I think The Field Negro is actually a little too polite about Roger L. Simon’s essay blaming Democrats for the deterioration in race relations in this country during the Obama Era.
I just wonder if Mr. Simon is aware of the psychological projection involved in his conclusion.
Just a few years later, the scab appeared very much healed with the inauguration of America’s first African-American president, a man who would be elected twice. I didn’t vote for him for policy reasons, but his election brought tears to my eyes as a former civil rights worker. America’s long nightmare, as Dr. King might have put it, was over, at least as over as things could be in this imperfect world.
But it wasn’t – not by a long shot. It went the other way. Driven by what I call in my book “nostalgia for racism,” racial enmity was brought back as surely as Michael Corleone was pulled back in in Godfather III.
Why?
Power, of course. The Democratic Party relies on the perceived reality of racism for the identity politics on which it feeds. Racism is the lifeline of the Democrats. Votes lie there.
I agree that the explanation for our curdled race relations lies in the quest for power, but not in the way that Simon says.
It was certainly possible to treat President Obama the way that Morgan Freeman asked to be treated by 60 Minutes’ Mike Wallace, as a person rather than as a black person. But that’s not the way he was treated. From at least the time of the Beer Summit with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the right chose to attack the president on racial grounds. No white president would have felt compelled to produce their birth certificate just to quell the cacophony of nonsense he was encountering that threatened to drown out everything he wanted to prioritize.
This wasn’t necessary. John McCain showed some actual restraint during his campaign in refusing to make a major issue out of Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and in making the decision to dispute accusations by his supporters that Obama is an Arab or a Muslim. After McCain’s loss, however, no one of similar stature stood up to quiet down those same racially charged accusations.
The Republicans were fully supportive of the Tea Party revolt, and the result was the end of Eric Cantor, John Boehner, and 18 Republican candidates for president (not named Trump)’s careers. They were all shortsighted, but they made their mistake because they put their quest for power over their responsibility to show real moral leadership.
I can’t identify a single thing that President Obama has gained by being subjected to this racism, and he certainly didn’t encourage it. I doubt very much that he got any votes out of it, although the Republicans certainly lost a few. On the whole, though, ramping up racial polarization helps the Republicans keep control of the House of Representatives because a racially divided country divvies up the districts in a way that is advantageous for the white party. Racial minorities are much more regionally concentrated.
The truth is, most Republican officeholders probably aren’t all that racist, but “votes lie there” and it takes actual moral fiber to make the decision that some power isn’t worth having on some terms.
Racism made a comeback because it worked politically for the out-party. But it quickly devoured them, and now they’re left with a nominee who all decent people cannot support.
A scab exists in the first place precisely because something is healing. It falls off when the healing is nearly done. But the thought that a scab appears to be healed gets to the real point–that its all about appearances.
That Mr. Simon, who is one of the few simpletons to actually think the election of a Black President would solve “America’s long nightmare”, could not see that the wound didn’t even have a scab, much less a dressing would be disturbing if I thought anything coming from him deserved more than abject scorn. One would think a person calling themselves “a former civil rights worker” would know something about the subject.
Quoting at length from the Wikipedia entry for George Wallace:
In 1958, Wallace ran in the Democratic primary for governor [of Alabama]. Since the 1901 constitution’s effective disfranchisement of the state’s blacks, and most poor whites as well, the Democratic Party had been virtually the only party in Alabama. For all intents and purposes, the Democratic primary was the real contest at the state level. This was a political crossroads for Wallace. State Representative George C. Hawkins of Gadsden ran, but Wallace’s main opponent was state attorney general John Malcolm Patterson, who ran with the support of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization Wallace had spoken against. Wallace was endorsed by the NAACP. Wallace lost the nomination by over 34,400 votes.
After the election, aide Seymore Trammell recalled Wallace saying, “Seymore, you know why I lost that governor’s race? … I was outniggered by John Patterson. And I’ll tell you here and now, I will never be outniggered again.”
In the wake of his defeat, Wallace adopted a hard-line segregationist stance and used this stand to court the white vote in the next gubernatorial election in 1962. When a supporter asked why he started using racist messages, Wallace replied, “You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor.”
*****
Seems that history has repeated itself.
