Race and Redistribution
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:
Anyway, there’s been a pretty lively debate raging between Yglesias, Douthat, Judis and Feeny. It’ll probably come as no surprise that I mostly agree with Douthat, if with a significant twist. It’s not that I put it past McCain’s people to race-bait, it’s that I really don’t care.
I think I should revise and extend my remarks on this score. “Race-baiting,” however defined, is not really the issue. Indeed, I tend to think that as a political concept it’s overblown. Barack Obama is a black man. This is obvious. People inclined to let this fact influence their vote — either those drawn to him or those repelled from him on account of his race — probably don’t need to be prompted or baited into doing so. The more important point is that race and racism have a large structural pull on the shape of American politics. In particular, they’re an obstacle for a politics of economic equality, security, and solidarity.
This happens through a number of mechanisms. One is that you have white Americans near the bottom of the economic spectrum who may be more inclined to identify on a personal level with whites near the top of the pyramid than with non-whites who are more similarly situated in terms of objective interests. Recall the great Gelman race/class master charts:
Poor Hispanics, poor Asians, poor African-Americans, and poor “others” are all very disinclined to vote Republican. But about half of poor non-Hispanic whites do. Conversely, very few rich African-Americans vote Republican, notwithstanding the general pro-GOP sympathies of rich non-Republicans. I don’t think anyone would take me to be saying anything especially controversial if I were to say that rich blacks’ aversion to the Republican Party is, in part, a matter of racial solidarity with the mostly non-rich black population trumping class solidarity with the mostly non-black rich population. But the same is true on the flip side — white racial solidarity trumping class solidarity is one of the reasons that poor whites are so relatively friendly to the Republican Party.
Another mechanism has to do with trust. Once upon a time there was a lot of concern with “welfare fraud.” Welfare fraud was a real phenomenon. And, clearly, being against fraud is not a racist sentiment as such. At the same time, children suffering lifelong handicaps in the struggle to build a decent life for themselves owing to growing up in conditions of deplorable poverty also was (and is) a very real problem. And when designing systems, it’s difficult to maximize the value of “giving all the help needed to everyone who needs it” and also maximize the value of making the system completely immune to fraud or abuse. When the recipients of help are people you find it easy to identify with, the tendency is to tell yourself sympathetic stories about their plight. When the recipients of help are people you find it difficult to identify with, you become much more skeptical — very eager to make sure that not one red cent is spent on an idler or a fraudster. Doing that becomes the most important thing, and that means that more legitimate needs wind up going unmet. And, again, it’s not racist to decide that you’re more interested in preventing fraud than in providing people with preventive health care — that’s a value decision. But it does seem that which values people prefer depends in part on racial and ethnic factors.
It’s not a coincidence that you tend to see more generous welfare states constructed in countries that have traditionally been homogeneous, or that in the US the South has both been the epicenter of racial animosity and the location of the least generous welfare states. One could arguably tell a story in which it’s the Swedes and the Finns who are the real racists here (letting Nordic genetic superiority blind them to the overarching merits of sink-or-swim individualism) but either way you’re going to get the result that racial and ethnic conflict is relevant to the politics of class and economics.
36 Responses to “Race and Redistribution”
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November 1st, 2008 at 9:28 am
Indeed. And this is why Scandinavian countries have had a real test as more immigrants from the Middle east/non EU countries. I lived in Denmark for a year in college, and was amazed at the level of ethnic solidarity, love of their governmental system, ect. among the Danes. But I was there when the Mohammad cartoon controversy went down, and not surprisingly heard a lot of anti Arab/muslim rhetoric among Danish friends. There is a substantial fear of new, nonwhite, largely Arab Muslim immigrants coming in, especially with older Danes. This is perhaps not very surprising, but i was struck that many of the Danes i knew expressed sentiment that i was familiar with, that the nonwhite immigrants are a burden on the welfare state, lazy, unemployed, ect. (of course on of my white Danish friends had been unemployed for two years and was living comfortably off the state, but he wasn’t considered a burden). With that said, there are a lot of younger Danes that are immigration advocates. Have not really followed the debate closely for the past few years, but no doubt that it seems to be creating a crisis for the Danish welfare state-one that will could certainly result in increasingly stringent immigration policy.
