Happy Birthday to Mayim Bialik, 38.
Good stuff:
1. Sarah Kliff on the people who may fall through the cracks.
2. Jamelle Bouie on demographics, the parties, and the future. Regular readers know I strongly agree with his argument.
3. See also Reihan Salam's response.
4. Ed Kilgore on Republicans, counterrevolutionary ideology, and internal party conflict. I'm not as convinced as Kilgore is that a substantial and influential group of Republicans sincerely believe in a "constitutional conservative" ideology...but I do think he's on very firm ground in thinking of (many within) the GOP in revolutionary (or counterrevolutionary) terms. And at any rate, he's certainly right that anyone who sees something similar to Reagan/Ford, or even less plausibly Goldwater/Rockefeller, is just seeing a fantasy. Must-read.
5. At a more practical level: Jessica Taylor has a good lay-of-the-land look at Republican insurgencies.
6. And Sarah Binder on the budget deal.
Showing posts with label race. Show all posts
Showing posts with label race. Show all posts
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Read Stuff, You Should
Happy Birthday to J. August Richards, 40.
Ah, yes, the good stuff:
1. Adam Serwer on one of the more awful reactions to the Obama years from (some in) the conservative press.
2. Seth Masket: media coverage matters for making congressional elections work well.
3. And Ben Lindbergh on Jeter's defense. Fascinating, on a subject I would have thought was long since played out.
Ah, yes, the good stuff:
1. Adam Serwer on one of the more awful reactions to the Obama years from (some in) the conservative press.
2. Seth Masket: media coverage matters for making congressional elections work well.
3. And Ben Lindbergh on Jeter's defense. Fascinating, on a subject I would have thought was long since played out.
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Read Stuff, You Should
Happy Birthday to Phoebe Cates, 50. Hey, Fast Times and Clueless fans -- and if you aren't, what's wrong with you? -- if you haven't see Amy Heckerling's Vamps yet, I highly recommend it. It's not, I'm afraid, as good as Clueless or as iconic as Fast Times, but it's excellent fun.
A little good stuff...
1. Matt Yglesias knows how to dress up a chart.
2. From the Monkey Cage: Corrine McConnaughy on Trayvon Martin.
3. And Ta-Nehisi Coates on Trayvon Martin.
A little good stuff...
1. Matt Yglesias knows how to dress up a chart.
2. From the Monkey Cage: Corrine McConnaughy on Trayvon Martin.
3. And Ta-Nehisi Coates on Trayvon Martin.
Monday, April 29, 2013
Catch of the Day
It goes to Jamelle Bouie, who has a terrific response to the latest exercise in fantasy party history by the National Review's Kevin Williamson. As he says, it's based on
Bouie does an excellent job of briefly reviewing the real party history that Williamson, somehow or another, manages to ignore. Basically, Williamson still wants us to think that the Democratic Party was (and still is, but in disguise) nothing but George Wallace, and that the GOP was and still is nothing but Jacob Javits. He somehow or another manages to miss the epic battle between the segregationists and liberals within the Democrats -- and also misses the part in which civil rights Republicans were driven from their party.
Now, Williamson is trying to make Goldwater into a hero of civil rights, despite his vote against the Civil Rights Act. The point is that it really doesn't matter whether Goldwater was personally a bigot, or even a champion of civil rights on particular circumstances, or not. What matters is that the people who actually cared about civil rights supported legislation that Goldwater opposed -- and what matters far more is that over time the people who opposed civil rights lost their battle within the Democratic Party, but beginning with Strom Thurmond they found a home in the GOP. That's not to say that the GOP became a segregationist party; that would be taking it too far. But it's not only true that by the 1980s most opponents of the civil rights agenda wound up in the Republican Party, but also that the heirs of the civil rights Republicans really just aren't welcome in the today's GOP.
Seriously, it's as if Williamson just thinks that belief in the existence of Hubert Humphrey, Adam Clayton Powell, and other civil rights Democrats is sort of like believing in UFOs. He also seems to believe that it's necessary to recover the well-known facts about the old segregationist Democrats. As I've said before: it's perfectly reasonable to investigate the complicity of such figures as Adlai Stevenson and Franklin Roosevelt in that story. It just has very little to do with what was happening within the Democratic Party by 1964, and absolutely nothing to do with the Democratic Party by the 1980s, let alone the 2010s.
a heavily revisionist history of American politics, in which the GOP never wavered in its commitment to black rights, and the Democratic Party embraced its role as a haven for segregationists. In this telling of history, black support for Democrats is a function of liberal demagoguery and crude identity politics. If African Americans truly understood their interests, the argument goes, they’d have never left the Republican Party.Williamson's focus this time is on a specific episode in Barry Goldwater's career. I have no idea whether Williamson is correct or not about it...it doesn't really matter. The point is that Williamson uses his anecdote in defense of, once again, his totally bizarre version of party history.
Bouie does an excellent job of briefly reviewing the real party history that Williamson, somehow or another, manages to ignore. Basically, Williamson still wants us to think that the Democratic Party was (and still is, but in disguise) nothing but George Wallace, and that the GOP was and still is nothing but Jacob Javits. He somehow or another manages to miss the epic battle between the segregationists and liberals within the Democrats -- and also misses the part in which civil rights Republicans were driven from their party.
Now, Williamson is trying to make Goldwater into a hero of civil rights, despite his vote against the Civil Rights Act. The point is that it really doesn't matter whether Goldwater was personally a bigot, or even a champion of civil rights on particular circumstances, or not. What matters is that the people who actually cared about civil rights supported legislation that Goldwater opposed -- and what matters far more is that over time the people who opposed civil rights lost their battle within the Democratic Party, but beginning with Strom Thurmond they found a home in the GOP. That's not to say that the GOP became a segregationist party; that would be taking it too far. But it's not only true that by the 1980s most opponents of the civil rights agenda wound up in the Republican Party, but also that the heirs of the civil rights Republicans really just aren't welcome in the today's GOP.
Seriously, it's as if Williamson just thinks that belief in the existence of Hubert Humphrey, Adam Clayton Powell, and other civil rights Democrats is sort of like believing in UFOs. He also seems to believe that it's necessary to recover the well-known facts about the old segregationist Democrats. As I've said before: it's perfectly reasonable to investigate the complicity of such figures as Adlai Stevenson and Franklin Roosevelt in that story. It just has very little to do with what was happening within the Democratic Party by 1964, and absolutely nothing to do with the Democratic Party by the 1980s, let alone the 2010s.
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Ideology Isn't the Natural Basis of Politics
I hope everyone has read the latest Ta-Nehisi Coates NYT item, this one about Benjamin Carson and other Obama-era black conservatives. It's as good as you would expect it to be.
It sparked a series of tweets from Jamelle Bouie about a distinction between the people Coates is talking about, "black conservatives," and what Jamelle calls "conservative blacks."
