, Atwater’s dog-whistling, and the the clown car of the past decade and a half. Even the Yankee conservatives (what few are left) are no longer quoting Burke but talking birther. And the bigotry has broadened beyond race thanks to a quarter century of Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talkers.
Sometimes I wonder what planet and timeframe Chait lives in.
I’d rather discuss the rebellion in Nevada.
Me too. Considering how the rightwing is screaming “We Won!”
Interesting that published reports tell us almost nothing about Bundy and his clan. For example, does this sixty-seven year old man, who doesn’t recognize the authority of the US government, collect Social Security income and Medicare benefits? Does he and he family enjoy any other federal benefits? None of his fourteen children taking advantage of welfare or Medicaid? No special reduced property taxes or government sponsored low cost fire and liability insurance? No federally sponsored low cost loans? Federal farm supports?
Would be most surprised if Bundy and his clan haven’t been sucking at every federal teat they can find.
They DID win. Its going to worse now because of BLMs defeat.
I generally like Chait’s writing, but I have to say I had an extremely negative reaction to that piece. The writing was bad and the reasoning was worse, for exactly the reason you raise:
Conservative activists and the Republican Party establishment made decisions–repeated decisions–to capture the votes of racists in service of their not-necessarily agenda of lower taxes, reduced regulation, and aggressive foreign politicy. These were choices on the part of those activists, not just some weird quirk of fate, and that’s what the Atwater quote that Chait is so eager to dismiss means. If, after decades of this, we decide that we all need to ignore that ugly history and, for that matter, ugly present, it means aiding them in enacting policies which we already object to by pretending that there was nothing wrong with their decision to build their coalition around a core of bigots. The problem is that it was profoundly wrong, and the wrongness has had a wide range of negative effects on the lives of people of color in this country.
Does this confine ” the scope for legitimate opposition to Obama” to an “uncomfortably small space”? Yes, I suppose it does, but isn’t that a problem for people who purport to legitimately oppose Obama? I don’t see why it’s my job to drag them out of a trap they’ve spent decades building for themselves through their own reprehensible behavior.
“Conservative activists and the Republican Party establishment made decisions–repeated decisions–to capture the votes of racists in service of their not-necessarily agenda of lower taxes, reduced regulation, and aggressive foreign policy.”
Not just racists. People hostile to women’s rights, reproductive choice, reasonable gun control and the separation between church and state have been fooled by the conservative movement to vote against their own economic self-interests. For example, the conservative base wants to keep Social Security, Medicare, and tax breaks for the middle class. Yet they vote, over and over, to empower members of Congress who really do want to take all those programs away from them.
This caught my eye as well:
Chait uses it as a throw away line to dismiss both the deep ties of Repubs to racism but also the line of thinking that bit could start.
Because frankly, the Repubs are in a very small space in terms of legitimate opposition. They are an insurgent outlier group now that actively sabotage government law. To see anything like their current unprecedented disruptive tactics one has to go back to the antebellum period.
Mann and Ornstein made this case clearly:
http://www.npr.org/2012/04/30/151522725/even-worse-than-it-looks-extremism-in-congress
You shouldn’t, but you can. In some corners of the internet, you must.
What’s interesting is that in three years, we’ll be talking about how sexist the GOP is (I mean more than we already do), because they’ll be fanatically opposing everything the President Clinton proposes. When they are condescending and talking about how emotional she gets, people will call that sexism (and be right, like objections to the birth certificate).
If Chait has a point worth defending, it’s that the GOP is just a reflexive bunch of assholes. They hate anything with a Democrat attached to it. Shit, ACA was a GOP idea!
So, I would say, “Yes, the GOP is chock full of racists.” But I would also say that they are simply, reflexively and unthinkingly opposed to anything Democrats propose. And since the Obama Coalition consists of minorities and women, that’s going to unleash their inner Klansman.
All of it is a crock of bullshit, period.
You know, every time there’s a fucking incident involving a Muslim, every fucking conservative is asking why every Muslim on earth isn’t going on record to condemn the attack.
Well, you know what, every time a conservative says something abjectly racist, almost none of them say a damn thing. Instead, they try to distinguish or qualify it somehow, or just outright lie.
You know, like when front-running Republicans talking about Blah people. Stuff like that.
So you know what? I’ll continue calling conservatives racist whenever their racist actions or silence about racist actions allow me to.
Because fuck the trashbags. If they want to be bigoted pieces of shit, I’m not going to slink away and let them get away with it. I’ll make their lives as uncomfortable as possible.
Chait is a fucking apologist and helping the bigots remain bigots.
Chait’s argument is stupid. (And I use that word advisedly.) It’s stupid because it’s based in what you maybe can call “argumentative aesthetics” (although there have got to be three or four better terms) — a kind of forced debate-table politeness that works out to appeasement.