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/sais/nexteurope/2008/10/super-immigrants_and_denmarks.html
November 1st, 2008 at 9:35 am
I live near a town that used to be a “sunset” town, where blacks reasonably feared to be there after sunset. This is Appalachia, there was not much of a Black population (very few slaves before the Civil war). One element of this racist ‘heritage’ was that, in the ’30s, the local mines and chemical plant unionized. During the first strikes, blacks were brought in as ‘replacement’ workers (scabs, if you will) and some were lynched. Now there are blacks living there, and even this insane reggae group having a festival there, and a few interracial couples. But the lingering hatred still emerges sometimes.
One of the features of racism is that lower class blacks and whites have been pitted against each other in a zero sum game..
And the whole problem with the ’southern heritage’ types is that their idea of history is strictly Hollywood. The locals ignore the area’s real history as a Unionist stronghold and a nasty brother against brother struggle, and wave the Rebel flag. Their history stops at Appomattox, and ignores the use of that flag in the Jim Crow era, the time of lynching and an apartheid as bad as, indeed the model for, South Africa’s, that didn’t begin to break down until the 1960s.
November 1st, 2008 at 10:08 am
MR Bill certainly makes a good point; if you want to stir up the poor/uneducated whites (don’t call them bitter), start talking about affirmative action, welfare queens, etc. Obama is right to talk about such programs in terms of class and need, rather than race.
November 1st, 2008 at 10:37 am
Very very good post
November 1st, 2008 at 10:42 am
Lucid, necessary and beautifully done.
November 1st, 2008 at 10:42 am
I am retired and have been an Obama volunteer in a small town in Wisconsin this year. Based on that experience, I must say that race is an insignificant factor here in voting choices. Older folks vote pretty much the same way (party) because, well, they always have done that . . . Young folks are, of course, more liberal leaning . . . Educated people are more liberal leaning. . . The very religious are single issue voters for the Republicans. . . Teachers are Democrats.
Major factors influencing voters this time . . . The economy; Abortion; Ignorance. . . (Amazing how many $30,000 earners are convinced Obama would raise their taxes or take away the rifles they use for hunting.)
November 1st, 2008 at 10:57 am
Off-topic, but one factor keeps those Gelman charts from true greatness: capping the vote share axis at 75% creates an artificially inflated picture of Bush’s support among all groups. He looks like he’s dominating most groups, even those where he’s barely cracking 50%, because his lines float in the upper half of almost every chart. Extending the vote share to 100% would give a much more realistic measure of his support.
I imagine any such charts for Obama’s vote share in 2008 would have to go higher, for African American voters if nothing else.
November 1st, 2008 at 10:57 am
1) Matthew left out the part where the rich white Republicans turn around and screw the poor whites like dogs.
2) Which is okay, because he also left out the part where the rich white Democrats turn around and screw the poor whites, blacks, and Hispanics like dogs.
3) We are in the later stages of the Roman Republic’s collapse. Julius Caesar’s cabal and the patricians may be fighting for power –but neither one of the gives a hairy rodent’s posterior for the plebe.
Jay Leno had a point when he said he preferred Hillary Clinton because she condescended to us better.
November 1st, 2008 at 11:01 am
I’ll be working all day for Obama on Election Day –but it’s because I want to cut the Republicans throats, not because I’m wildly optimistic that Obama will be able to significantly change things or divert us from where we are heading.
As someone noted here over a year ago, the lesson of history is that we never learn from the lessons of history.