Conservative blacks are simply black people with conservative views. They’re folks like my parents: Church-going military veterans.I disagree with this.
They care deeply about black people, and hold views that are recognizably conservative. In a less racist world, they’d be Republicans.
Basically, I think we should fight the assumption that there's something more real or proper politically about ideology than about other forms of primary political identity, and that the correct way for people to sort themselves into parties is by ideology.
Oh, it happens, and can happen. But I don't believe that it has to, and I definitely don't see why it should.
There's simply no reason that all people who have "recognizably conservative" views should sort to one party, with all the liberals going to the other one.
Nor is there any reason for us to believe that one's primary political identity should be ideology. There's nothing at all wrong with primary (and secondary, and etc.) political identity being oriented to ethnic group, profession/occupation, class, or anything else. My general feeling is that there's no "should" here, and that there is reason to believe that a party system that delegitimizes political identity other than ideology is going to work poorly and produce less democracy, for a variety of reasons.
That's also going to be a large part, I think, of my reaction to Rick Hasen's new and interesting paper on political dysfunction. But I'm still putting that together, so I won't go into it now other than to tell you to read the paper).
At any rate...so I guess I'm saying in the first instance that there's no reason to think that it's more natural or proper for Jamelle's parents to be Republicans because of ideology than it is to think that they "should" be Democrats because (most) African Americans (and presumably virtually all black people whose primary political identity is based on ethnicity) are Democrats.
Basically, I think that pushing people to be ideological and pushing the idea that politics should primarily be about ideology gets it completely and totally wrong. And I think that unfortunately the ideology people have won, and that's one of the Big Things Wrong with US politics right now. Not the biggest thing (that's the broken GOP, which is related but not really the same thing). But one of the big things.
Saturday, October 13, 2012
What Mattered This Week?
This week, I'll go with the affirmative action SCOTUS case.
As far as what didn't matter? The events in Libya mattered, but I don't really expect the "scandal" aspect of it to matter at all.
But what do you have? What do you think mattered this week?
As far as what didn't matter? The events in Libya mattered, but I don't really expect the "scandal" aspect of it to matter at all.
But what do you have? What do you think mattered this week?
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Read Stuff, You Should
Happy Birthday to Darren Lewis, 45. I always thought his reputation for having a good glove was legitimate. Obviously, if you gave him 500 PAs it wasn't going to work out well, although it's hard to blame him for the Giants falling shot in 1993, I guess; amazing that the Red Sox gave him almost 700 PAs in 1998 and sort of got away with it. Although looking at that roster...wow, that is a depressing group of OFers. By the way -- that 1993 team sure had a lot of gloves, didn't it? Although the fielding stats at least as compiled at b-r shows them about even with the Braves, so no advantage there. What a great, great season for fans, even with the bitter ending. For all of the problems with the new double WC system, at least it brings back the possibility that we'll see something at least close to that again.
Enough about that: the good stuff.
1. Nice Walter Shapiro column on covering the conventions.
2. Ross Douthat points out why James K. Polk is the wrong model of presidenting for Mitt Romney.
3. Excellent piece on race, Romney, and Obama, by Ezra Klein. Interesting to see how mainstreaming of political science research on race will go.
4. Byron Shafer is blogging from the conventions. Recommended. (Via John).
5. And, sure, why not; Rebecca Schoenkopf on Obama, Breitbart, my brother, whatever.
Enough about that: the good stuff.
1. Nice Walter Shapiro column on covering the conventions.
2. Ross Douthat points out why James K. Polk is the wrong model of presidenting for Mitt Romney.
3. Excellent piece on race, Romney, and Obama, by Ezra Klein. Interesting to see how mainstreaming of political science research on race will go.
4. Byron Shafer is blogging from the conventions. Recommended. (Via John).
5. And, sure, why not; Rebecca Schoenkopf on Obama, Breitbart, my brother, whatever.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Read Stuff, You Should
Happy Birthday to Aaron Douglas, 41. I don't know whether I currently think that BSG had the best-ever cast performance in a TV show...I sometimes think it's Claudius. BSG's edge? How deep the great performances go. Douglas is a big part of that. Terrific performance.
Eye doctor this morning, so I'm not sure what kind of blogging pace I'll have, but there's plenty of good stuff:
1. Today's must-read: conservative columnist Philip Klein tells the truth about Todd Akin and the Republican Party -- and hopes that the blanket condemnation of Akin is the beginning of something new.
2. Today's other must-read: the great Ta-Nehisi Coates on race and Obama.
3. CJR's Jay Jones updates on the latest in fact-checking: fairness, not facts.
4. Matt Yglesias does a good job of explaining the ACA Medicare cuts. Really, the Romney position here is to be pro-waste, isn't it? I mean, there's a reason both Ryan and the Democrats wanted these cuts.
5. Ed Kilgore on welfare reform. Oh, and lazy mendacity: there's a link provided by the Republicans that he follows and finds that it undermines the case they're trying to make.
6. And this piece on tracking swearing around the US doesn't really deliver all that much, but is still well worth a look. From Megan Garber. While you're at it, see Alyssa Rosenberg on who (and where) is watching gay-inclusive television.
Eye doctor this morning, so I'm not sure what kind of blogging pace I'll have, but there's plenty of good stuff:
1. Today's must-read: conservative columnist Philip Klein tells the truth about Todd Akin and the Republican Party -- and hopes that the blanket condemnation of Akin is the beginning of something new.
2. Today's other must-read: the great Ta-Nehisi Coates on race and Obama.
3. CJR's Jay Jones updates on the latest in fact-checking: fairness, not facts.
4. Matt Yglesias does a good job of explaining the ACA Medicare cuts. Really, the Romney position here is to be pro-waste, isn't it? I mean, there's a reason both Ryan and the Democrats wanted these cuts.
5. Ed Kilgore on welfare reform. Oh, and lazy mendacity: there's a link provided by the Republicans that he follows and finds that it undermines the case they're trying to make.
6. And this piece on tracking swearing around the US doesn't really deliver all that much, but is still well worth a look. From Megan Garber. While you're at it, see Alyssa Rosenberg on who (and where) is watching gay-inclusive television.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Where Are the Black Senators and Governors?
I highly recommend Jamelle Bouie's excellent piece on the absence of African American Governors and Senators, an absence that doesn't appear to be changing at all even in the age of Barack Obama. See also his follow-up on black Republicans.
Especially good is his examination of the phenomenon as having little to do with current racist practices and more to do with the consequences of lots of demographic and political factors, some of which are legacies of bigotry and some of which are not.