Although I agree with this post overall, it should be noted that majority-minority districts were strongly advocated by black activists and liberals and imposed by the Supreme Court in Allen to ensure proportional black representation in elected bodies. A straightforward consequence of concentrating blacks in certain districts is diluting their voices elsewhere, which also mean diluting the voice of Democratic voters, because that is how they overwhelmingly vote. Allen was conceived to increase black, not liberal or Democratic, participation, but the fact that it was likely to decrease Democratic representation is something that seems only to be occuring to people or at least being discussed relatively recently. This is a conflict that progressives need to face: increasing the percentage of black elected officials comes at the cost of progressives ones or even of Democrats. If you think it nonetheless worth doing, there is no sense complaining about this.
Hmm, wasn’t it ultimately a case brought by the right though?
>>Seems that history has repeated itself.
pretty much.
Lee Atwater talked about “we couldn’t just say n- n- n- any more, we had to use code words like busing”
Trump is the closest yet to getting back to just saying n- n- n-.
oops, this was a response to JoelDanWalls above.
Sorry for the bad language coming soon – but –
What a racist-sympathizing FUCKING MORON, this asshole is.
That is all.
We have seen cases before of history repeating itself. The vast majority of people prefer to ignore history and seem rather to prefer ignorance over being forewarned.
He doesn’t even realize that “our long national nightmare is over” is Gerald Ford, not MLK.
What, you’ve forgotten Dr. King’s famous “I have a nightmare” speech? Simon remembers it as if it was yesterday.
Yeah, but that speech was totally plagiarized from Mohandas Gandhi’s “I Have a Headache” speech.
So, The Onion got that from Gerald Ford? Hmmmmm!! People remember that, right?
I’m sorry, BooMan, but I do not think anything PJ Media does is worth comment; it was set up and continues push lying crap propaganda. In this case, defenders of racist institution will argue anything to defend racist institutions. Starting with the Nixon Southern Strategy (likely an outgrowth of Nixon’s earlier campaigns after the cracks showed in the Democratic Party in 1948), the Republican Party has transformed itself from a racist-tolerating institution to the primary defending institution of racism in the US. Every attack on black racism has essentially been a projection of their own attitudes and resistance to change.
If fact, the whole “small government” rhetoric in the Republican Party has always from Nixon onward been about enforcement of civil rights laws and anti-monopoly laws. A union of bigots and billionaires. Now the facade is dropped and the Klan robes come out.
It is solely about them and never was about Obama, except that a black President of any name (no doubt even Alan Keyes) was a bridge too far, a statement of equality in capability and law that their constituents could not accept and would even kill to frustrate–as they did in 1875.
Mr. Simon is just the sophisticated reincarnation of the secessionist rabble-rousing local newspaper editor of the 1850s. He’s worse than backwards; he’s dangerous.
Is Roger L. Simon serious? Does he really think this or is he just trolling for votes? I cannot fathom how someone supposedly intelligent can come to his conclusion. Is he so blind with racism or is he just that cynical?
I don’t understand people like this.
A literary grifter. I remember when he used to be a hippie, writing badly-constructed stereotype-filled novels about a sort of dope-smoking Jewish detective. I think it was when his Hollywood career stalled that he turned conservative.
As Trump might say, Fatigued mystery writer Roger Simon has no more talent, insults Democrats out of envy. Sad!
The idea that Democrats are responsible for a resurgence, or a renewed visibility, of racism, is so far beneath contempt it’s swimming in the deep mantle of the earth’s core.
Once again, the party of personal responsibility is absolutely incapable of owning their stinky doo doo messes, much less doing anything to clean them up.
So how are those income inequality, household debt, child poverty, and suicide rates looking under the Clinton and Obama administrations? Good?
Oh, silly me. Economic anxiety has nothing to do with nativism and authoritarianism. I know this, because bourgeois liberals tell me this. After all, the rise of the Know Nothings, 2nd KKK, and Nazi Germany had nothing to do with the economic backdrop.
“Power, of course. The Democratic Party relies on the perceived reality of racism for the identity politics on which it feeds. Racism is the lifeline of the Democrats. Votes lie there.”
The only ones lying here are desperate conservative political pundits. These are particularly audacious Big Lies.