November 1st, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Re Don Williams
I really love the rants of the boards’ resident Bolshevik. I really think he should leaven his posts with some two fisted Israel bashing, just to provide variety.
November 1st, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Right wing parties usually crave a watershed event in which they win the loyalty of the poor and the low-information voters, and can milk it for generations.
Israel => Likud
Argentina => Peronistas
(parts of) Britain => the Tories
Appalachia+South => GOP
Actually, both Likud and the Peronistas can turn many elements of their ideology on a dime, and sometimes act like a Single Party does, by attracting ambitious politics-minded people regardless of their actual ideas. Before the ascendence of Likud, Mapai (Labor) behaved as a Single Party, but the ideology was relevant.
November 1st, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Re: We are in the later stages of the Roman Republic’s collapse.
This is a common meme, but one that does not stand up to history very well. The late Roman Republic was riven by military coups, civil wars and dictatorships. We are not.
While I don’t think history reperats itself, the best analogy to Roman history would be the Republic c. 200 BC– Carthage was defeated, Rome was supreme in its known world (but there were still enemies, allies and other lesser powers in that world), the rich were certainly getting richer, but the social upheavals of the Gracchi, of Saturninus, Marius and Sulla, were still a long ways off.
November 1st, 2008 at 12:21 pm
my mother is a conservative black woman. on state and local levels she splits her vote (1/2 Dem, 1/2 Repub). She’s been a registered Democrat for years, but I think she switched her affiliation a couple of years ago to Republican or Independent. She also donates a significant amount of $$ to Republicans she supports, like Olympia Snow.
On the national level she’s been back and forth. She liked Reagan, liked Bush Jr., liked Clinton, and hated George Bush with a passion. When campaigning started in 2007, she contributed to McCain and Hillary. She hasn’t give McCain a dime since he started to go crazy and she felt insulted when he picked Sarah Palin. I think, for her, and a lot of other black people, it’s not necessarily about “race solidarity” nor is it about “class solidarity within racial groups.” The more stuff the right-wing of the GOP does on the extremist side, the more they push someone like her away. She’s so offended by the mccain rallies and sarah palin, that I don’t think she’ll be contributing any $$ to any republican candidates this year. She’s not the biggest fan of Obama but she appreciates his sense of inclusiveness and his vision to change the country.
November 1st, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Hey, SLC , how did Matthew talk you into posing for his thread the other day?
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2008/10/tinfoil_time.php
November 1st, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Puzzled One,
I’m not certain that Peronism is best classified as ‘right wing’ in the same sense as Likud or the Republicans. It certainly wasn’t on the _left_, but at the same time it was anti-capitalist at least in theory, and anti-oligarchy. Peronism had quite a following among students and the youth, and by the 1960s there were quite a few people who claimed to be simultaneously Peronist and socialist. The threat to the established oligarchy in the ’60s and ’70s came from two armed movements, one of them Marxist and the other Left-Peronist.
November 1st, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Re JonF’s comment “but the social upheavals of the Gracchi, of Saturninus, Marius and Sulla, were still a long ways off.”
———-
You don’t see the assassinations of John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther king as similar to those of the Gracchi? Both cases, after all, were precursors of what followed.
Marius changed the Roman Army from a citizens’ army into one of long term volunteers recruited from the poor circa 107 BC. When did we do the same?
Look at what the Founding Fathers said about standing armies in times of peace. For the first 210 years of our existence, our leaders followed that advice. Clinton has began the post-Cold War drawdown.
George W Has embarked onto a different pattern — because that an Empire made for the Superrich requires protection for the Superrich’s foreign investments. You also have the pattern of the middle class being destroyed by the twin burdens of taxes/heavy borrowing to support Empire and competition for wages from cheap imported foreign slaves.
