Liberals unfairly "playing the race card" is a frequent accusation among those on the Right, and with some justification. Dismissing one's opponent as a blanket racist is akin to a Godwin's Law violation, in that it is an ad hominem argument that shuts down all productive and reasonable discourse thereafter.
And yet, the accusation of blanket racism on the part of the Right would ring more hollow if it weren't so obviously true. A good way to put this in perspective would be to consider how radically different modern American politics would be if most Wall St. executives were black.
Ask yourself whether those same protesters would not only be raging against the bailouts rather than the stimulus, but instead be demanding the stimulus for themselves, hailing Paul Krugman rather than Glenn Beck as their greatest champion.
Because the truth is, most of the teabaggers attending these events have absolutely no problem with Keynesian social democracy, and never have.
One of the biggest problems with those obsessed with the day-to-day events in American politics is that we can often become blind to broader realities, seeing only trees when forests stretch before us. Nowhere has this been more true than the reaction to the futile Tea Party rallies organized by the Right's media empire.
Many have, of course, remarked on the absurd intellectual inconsistency and gross xenophobia of these events. But the most important observation about these teabagging events was made by Matt Taibbi: the peasant mentality that has beset so many on the Right who are furious at spending on jobs for regular people, while defending the lavish bonuses and mind-numbingly enormous bailouts of the pirates of Wall St.:
This must be a terrible time to be a right-winger. A vicious paradox has been thrust upon the once-ascendant conservatives. On the one hand they are out of power, and so must necessarily rail against the Obama administration. On the other hand they have to vilify, as dangerous anticapitalist activity, the grass-roots protests against the Geithner bailouts and the excess of companies like AIG. That leaves them with no recourse but to dream up wholesale lunacies along the lines of Glenn Beck’s recent "Fascism With a Happy Face" rants, which link the protesting "populists" and the Obama adminstration somehow and imagine them as one single nefarious, connected, ongoing effort to install a totalitarian regime.... snip
But actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit.
This is, of course, an excellent point. But Taibbi fails to answer an extremely important question: why? In a feudal system of noblesse oblige, the peasants are allowed to identify vicariously with the Noble. The Nobility, meanwhile, is bound by certain social expectations of decorum and obligation. And in the feudal system (ideally), the Noble is responsible for the economic care and military protection of the serf. In a more modern era, the Nobility (such as the Rockefellers in New York) engaged in massive public works and infrastructure projects that built beautiful city squares and libraries. In other words, it used be at least a partially two-way street. America's modern "nobility", by contrast, flitting around like slobs in private jets and private mansions, do nothing for the public square and allow for no such vicarious pleasures on the part of the peasantry. So what could possibly account for this bizarre, continued loyalty to the super-rich?
Kansas notwithstanding, the answer is fairly inescapable: it all comes down to race. Yes, there may be some resentment of the "management" middle class by the blue-collar working class (explored effectively by Barbara Ehrenreich), but that class resentment is dwarfed by race resentments.
It is a trite observation exhaustively covered by Thomas Schaller that the Republican ascendancy began when the Dixiecratic South began to switch to the Republican Party in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. No other explanation for the Reagan/Gingrich/Bush era is really necessary: the massive electoral bulk of the South switching, for fairly obvious reasons, from Democratic to Republican explains quite effectively in a simple broad stroke the past 40 years of American electoral realignment and public policy.
The basic assumption that often gets taken for granted and lost in this analysis, however, is the nature of the Dixiecratic South. It must be remembered that the Dixiecratic South was FDR's most reliable voting block on account of its economic progressivism. The Progressive Movement of the 1890s was strong among the farmers of the former Confederacy. You'll scarcely find stronger roots of economic populism than in America's "Heartland", particularly in some of the strongest Midwestern redoubts of the modern GOP's reactionary rump. So long, of course, as we're only talking about White People.