The one thing that I'd put a little more emphasis on that Bouie does is the active choices that have been available to Democratic party actors, especially in states such as New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and others. In these non-Southern states, outside of Illinois, where black candidates have been nominated for the Senate three times in the last couple of decades, Democrats just haven't been nominating anyone (and both Braun and Obama were, at least to some extent, flukish). In other words, it's one thing to say that circumstances explain why there may be fewer good candidates, but that doesn't take the responsibility away from parties to do something about it. Especially parties that rely on African American support to the extent that Democrats do in several states.
The other question I have, however, is to what extent black Democratic leaders in those states -- and again, I'm talking primarily about non-Southern states with large numbers of African Americans -- have pushed hard for these offices. Or have those leaders preferred to work for other goals? I don't have a really good sense of this, other than that the fact I don't have a sense of it may mean that there hasn't been much of a fight over these nominations, at least not in public. I'm very aware, for example, of both efforts to get women nominated and complaints about resistance to those efforts. At the House level, yes, and same with state legislatures, and certainly over city hall in many cities. But not, I don't think, in statewide races. But I'd be interested in reading more about it.
[Typo fixed]
Especially good is his examination of the phenomenon as having little to do with current racist practices and more to do with the consequences of lots of demographic and political factors, some of which are legacies of bigotry and some of which are not.
The one thing that I'd put a little more emphasis on that Bouie does is the active choices that have been available to Democratic party actors, especially in states such as New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and others. In these non-Southern states, outside of Illinois, where black candidates have been nominated for the Senate three times in the last couple of decades, Democrats just haven't been nominating anyone (and both Braun and Obama were, at least to some extent, flukish). In other words, it's one thing to say that circumstances explain why there may be fewer good candidates, but that doesn't take the responsibility away from parties to do something about it. Especially parties that rely on African American support to the extent that Democrats do in several states.
The other question I have, however, is to what extent black Democratic leaders in those states -- and again, I'm talking primarily about non-Southern states with large numbers of African Americans -- have pushed hard for these offices. Or have those leaders preferred to work for other goals? I don't have a really good sense of this, other than that the fact I don't have a sense of it may mean that there hasn't been much of a fight over these nominations, at least not in public. I'm very aware, for example, of both efforts to get women nominated and complaints about resistance to those efforts. At the House level, yes, and same with state legislatures, and certainly over city hall in many cities. But not, I don't think, in statewide races. But I'd be interested in reading more about it.
[Typo fixed]
Sunday, February 26, 2012
What Mattered This Week?
Significant news again in Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, and Yemen, at least.
Congress was out of town, so nothing much there, and no GOP primary, although there was a debate in Arizona. The most important thing in GOP WH 2012, however, was the continued silence by conservatives who are still not backing Rick Santorum.
The Supremes took an affirmative action case, with court-watchers predicting that they'll knock out affirmative action.
What else? What did you think mattered this week?
Congress was out of town, so nothing much there, and no GOP primary, although there was a debate in Arizona. The most important thing in GOP WH 2012, however, was the continued silence by conservatives who are still not backing Rick Santorum.
The Supremes took an affirmative action case, with court-watchers predicting that they'll knock out affirmative action.
What else? What did you think mattered this week?
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Read Stuff, You Should
I'll start with a general recommendation: if for some reason you haven't been reading the Monkey Cage regularly, it's really time to try again. I've always been a huge fan of the core group, but recently they've been expanding in two ways. There seem to be a lot more guest posts, usually bringing in someone with relevant expertise when something is in the news. That's excellent. But they've also expanded their group of regular occasional contributors. I mean, having Sarah Binder (and others) was great enough, but look who they've added recently: Hans Noel! David Karol! Larry Bartels! It truly is an All Star list. I mean, the Cage was always worth reading for John Sides and the other regulars, but it's significantly better now.
Also, the great blog The Edge of the American West is back after a recent hiatus.
And now the more specific good stuff...
1. Jack Rakove on James Madison.
2. Good comments on money in politics from Seth Masket. Sounds like a great book project, too.
3. Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein knock down the bad advice David Brooks keeps giving to Barack Obama.
4. Barry Pump looks at the behavior of Senate Democrats.
5. The political scientists at Rule22 have been doing a great series on basics from "institutionalism" -- Joshua Huder looks at time. OK, that doesn't sound interesting, but really, it's important stuff.
6. Matt Glassman answers my question from yesterday about coverage of the JSC and the appropriations trainwreck-to-be. Good analysis; I especially like #5. As I said in comments yesterday, I should have noted, by the way, that Norm Ornstein has been on the the appropriations case from early on, too, so make that Ornstein, Collender, and me.
7. Excellent overview of US military policy and Obama from Fred Kaplan.
8. Adam Serwer is really good on "high tech lynching" (and by the way: it's a phrase that obviously worked, so kudos to whoever wrote it for Clarence Thomas, but there's still nothing "high tech" about either Congressional hearings or Politico stories). Question for John Dickerson, by the way: do you really want to assert that Thomas was "not a public figure or politician" at the time of his confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court? Really? Also, Conor Friedersdorf on the race-obsessed Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives, and E.J. Graff on sexual harassment. One more: David Frum on the "coming Herman Cain culture war." Yes, but I think Marx's thing about tragedy and farce probably applies.
9. Always like to see this: Spencer Ackerman has a nice post saying that he was wrong about Libya, and discussing some of the reasons. Good stuff.
10. Graff on one of the weaker arguments against choice on abortion.
11. Serwer explains the "ethnic revenge flick." Also Michael Tomasky on the ugly history of the Washington Redskins. And Alyssa Rosenberg, first on First Families and then on culture, politics, and Lil Wayne.
Also, the great blog The Edge of the American West is back after a recent hiatus.
And now the more specific good stuff...
1. Jack Rakove on James Madison.
2. Good comments on money in politics from Seth Masket. Sounds like a great book project, too.
3. Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein knock down the bad advice David Brooks keeps giving to Barack Obama.
4. Barry Pump looks at the behavior of Senate Democrats.
5. The political scientists at Rule22 have been doing a great series on basics from "institutionalism" -- Joshua Huder looks at time. OK, that doesn't sound interesting, but really, it's important stuff.
6. Matt Glassman answers my question from yesterday about coverage of the JSC and the appropriations trainwreck-to-be. Good analysis; I especially like #5. As I said in comments yesterday, I should have noted, by the way, that Norm Ornstein has been on the the appropriations case from early on, too, so make that Ornstein, Collender, and me.
7. Excellent overview of US military policy and Obama from Fred Kaplan.
8. Adam Serwer is really good on "high tech lynching" (and by the way: it's a phrase that obviously worked, so kudos to whoever wrote it for Clarence Thomas, but there's still nothing "high tech" about either Congressional hearings or Politico stories). Question for John Dickerson, by the way: do you really want to assert that Thomas was "not a public figure or politician" at the time of his confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court? Really? Also, Conor Friedersdorf on the race-obsessed Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives, and E.J. Graff on sexual harassment. One more: David Frum on the "coming Herman Cain culture war." Yes, but I think Marx's thing about tragedy and farce probably applies.