I think what bothers Chait is, he looks at an increasingly volatile and combative landscape where the racial underpinnings of so many arguments are (finally) being exposed and uncovered…and he says, “Oh dear,” because he doesn’t like the results from the standpoint of decorum and politesse. It just doesn’t seem like a road that leads to people agreeing and finding “common ground” — it’s way too volatile and incendiary. So it’s got to be wrong; we’ve got to try something else.
But that’s always been a terrible way to look at things. It didn’t work in the 1930s or the 1960s and it doesn’t work today. “Don’t say those things that get the other side so mad” is never good advice when trying to actually solve problems (rather than smooth over differences).
The problem with Chait is that his fucking article was ridiculous from beginning to end, and discounted race from a Black person’s perspective.
Racism is not cocktail chatter for Black people. It’ s not something that we discuss over martinis. It’s something we live with every fucking day, one way or another. It’s slights, both big and small.
How the fuck do you write an article about race during the Obama age, and NOT bring up the Birth Certificate?
how is that possible?
the utter and complete and fundamental lack of respect shown this President and his entire family.
pretending that Black people lived on Mars for the previous 43 White Presidents, instead of in America, and we don’t notice the difference in the baseline of respect for the Presidency of the United States since Barack Obama won in 2008.
the Republican party is the party of White Supremacy and racial resentment. It’s who they are. It’s all they are. And, to try and cover that is why Chait’s ass has been lit up.
Wow. Reading that was like reading Steve Gilliard. You have a great voice, Rikyrah.
I totally agree.
Chait should be disqualified from writing about race when he doesn’t even understand the fundamental difference between institutional racism and personal racism. (An ignorance, by the way, that’s a lot easier to maintain when you benefit from white privilege and don’t have to think about such issues.)
Some conservatives are overtly racist. Some are not. All of them perpetuate, manipulate, and benefit from institutional racism. Atwater’s quote doesn’t necessarily reflect personal animus; it reflects political calculation. The dog whistles that pass for reasoned discourse in the GOP these days are as much a result of that sort of calculation as they are of personal bigotry.
But the bigots are much, much more mainstream now than they were 20 or even 10 years ago. That’s a result of stoking personal animus for political gain – especially since the election of President Obama. But it’s also because white, establishment writers like Chait are afraid to call things what they are, and not especially interested in the topiv, either. They’re also convinced that whenever somebody uses the R-word they’re talking about personal animus.
Poverty rates, bad schools, infant mortality, and literally hundreds or thousands of other indices are indicators of our society’s institutional racism. You can’t change it in any meaningful way unless you can name it. Writers like Chait seem to have invested a whole lot in not understanding, or even trying to understand, what they’re writing about.
Writers like Chait seem to have invested a whole lot in not understanding, or even trying to understand, what they’re writing about.
What do you expect from a guy who worked for Marty Peretz for 13 years?
I can’t say I’m a fan of saying people should be disqualified from writing about anything…
Let him write a private diary entry, then. But as an alleged expert given a national platform? You shouldn’t be given an chance to write for that sort of publication on a topic if you don’t even have the basic concepts down. Nobody would likely hire Chait – or me – to write about ancient Persian iconography (or whatever) because we’re not qualified to do so. On race, he’s not qualified.
The idea that a pundit should hold forth and be taken seriously on any topic that pops into her or his head is one of the more toxic aspects of Village custom. I generally like Chait. But that level of ignorance is inexcusable.
He’s writing about politics. And the role race plays in politics.
Again, I am not outraged by his assertion. He basically says something along the lines of “All racists are Republicans, but not all Republicans are racists.” Would you argue against that?
And if you would, then Chait’s point is proved: namely that it becomes impossible to debate GOP priorities and policies.
It is one thing to say, “GOP tax policies hurt the poor.” And another thing to say, “GOP tax policies are racial motivated.” If racism is used to explain everything about the GOP, then the GOP can no longer exist as a political party, and that way lies violence, frankly.
Chait does not acknowledge the birth certificate, but he does acknowledge – repeatedly – the link between racism and the GOP. He notes vote suppression as a significant racist policy.
It seems all that he is saying is that calling Paul Ryan a “racist” for slashing taxes on the rich and social spending on all the poor – black, brown and white together – is a crude overuse of a term that seeks to delegitimize every position the GOP takes.
Voter suppression is racism translated into policy. Slashing social spending is Randism translated into policy. All Chait is asking is that we acknowledge the difference.
People should write about what they know and understand. And if they presume in their obtuseness to continue to understand what they obviously don’t, they should just stop writing, period.
This has been going on a lot longer than 1954. I’m reading Foner’s history of reconstruction. In explaining why the governor of North Carolina did not support public education, he says, “… the governor feared that if white children were educated at public expense, ‘we will be required to educate the negroes in like manner.'”
Armando does further and suggests that Chait is engaged in hippie-punching:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/04/13/1291166/-Jonathan-Chait-s-new-form-of-hippie-punching-Playi
ng-the-GOP-are-not-racists-card
You’re on form, Boo!