The poor, white Southern/Midwestern blue collar worker and farmer has always been fueled by anger at the oppressive forces keeping him/her down. Back in the 1890s and 1930s, this anger was directed squarely at the economic manipulations of Northeastern bankers and trusts. Wall St. was a giant target: so much so, in fact, that Wall Street's role in causing the Great Depression was kept as secret as possible, lest the institutions of Wall St. be totally destroyed in the populist rage to follow. The resentment was regional, but it was also appropriately economic against the rich.
There is only one event that can possibly explain the anti-tax, pro-rich people hysteria seen in the very children of those economic progressives: black people were finally allowed a share of the economic pie.
In the immediate aftermath of that decision, wealthy interests began the cynical rhetorical manipulation of channeling the economic resentments of these oppressed poor whites against their black/brown fellow travelers and blue-collar workers. With a long history of racial prejudice, they were only too willing to believe that African-Americans were grifters taking all their hard-earned tax dollars.
In short, poor whites stopped hating rich whites for stealing from them, and started blaming poor blacks for the theft of their dignity instead. Meanwhile, they continued to eagerly support the Keynesian social programs that worked in their favor, because they were not perceived as redounding to the benefit of African Americans. As nephewmiltie said at RedState.com:
Well, be honest. The voters have long supported socialism. This country was dominated for 50 years by the New Deal coalition, remember? The Reagan and Gingrich revolutions were never against the New Deal. They were against the Great Society. Thus, people have never opposed socialism for themselves. People have for decades wanted free public schools, grants to go to college, retirements, medical care, money to keep their businesses and farms afloat, etc. So in other words, Americans supported the socialism that benefitted them and people like them. They just opposed it for the other guy. The Great Society was easy pickings, because it went to a small segment of society that, let's face it, most people didn't like anyway.
To put this into crystal-clear perspective, let's do a little exercise: imagine, for a moment, that most of the executives getting the bonuses and being bailed on Wall St. were black. It would require an inversion of history and the social order and the reasons for the lack of black faces in the boardroom--but just suspend disbelief and go with it for a moment. Picture that alternate universe.
Now ask yourself, as I stated at the beginning, whether the collective outrage of the Right would not be forcefully made against Wall St. bailouts, rather than economic stimulus. Ask yourself, indeed, whether huge economic stimulus for themselves would not in fact be demanded, and whether Paul Krugman would not be lionized and Glenn Beck derided.
I believe they would. In fact, I know they would.
Because all the sturm und drang about "socialism" this and "communism" that, isn't about socialism or communism at all. It's about freeloaders, and the mass delusion on the part of a frighteningly large segment of the American public that blacks/browns are all freeloaders. And since communism/socialism is simply defined by the simple-minded as the taking of hard-earned wealth from John Galt producers to distribute to freeloaders, the equation here is remarkably simple.
In the old days, Wall St. bankers were considered the biggest freeloaders. Today, it's the faceless African-American in the inner city.
Which is why, to quote nephewmiltie once again:
Small government Sarah Palin actually increased spending in her state. So why did we presume that she supported small government and less spending? Simple: because she is a Republican from a state that doesn't have a Chicago, Detroit or Harlem in it. That is precisely the problem that I am speaking of.
Which is ultimately why, no matter how unfair and destructive to reasoned argument it may seem to pull out "the Race Card", honest and coherent argument with conservatives is often so impossible. Back in the old days of Buckley, Eisenhower and Goldwater, conservatives actually had meritorious intellectual arguments worth debating.
Today, nearly every conservative "idea" is merely a posturing cover for xenophobic, tribal aggression. And nobody said it better than Karl Rove's mentor Lee Atwater:
You start out in 1954 by saying, "N----r, n----r, n----r." By 1968 you can't say "n----r"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
That's really all she wrote. Until I see conservatives start getting at least as upset about tax dollars wasted on rich white people as they are about phantom tax dollars supposedly wasted on poor black people, I'll keep playing the "Race Card" on them.
Because really, at that point, what is there to talk about?