9. Always like to see this: Spencer Ackerman has a nice post saying that he was wrong about Libya, and discussing some of the reasons. Good stuff.
10. Graff on one of the weaker arguments against choice on abortion.
11. Serwer explains the "ethnic revenge flick." Also Michael Tomasky on the ugly history of the Washington Redskins. And Alyssa Rosenberg, first on First Families and then on culture, politics, and Lil Wayne.
Monday, September 19, 2011
Read Stuff, You Should
Straight to the good stuff:
1. I'm a big fan of Mark Blumenthal's "power outsiders" poll, here on Rick Perry and electability.
2. Do Members of Congress vote their social status? From John Sides.
3. Andrew Sullivan: "Republicanism as religion."
4. Budget caps and why they don't work, from Suzy Khimm.
5. A primer on Social Security from Glenn Kessler. Or, even more on Social Security from Karl Smith.
6. Ta-Nehisi Coates: "Somehow we got in our head that the Civil Rights movement happened because Martin Luther King was a really nice guy." On how to move ahead.
7. Harold Pollack talks to a lobbyist and learns about ACA.
8. Nate Silver's pre-mortem on the NY-7 Special holds up well still.
9. Norm Ornstein and Tom Mann on the silliness that is third-party wishful thinking.
10. Diversity, Obama, and the courts, from Jesse Holland. And Adam Serwer on Rush, Michael Moore, and Bill Maher. Also, Sides on Obama and the Jews.
11. A fun glossary of Congressspeak, from Matt Glassman. Do people really say "cats and dogs"? I've read about it several times now, but never heard anyone actually use it.
12. And I'm not sure if Philip Bump is really covering new ground in his takedown of discredited pollster Frank Luntz, but I'm always up for rehashing his credits.
1. I'm a big fan of Mark Blumenthal's "power outsiders" poll, here on Rick Perry and electability.
2. Do Members of Congress vote their social status? From John Sides.
3. Andrew Sullivan: "Republicanism as religion."
4. Budget caps and why they don't work, from Suzy Khimm.
5. A primer on Social Security from Glenn Kessler. Or, even more on Social Security from Karl Smith.
6. Ta-Nehisi Coates: "Somehow we got in our head that the Civil Rights movement happened because Martin Luther King was a really nice guy." On how to move ahead.
7. Harold Pollack talks to a lobbyist and learns about ACA.
8. Nate Silver's pre-mortem on the NY-7 Special holds up well still.
9. Norm Ornstein and Tom Mann on the silliness that is third-party wishful thinking.
10. Diversity, Obama, and the courts, from Jesse Holland. And Adam Serwer on Rush, Michael Moore, and Bill Maher. Also, Sides on Obama and the Jews.
11. A fun glossary of Congressspeak, from Matt Glassman. Do people really say "cats and dogs"? I've read about it several times now, but never heard anyone actually use it.
12. And I'm not sure if Philip Bump is really covering new ground in his takedown of discredited pollster Frank Luntz, but I'm always up for rehashing his credits.
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Jay Jump Joyful
Time for a little Fourth of July Weekend blogging, and I'll start by pointing everyone to Will Wilkinson's tribute to John Jay, and a follow-up from Matt Yglesias.
I think the more general point here is that we're still living in the shadow of American apartheid, even now. After all, most baby boomers (and those from earlier generations) learned a version of history, at least up through high school, that pretty much swallowed whole the South's interpretation of race in US history. I suppose the most obvious starting point to this is the reputations of Grant and Lee, but it really affects the full sweep of US history, at least up to the 1950s.
Just to be clear: traditional history got a lot of things right. And this isn't about purging every slaveholder from the pages of the history books. It's about, at least in the first instance, getting the history right.
So I think I'll just throw out a question: what do you remember learning in grade school or high school (or, I suppose, college) history classes in American history that you now believe was totally wrong?
I think the more general point here is that we're still living in the shadow of American apartheid, even now. After all, most baby boomers (and those from earlier generations) learned a version of history, at least up through high school, that pretty much swallowed whole the South's interpretation of race in US history. I suppose the most obvious starting point to this is the reputations of Grant and Lee, but it really affects the full sweep of US history, at least up to the 1950s.
Just to be clear: traditional history got a lot of things right. And this isn't about purging every slaveholder from the pages of the history books. It's about, at least in the first instance, getting the history right.
So I think I'll just throw out a question: what do you remember learning in grade school or high school (or, I suppose, college) history classes in American history that you now believe was totally wrong?
Monday, January 17, 2011
The Latino Vote
Jonathan Chait takes on Jeb Bush, who (in Chait's interpretation) supports Latinos to the extent that they assimilate.
I agree with those who speculate that, contrary to those who argue that the United States will soon become a majority-minority nation, what's more likely is that Latinos will over time be re-coded as "white," just as the Irish and the Jews and other "minorities" were in the past.
If you're the Republicans, it makes no sense at all to get into a bidding war with Democrats over the loyalties of minorities-as-minorities. You can't win, and you'll annoy other groups within your coalition. However, you certainly can try to appeal to those who are in those groups and at least open to voting for the GOP. It's true that done poorly, at its ugliest, this can wind up becoming an advertisement for those willing to simply turn their back on the group. But at its best, while still highly problematic (because it still implies exclusion of some others),allowing people to be white encouraging integration and being open to new groups is almost certainly better than the alternative. Both as an electoral strategy, and (at least in my opinion) ethically.
I don't mean to be oversensitive here, but it really seems as if Bush is arguing that republicans should embrace Latino immigration because Latinos are becoming less Latino and more white. Is that really a good political sales pitch?Answer? Yes!
I agree with those who speculate that, contrary to those who argue that the United States will soon become a majority-minority nation, what's more likely is that Latinos will over time be re-coded as "white," just as the Irish and the Jews and other "minorities" were in the past.
If you're the Republicans, it makes no sense at all to get into a bidding war with Democrats over the loyalties of minorities-as-minorities. You can't win, and you'll annoy other groups within your coalition. However, you certainly can try to appeal to those who are in those groups and at least open to voting for the GOP. It's true that done poorly, at its ugliest, this can wind up becoming an advertisement for those willing to simply turn their back on the group. But at its best, while still highly problematic (because it still implies exclusion of some others),
Friday, December 17, 2010
Catch of the Day
How about one for Jamelle Bouie, calling out Andrew Breitbart (OK, it's easy pickings, but still):
This is a nearly pure expression of conservative anti-anti-racism, or the idea that accusations of racism (against white people) are far more harmful than actual incidents of bigotry against minorities (with the collorary that minorities are guilty of tremendous racism against white people). Smearing Shirley Sherrod is perfectly okay, but calling out Breitbart's race-baiting is beyond the pale, and harmful to free speech.Nice catch!