November 1st, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Erica Jong senses what I’m talking about:
http://www.observer.com/2008/politics/erica-jong-tells-italians-obama-loss-will-spark-second-american-civil-war-blood-will-r
November 1st, 2008 at 3:50 pm
I just scanned the post, looking for one outstanding instance of stupidity. Needless to say, I found one:
white racial solidarity trumping class solidarity is one of the reasons that poor whites are so relatively friendly to the Republican Party.
Actually, that’s probably more of a reaction to the Democratic Party’s frequent overt hostility to white people, especially straight white Christian males. Of course, it’s not just limited to that subgroup; consider for instance this quote from the Chairman of the CaliforniaDemocraticParty (ID’ed there as former chairman, but he’s actually been in that position since 1997.)
That quote is coming close to something that Hitler or Mugabe would say, but there it is coming from the Chairman of the CaliforniaDemocraticParty.
November 1st, 2008 at 4:05 pm
I’m not sure the analogy with Scandinavian states holds true. For one thing, they differ among themselves, Sweden having for example one of the largest shares of foreign-born inhabitants in Western Europe, and this since the 60’s – and the rising proportion of foreigners or Swedes of foreign stock hasn’t dented the Swedish electorate’s fondness of welfare – the right came to power in 2006, for the third time in the last 75 years or so, only because it campaigned as pro-welfare…
Denmark is another kettle of fish altogether, as is Norway – in both countries, the extreme right wing – which in Denmark is part of the Fogh Rasmussen government’s parliamentary coalition – is pro-welfare, but wants to restrict both immigration and naturalization.
November 1st, 2008 at 7:46 pm
I’m going to agree with what Don Williams said. Minus the Rome stuff.
I think progressives need to do the work to hold Obama accountable if/when he is elected and not just leave it up to the statistics. To do otherwise is just lazy politics.
Seriously, he’s a Constitutional Law scholar and voted for the FISA extention, he’s also for the death penalty, free trade, and unabashed imperialism. Even if you do vote for him, which I cannot bring myself to do, please help to hold his feet to the fire.
starbuck
stayingsick.wordpress.com
November 1st, 2008 at 7:54 pm
A good post which contributes to the emerging narrative attempting to explain why even one percent of the poor would ever vote Republican. Since the Republican party cares nothing for the interests of the lower class and indeed represents policies that would drown it in economic misery and likely destroy the lives of their children, there has to be some other reason than common sense self interest that is causing these people to help put the Republicans, who ought to be their mortal enemies, in power. One possible explanation would have to do with the culture wars, and the other with race, and it seems the latter has more supporting evidence.
November 1st, 2008 at 8:55 pm
1) You mentioned awhile back that both blacks and whites grossly overestimate the percentage of black people in America. For very different political reasons neither party ever tries to put the real figures in a context. Dems don’t do it because political parties rarely go out of their way to tell coalition groups they are less powerful (except when DLC Dems falsely tells this to liberals). The reasons the GOP doesn’t do it has an uglier side, they benefit from the fears generated by the misunderstanding.
2) The GOP NEVER mentions that the raw number of white poor who benefits from government spending dwarfs the number of black poor. Why is that?
3) Coates is effectively calling McCain a bullshitter who doesn’t care if what he says is true or not. I’d add that McCain is mostly repeating other stock GOP arguments. To argue that McCain isn’t race baiting you have to stipulate McCain is dimwit parrot who cares nothing for the truth. I’d be all ready to stipulate this (McCain is dim and repetitive) BUT McCain made a big show of opposing the MLK holiday back in the day so I have no reason to believe McCain isn’t genuinely like most of his peer group in the GOP, happy to benefit from racial tension and unhappy about some of the consequences of the various civil rights legislation of the late 60s.
4) All the people in this argument understand the concept of dog whistle politics. On the issue of race Ross continues to say that because McCain doesn’t openly say Obama wants to take money from whites and give it to blacks and Palin doesn’t say ‘don’t vote for the nigger’ that there is no race-baiting going on. It’s a little more nuanced than that in 2008 (see Lee Atwater’s explanation of the Southern Strategy).
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