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
We Need Better-Educated Bigots
I usually just ignore this crap, but for some reason it got to me...
1. Back of the bus is about Jim Crow, and race. Back of the car is where the kids sit while the grownups are up front. It has no racial or ethnic overtones.
2. This is just the bigot's version of Brian's mother, right? (You know -- whatever Brian says, his mother replies: "Oh, you're always thinking about sex").
3. There is another situation in which it matters who sits in the front and who sits in the back, which may have racial or ethnic overtones, but it doesn't fit either...but it does give me an excuse to quote: "Ladies and Gentlemen, Today's Feature Presentation: Driving Miss Daisy."
1. Back of the bus is about Jim Crow, and race. Back of the car is where the kids sit while the grownups are up front. It has no racial or ethnic overtones.
2. This is just the bigot's version of Brian's mother, right? (You know -- whatever Brian says, his mother replies: "Oh, you're always thinking about sex").
3. There is another situation in which it matters who sits in the front and who sits in the back, which may have racial or ethnic overtones, but it doesn't fit either...but it does give me an excuse to quote: "Ladies and Gentlemen, Today's Feature Presentation: Driving Miss Daisy."
Monday, July 26, 2010
Read Stuff, You Should
I haven't read anything over the weekend that annoyed me, but there's so much good stuff that I can't wait any longer. So, here goes:
1. Defense and National Security: Mark Ambinder looks at the Wikileaks data; Fred Kaplan on the Post's Top Secret America; Matthew Dickinson on the Post series and the presidency; Andrew Sprung on Obama, Gates, and the defense budget.
2. Bigotry stories. DiA's M.S. on the Ground Zero Mosque silliness, Jamelle Bouie adds historical perspective; Cynic on Sherrod; and Cynic on, well, the future. (TNC? Not only the Best Blogger ever, but as far as I know the best comments section, and apparently the best guest-bloggers. As Bill McNeal would say....Damn.). Gotta quote the first line...Cynic: "Why did anyone ever believe that Shirley Sherrod might have stood before a couple hundred people and given a speech in which she publicly proclaimed herself a racist?"
3. Barry Pump on magic presidency dust (and Tom Friedman).
4, Other policy areas...Jonathan Cohn with a Massachusetts health care update; Elizabeth McNichol on the states and their budgets; and Ezra Klein suggests everyone take a deep breath when it comes to Elizabeth Warren.
5. Michael Cohen on substance vs. symbolism.
6. Noah Millman takes down David Frum's Cold War Case for Israel.
7. Sprung again, on one of my favorite topics: the Big Dog (I have the Taylor Branch book within reach of where I'm sitting...really want to get to it. Haven't.).
8. And Alex Massie takes up my question about West Virginia.
That should keep everyone busy. Get to it! And enjoy.
1. Defense and National Security: Mark Ambinder looks at the Wikileaks data; Fred Kaplan on the Post's Top Secret America; Matthew Dickinson on the Post series and the presidency; Andrew Sprung on Obama, Gates, and the defense budget.
2. Bigotry stories. DiA's M.S. on the Ground Zero Mosque silliness, Jamelle Bouie adds historical perspective; Cynic on Sherrod; and Cynic on, well, the future. (TNC? Not only the Best Blogger ever, but as far as I know the best comments section, and apparently the best guest-bloggers. As Bill McNeal would say....Damn.). Gotta quote the first line...Cynic: "Why did anyone ever believe that Shirley Sherrod might have stood before a couple hundred people and given a speech in which she publicly proclaimed herself a racist?"
3. Barry Pump on magic presidency dust (and Tom Friedman).
4, Other policy areas...Jonathan Cohn with a Massachusetts health care update; Elizabeth McNichol on the states and their budgets; and Ezra Klein suggests everyone take a deep breath when it comes to Elizabeth Warren.
5. Michael Cohen on substance vs. symbolism.
6. Noah Millman takes down David Frum's Cold War Case for Israel.
7. Sprung again, on one of my favorite topics: the Big Dog (I have the Taylor Branch book within reach of where I'm sitting...really want to get to it. Haven't.).
8. And Alex Massie takes up my question about West Virginia.
That should keep everyone busy. Get to it! And enjoy.
Friday, July 23, 2010
Why The Panic?
Jonathan Chait has an interesting post up arguing that the Obama administration is particularly vulnerable, and more to the point acts particularly vulnerable, when race is involved:
Chait is right: it certainly isn't true that the administration has folded every time that Beck has singled someone out. I just don't think we know enough yet to be able to conclude why this time was different.
I don't think there's a generalized pattern of the administration folding in the face of right-wing attacks, credible or otherwise. Rather, the issue is that the Obama administration is, and always has been, terrified of engaging on race.I think it's worth considering, but I'm not sure that he's right. On the Shirley Sherrod affair, I think we need more information. Who panicked? Was it someone in the White House communications or political shops (or in the chief of staff's office)? Someone who was on hair-trigger alert to defuse all issues remotely racially tinged as quickly as possible? Or, as we've been told and as I suspect was true, was it someone in the Ag Department -- perhaps someone not very senior in the Ag Department. Perhaps someone who normally goes about his business in one of the many backwaters of the government, someone in a press office whose normal interactions are with equally backwater reporters for the Podunk Times and the Ag Policy Review (uh, those are fictional, I think), and who suddenly found himself fielding calls from the Glenn Beck show and dozens of other major conservative media outlets, and panicked -- followed by more panic from whatever backwater bureaucrat the press official ran to who had the authority to make the wrong decision about Sherrod. If that's the case -- and again, that's my hunch, but I certainly could be wrong -- then it's still possible that race was the trigger, but more likely it was just that a couple of mid-level officials found themselves way over their heads, and any "scandal" about to show up on Fox News would have led to the same outcome.
Chait is right: it certainly isn't true that the administration has folded every time that Beck has singled someone out. I just don't think we know enough yet to be able to conclude why this time was different.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Presidents for the Fourth 2
Oh, Ta-Nehisi Coates is gonna like this...guess which president's stock has improved the most since the last Siena College survey? That's right, it's Ulysses S. Grant.
Grant was close to the bottom in the first three Siena polls (1982, 1990, 1994), beating out just three presidents each time. In the 2002 edition, he moved up the 35th (of 42). Now, he's escaped the ranks of the failed presidents entirely, rising to a respectable 26th. This matches what other surveys have been showing. The very first such study, conducted in 1948 by Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., had Grant second-to-last, and up until recently he was invariably a bottom-five choice. Now, with Siena joining the crowd, he's a mid-pack president. Siena's respondents docked him for his executive appointments and executive ability, and didn't really give him strong marks anywhere, with it all averaging out to 26th place.
I have to admit that I probably know more about the historiography here than about the actual history of the Grant presidency. The historiography is straightforward: Southern-dominated history cast Grant as the scapegoat for pretty much everything. Grant was uncouth and brutal while Lee was civilized and tragic. Grant spent eight years drunk while crooks raided the treasury and crazies took revenge on the South. Something like that. Lincoln was sainted -- that almost couldn't be helped -- but his death left the presidency in the hands of buffoons who allowed the greedy carpetbaggers and clown-like (at best) ex-slaves to punish the South even more over that tariff-dispute thing that tragically divided honorable Americans.
Of course, that was all nonsense, and it's finally starting to recede, and with that Grant's ratings are improving. I have only the vaguest of notions, however, about where he really should be in this sort of ranking. My geuss is that I'd probably wind up putting him somewhat higher, somewhere in the broad range of 13th-22nd, if I was doing a ranking right now, but I'd be stabbing at it..
The obvious recommendations for Grant are his memoirs, which I haven't read, and TNC"s recent series of posts as he was reading the memoirs, which I have (links to the last one, I'm not aware of any index, alas). But really, since what interests me in this post is the historiography, there's only one place to send you: you really have to watch Birth of a Nation. It's all you think it is...you just have to watch it, and understand that it was White House-sanctioned history, of a piece with most grade school and high school American history texts, and not the ravings of some loony remnant faction.
Grant was close to the bottom in the first three Siena polls (1982, 1990, 1994), beating out just three presidents each time. In the 2002 edition, he moved up the 35th (of 42). Now, he's escaped the ranks of the failed presidents entirely, rising to a respectable 26th. This matches what other surveys have been showing. The very first such study, conducted in 1948 by Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., had Grant second-to-last, and up until recently he was invariably a bottom-five choice. Now, with Siena joining the crowd, he's a mid-pack president. Siena's respondents docked him for his executive appointments and executive ability, and didn't really give him strong marks anywhere, with it all averaging out to 26th place.
I have to admit that I probably know more about the historiography here than about the actual history of the Grant presidency. The historiography is straightforward: Southern-dominated history cast Grant as the scapegoat for pretty much everything. Grant was uncouth and brutal while Lee was civilized and tragic. Grant spent eight years drunk while crooks raided the treasury and crazies took revenge on the South. Something like that. Lincoln was sainted -- that almost couldn't be helped -- but his death left the presidency in the hands of buffoons who allowed the greedy carpetbaggers and clown-like (at best) ex-slaves to punish the South even more over that tariff-dispute thing that tragically divided honorable Americans.
Of course, that was all nonsense, and it's finally starting to recede, and with that Grant's ratings are improving. I have only the vaguest of notions, however, about where he really should be in this sort of ranking. My geuss is that I'd probably wind up putting him somewhat higher, somewhere in the broad range of 13th-22nd, if I was doing a ranking right now, but I'd be stabbing at it..
The obvious recommendations for Grant are his memoirs, which I haven't read, and TNC"s recent series of posts as he was reading the memoirs, which I have (links to the last one, I'm not aware of any index, alas). But really, since what interests me in this post is the historiography, there's only one place to send you: you really have to watch Birth of a Nation. It's all you think it is...you just have to watch it, and understand that it was White House-sanctioned history, of a piece with most grade school and high school American history texts, and not the ravings of some loony remnant faction.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Ronald Reagan, Conservatives, and Willing Innocence
There's a whole discussion that Matt Yglesias sparked and Conor Friedersdorf got going about today's conservatives and Goldwater worship, but I'm going to skip to what what Ta-Nehisi Coates said, because it's Just That Good:
Here's the thing: Ronald Reagan's great gift, as Garry Wills told it, was exactly that naivete. I've posted before Lou Cannon's story about Reagan's ability to continue touting Hollywood morality and how it led to great marriages even in the weeks after his own divorce. That's just the beginnings of it. Wills talks at length about Reagan's ability to believe what he wanted to believe, to believe things that fit the story he wanted to be living. The best illustration of this, to me, was that Reagan even managed to ignore the obvious subtexts of Production Code era movies. This brings us to Reagan's favorite movie role, the one that made him a star: Drake McHugh in King's Row. For Reagan, King's Row -- a gothic story about the evils lurking below the surface of a seemingly idyllic American town -- was mostly a story about overcoming adversity in an idyllic American town. Moreover, part of the strength of the American gothic genre...think, for example, David Lynch's Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks, or Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"...is that it undermines one's ability to retain an idyllic image of American small-town life. See also the political theorist John Seery's wonderful analysis of Grant Wood's "American Gothic" (alas, I can't find an ungated version of the paper, but he discusses it briefly here).
As Wills describes it in his Reagan book, Code-era audiences learned to understand the ever-expanding symbolism that Hollywood deployed to evade the censors (think of how in Top Secret! the camera cuts from Val Kilmer and Lucy Gutteridge embracing while parachuting to safety...to a fireplace, parachuting right along side them). Here's Wills:
By the way, the KGB agent who lures Travolta and Gross to the USSR is Toad, from American Graffiti (a movie irrelevant to this, despite its small-town setting, but one I like to mention since I love it). Toad...er, Charles Martin Smith, also directed the first half of the pilot of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, which certainly is relevant. In American gothic, things lurk underneath...in American gothic monster-style, things really do lurk underneath, and they're trying to get out and kill you, and in fact they take half the high school kids in town hostage by the end of the second half of the pilot. After Buffy stops them (uh, spoiler -- the world doesn't actually end in the pilot), her new friend Xander says that nothing will ever be the same again/quick cut to the next day, at school, where everything is the same after all, and Giles has to explain to Willow and Xander that people are capable of blocking out all sorts of horrible things that they don't want to know.
Which leads us back to Ronald Reagan, and his great gift of naivete. I'll quote Wills again:
Sometimes, with Reagan, the belief in the pretense got him into trouble. Sometimes, as in his recovery from divorce, as Wills writes, it was a source of great strength (and of course he had other strengths, too -- Reagan was a very successful pol for plenty of reasons). I think it was this quality of Reagan's, however, and not his Hollywood background that fooled liberals into thinking that he was "just" an actor and over his head in national politics. But at the same time, Reagan's ability to believe things that weren't so was no help to him in the White House, and in my view it seriously endangered the nation more than once, most precariously at Reykjavik (although see this argument that Reagan's belief in pretense was in some ways essential to the demise of communism).
That's the basic story I feel confident in telling about Reagan. Now, if I wanted to stretch, I would launch into a discussion of how Ronald Reagan taught conservatives to believe that the things they want to believe are true. Perhaps that's true, but it's pretty squishy stuff. I guess what I'd say is that Reagan's belief-in-pretense solved solved for himself at least one difficult problem in post-civil rights America, and it's not unreasonable to speculate that those who have sought to emulate him have learned what he taught. And here I would return to TNC and the willed naivite among some of today's conservatives.
The problem for conservatives in post-civil rights America -- at least for well-intentioned conservatives -- is the one that Rand Paul ran into last week, or the one that Trent Lott ran into a few years ago. Like or it not, the problem goes (and this is what Matt Yglesias was talking about), the contemporary conservative movement was very much born in opposition to the civil rights movement. That's a whopping big original sin. Conservatives have dealt with this in any number of ways...pretending that MLK's basic message was opposition to affirmative action, or Michael Steele's favorite, pretending that the Republicans who fought the Civil War and supported civil rights are the same people as today's conservatives. Reagan's is one of the best: simply pretending that it never happened, that there was a time when no one knew about the bigotry...and then things got better. Of course, the past and race isn't just a problem for conservatives; it's a problem for Democrats, for liberals, and for the nation as a whole. But liberals can look back with justifiable pride of at least some of their actions at one critical point, and that perhaps makes it easier to deal with the truth of other times when they showed less courage. Democrats can look back with pride (perhaps less justifiable, but at least plausible) at the record of their party in risking electoral loss over historic legislation, and that perhaps makes it easier to deal with the truth of the party's long and disgraceful record up until that point. It's not surprising, then, that believing the pretense that there never were any racists is appealing to some conservatives, even if it means pretending that there are not now, and never have been, any conservative interest in winning the Jimmy Rebel vote.
(I don't, by the way, mean just white liberals and white Democrats -- I mean liberals-as-liberals, regardless of ethnicity).
If I really wanted to dive into speculation, I could talk about what Jonathan Chait recently referred to as "magical thinking" among conservatives, generally, and think about the connection between that sort of thinking and Reagan's ability to believe the pretense. I think that's probably a step too far for me, and I'll leave it to others to think about.
Which leaves me just with one important paragraph of caveats. I am certainly not saying that conservative thought is somehow illegitimate or tainted because of its history, any more than America itself is somehow illegitimate because of its history. What I am saying is that one does have to deal with these things in some way, and the Reagan method involved simply not believing things that didn't fit what he wanted to believe, true or not. And, again, I'm not saying that this means that Reagan was a moron or anything like that, or that this particular trait of Reagan's delegitimatizes conservative ideas. That's not the point. The idea here is to understand how he went about his life in order to see his strengths and weaknesses, not to assess conservative thought based on how one conservative pol lived his life.
And, endnotes...here's Adam Serwer and David Weigel, and here's Conor Friedersdorf's follow-up.
I mentioned a lot of movies and TV shows above. I give my highest recommendations to Top Secret! (much funnier than Airplane!); to Buffy (stick with it, the first season is inconsistent, but it's worth it); and to American Graffiti. I'm not sure what kind of recommendation to give The Boondocks. It's wildly inconsistent; at its best, one of the most terrific shows I've ever seen, but I'm not sure that it's really worth sticking with it past season one, although there are still funny bits that pop up when you least expect it. I have some thoughts about Huey in the current season, but this is long enough already. If you haven't seen Back to the Future for some reason I suppose I can solidly recommend that, as well. And, of course, I continue to highly recommend Garry Wills, Reagan's America: Innocents at Home.
Goldwater's sin was naivety...In that sense, Goldwater is the more appropriate hero for today's generation of blissfully ignorant ("How did that 'White slavery' sign get there?") non-racist Republican. It's not so much that they hate you, it's they are shocked--shocked--to discover that some of their fellow travelers hate you. When discussing them, all bloggers are required to begin their missives by quickly dispensing with with the "Are they racist?" strawman. Answering in the affirmative has been outlawed in polite company, where there are no actual racists. And so we are left, as I've said, with imbecility as an explanation, and a much more troubling query--"Are they stupid?" ("Are you so stupid that you would allow racist newsletters to be published in your name?" "Are you so stupid that you would have a campaign manager with "Happy Nigger day" on his Myspace page?")TNC is brilliant as usual. Even better, all of this gives me an excuse, actually a pretty good excuse, to go through at least some of the bits of my very favorite classroom lecture that I give, since it's very much to the point here. Plus it can count as a Monday Movies Post, sort of.
Here's the thing: Ronald Reagan's great gift, as Garry Wills told it, was exactly that naivete. I've posted before Lou Cannon's story about Reagan's ability to continue touting Hollywood morality and how it led to great marriages even in the weeks after his own divorce. That's just the beginnings of it. Wills talks at length about Reagan's ability to believe what he wanted to believe, to believe things that fit the story he wanted to be living. The best illustration of this, to me, was that Reagan even managed to ignore the obvious subtexts of Production Code era movies. This brings us to Reagan's favorite movie role, the one that made him a star: Drake McHugh in King's Row. For Reagan, King's Row -- a gothic story about the evils lurking below the surface of a seemingly idyllic American town -- was mostly a story about overcoming adversity in an idyllic American town. Moreover, part of the strength of the American gothic genre...think, for example, David Lynch's Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks, or Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"...is that it undermines one's ability to retain an idyllic image of American small-town life. See also the political theorist John Seery's wonderful analysis of Grant Wood's "American Gothic" (alas, I can't find an ungated version of the paper, but he discusses it briefly here).
As Wills describes it in his Reagan book, Code-era audiences learned to understand the ever-expanding symbolism that Hollywood deployed to evade the censors (think of how in Top Secret! the camera cuts from Val Kilmer and Lucy Gutteridge embracing while parachuting to safety...to a fireplace, parachuting right along side them). Here's Wills:
Once it was realized that movies were sending messages over and around the Code, a kind of snide knowingness was required in the intelligent viewer. The question became not is this storm really the Code's code for intercourse, but can there be any storm in the movies that is not a sexual spasm?...There was a perpetual oscillation, a forever wavering balance, between the naive and the knowing, between sappy innocence and winking lubriciousness. One falsehood fed the other. As Ben Hecht wrote: "The have learned how to hint at fornication in a hundred masterful ways and so much that I, for one, watching a movie, am ready to believe that all its males and females fall to futtering one another as soon as the scene dissolves."Mind if I go off on a bit more of a tangent? If the Production Code protects us from King's Row, from American gothic themes of incest, sadism, and other depravity lurking below the surface of small-town America, then when the Code goes away, the movies in that genre get awfully hard to watch. After all, even David Lynch needs a stylized opening to his own imaginings of depravity (granted, Lynch is no slouch at imagining depravity). Much easier to take are two Reagan-era films. Back to the Future is an inverted comic American gothic. In it, the perverted, corrupt city is on the surface, while the pure idyllic American small town is, perversely, lurking underneath. The film retains the themes of incest (Marty and his mom) and sadism (the town bully), but they're now comic, not depraved. Even more oddly inverted, albeit far more obscure, is The Experts, from one of John Travolta's career lulls. Like Back to the Future, this one also features an idyllic American 1950s small town. However, the rot underneath this one is quite literally Communism; the small town is actually a KGB version of an American small town in which agents live out their lives in order to raise "real" Americans who can grow up to be the perfect agents. Insidious -- but it's the 1980s, and in order to bring the town up to date, the KGB tricks Travolta and Arye Gross to move there to bring them 1980s hair or something like that. Not only are Travolta and Gross too foolish to figure out that they're not in Nebraska, but as two city-dwelling, club-hopping, losers, they don't have the true American values that the KGB...wait for it...finds to its horror that they've inadvertently bred into their faux "Americans," who naturally have to teach Travolta the true meaning of America. (Arye Gross is a sidekick; sidekicks don't have to learn things). It's not quite as clean an inverted American gothic as is Back to the Future, but I do love the way that it subverts American gothic themes by replacing personal and societal corruption with communism.
By the way, the KGB agent who lures Travolta and Gross to the USSR is Toad, from American Graffiti (a movie irrelevant to this, despite its small-town setting, but one I like to mention since I love it). Toad...er, Charles Martin Smith, also directed the first half of the pilot of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, which certainly is relevant. In American gothic, things lurk underneath...in American gothic monster-style, things really do lurk underneath, and they're trying to get out and kill you, and in fact they take half the high school kids in town hostage by the end of the second half of the pilot. After Buffy stops them (uh, spoiler -- the world doesn't actually end in the pilot), her new friend Xander says that nothing will ever be the same again/quick cut to the next day, at school, where everything is the same after all, and Giles has to explain to Willow and Xander that people are capable of blocking out all sorts of horrible things that they don't want to know.
Which leads us back to Ronald Reagan, and his great gift of naivete. I'll quote Wills again:
Each performer had to strike her or her private bargain with make-believe. It is clear, from early on, what Reagan's device would be: he pretended there was no pretense. When he had to, he could will his own innocence.Reagan, as it were, is the people of Sunnydale. He's able to believe that idyllic American small towns are nothing but idyllic American small towns even after watching the vamps kill his friends. Reagan famously said that "I am eternally optimistic, and I happen to believe that we've made great progress from the days when I was young and when this country didn't even know it had a racial problem." One can read all sorts of terrible motives into that, but I think it's better to see it as of a piece with the Reagan who never was divorced, the Reagan who makes himself believe that a fireplace is just a fireplace. The Reagan who just couldn't force himself to believe that he had traded arms for hostages, because it didn't fit with the rest of the story he thought he was in.
Sometimes, with Reagan, the belief in the pretense got him into trouble. Sometimes, as in his recovery from divorce, as Wills writes, it was a source of great strength (and of course he had other strengths, too -- Reagan was a very successful pol for plenty of reasons). I think it was this quality of Reagan's, however, and not his Hollywood background that fooled liberals into thinking that he was "just" an actor and over his head in national politics. But at the same time, Reagan's ability to believe things that weren't so was no help to him in the White House, and in my view it seriously endangered the nation more than once, most precariously at Reykjavik (although see this argument that Reagan's belief in pretense was in some ways essential to the demise of communism).
That's the basic story I feel confident in telling about Reagan. Now, if I wanted to stretch, I would launch into a discussion of how Ronald Reagan taught conservatives to believe that the things they want to believe are true. Perhaps that's true, but it's pretty squishy stuff. I guess what I'd say is that Reagan's belief-in-pretense solved solved for himself at least one difficult problem in post-civil rights America, and it's not unreasonable to speculate that those who have sought to emulate him have learned what he taught. And here I would return to TNC and the willed naivite among some of today's conservatives.
The problem for conservatives in post-civil rights America -- at least for well-intentioned conservatives -- is the one that Rand Paul ran into last week, or the one that Trent Lott ran into a few years ago. Like or it not, the problem goes (and this is what Matt Yglesias was talking about), the contemporary conservative movement was very much born in opposition to the civil rights movement. That's a whopping big original sin. Conservatives have dealt with this in any number of ways...pretending that MLK's basic message was opposition to affirmative action, or Michael Steele's favorite, pretending that the Republicans who fought the Civil War and supported civil rights are the same people as today's conservatives. Reagan's is one of the best: simply pretending that it never happened, that there was a time when no one knew about the bigotry...and then things got better. Of course, the past and race isn't just a problem for conservatives; it's a problem for Democrats, for liberals, and for the nation as a whole. But liberals can look back with justifiable pride of at least some of their actions at one critical point, and that perhaps makes it easier to deal with the truth of other times when they showed less courage. Democrats can look back with pride (perhaps less justifiable, but at least plausible) at the record of their party in risking electoral loss over historic legislation, and that perhaps makes it easier to deal with the truth of the party's long and disgraceful record up until that point. It's not surprising, then, that believing the pretense that there never were any racists is appealing to some conservatives, even if it means pretending that there are not now, and never have been, any conservative interest in winning the Jimmy Rebel vote.
(I don't, by the way, mean just white liberals and white Democrats -- I mean liberals-as-liberals, regardless of ethnicity).
If I really wanted to dive into speculation, I could talk about what Jonathan Chait recently referred to as "magical thinking" among conservatives, generally, and think about the connection between that sort of thinking and Reagan's ability to believe the pretense. I think that's probably a step too far for me, and I'll leave it to others to think about.
Which leaves me just with one important paragraph of caveats. I am certainly not saying that conservative thought is somehow illegitimate or tainted because of its history, any more than America itself is somehow illegitimate because of its history. What I am saying is that one does have to deal with these things in some way, and the Reagan method involved simply not believing things that didn't fit what he wanted to believe, true or not. And, again, I'm not saying that this means that Reagan was a moron or anything like that, or that this particular trait of Reagan's delegitimatizes conservative ideas. That's not the point. The idea here is to understand how he went about his life in order to see his strengths and weaknesses, not to assess conservative thought based on how one conservative pol lived his life.
And, endnotes...here's Adam Serwer and David Weigel, and here's Conor Friedersdorf's follow-up.
I mentioned a lot of movies and TV shows above. I give my highest recommendations to Top Secret! (much funnier than Airplane!); to Buffy (stick with it, the first season is inconsistent, but it's worth it); and to American Graffiti. I'm not sure what kind of recommendation to give The Boondocks. It's wildly inconsistent; at its best, one of the most terrific shows I've ever seen, but I'm not sure that it's really worth sticking with it past season one, although there are still funny bits that pop up when you least expect it. I have some thoughts about Huey in the current season, but this is long enough already. If you haven't seen Back to the Future for some reason I suppose I can solidly recommend that, as well. And, of course, I continue to highly recommend Garry Wills, Reagan's America: Innocents at Home.
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