Paul Krugman is an economist.
Economists look at data to analyze things, economic data to be sure, but also other data.
Krugman writes about politics as well as economics. He looks at data that explains political actions.
Today's New York Times column, written in the aftermath of the horror of Charleston and Dylann Roof, is a superb example of that, and one that everyone should read.
He begins by pointing where we have had had progress in race, for example on the subject of interracial marriage:
as recently as the 1980s half of Americans opposed interracial marriage, a position now held by only a tiny minority.
But he immediately follows with these words
Yet racial hatred is still a potent force in our society, as we’ve just been reminded to our horror. And I’m sorry to say this, but the racial divide is still a defining feature of our political economy, the reason America is unique among advanced nations in its harsh treatment of the less fortunate and its willingness to tolerate unnecessary suffering among its citizens.
He notes his views on this are largely shaped by two academic papers. The first is by Larry Bartels written in response to Thomas Franks.
Mr. Frank argued that working-class whites were being induced to vote against their own interests by the right’s exploitation of cultural issues. But Mr. Bartels showed that the working-class turn against Democrats wasn’t a national phenomenon — it was entirely restricted to the South, where whites turned overwhelmingly Republican after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Richard Nixon’s adoption of the so-called Southern strategy.
Krugman notes that since Reagan's adoption of the Southern strategy (and I remind readers that he began his campaign in 1980 at the Neshoba County Fair in MS, that county being the site of the lynching and burying in an earthen dam of the three civil rights workers doing voter registration) Whites in the South vote 80-85% Republican. As he puts it simply:
Race made Reaganism possible.
The second paper, by economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote, analyzed why the US does NOT have a European-style social welfare state. He notes that the authors are not particularly politically liberal, and that they
concluded that race is central, because in America programs that help the needy are all too often seen as programs that help Those People: “Within the United States, race is the single most important predictor of support for welfare. America’s troubled race relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare state.”
But Krugman is just getting going.
But the heart of the column is the analysis of more recent events, specifically, implementation of "Obamacare." After pointing out the financial benefits to states that accepted the federal program on expanding Medicaid, Krugman asks the rhetorical question of who would reject such a program.
He then answers with two powerful and pointed paragraphs:
The answer is, 22 states at this point, although some may eventually change their minds. And what do these states have in common? Mainly, a history of slaveholding: Only one former member of the Confederacy has expanded Medicaid, and while a few Northern states are also part of the movement, more than 80 percent of the population in Medicaid-refusing America lives in states that practiced slavery before the Civil War.
And it’s not just health reform: a history of slavery is a strong predictor of everything from gun control (or rather its absence), to low minimum wages and hostility to unions, to tax policy.
First a quick clarification. The 22 states include those not yet states but still territories, albeit territories open to slavery.
Next, something worth remembering. The price of getting the New Deal programs through the United States requirement even with a heavily Democratic Congress was the exclusion of Negroes from many of the benefits: remember, Roosevelt's coalition included Southern Democrats who were still heavily pro-segregration. Remember that the Deomcratic leadership of the Congress and of Committees from the New Deal even through Johnson's Great Society was disproportionally Southern and thus opposed to integration, and to benefits going to those of color.
That Southern Blacks were excluded from the benefits of the New Deal, that housing under the post-World War II GI Bill allowed the exclusion of African-American veterans (and thus Levittowns, the doorway to the middle class for many vets, were racially exclusionary) means that even those social welfare programs we had tended to exacerbate the economic disparities between White and Black.
While Krugman is hopeful that things will continue to change, he is cautious. As he concludes,
Every once in a while you hear a chorus of voices declaring that race is no longer a problem in America. That’s wishful thinking; we are still haunted by our nation’s original sin.
Whether or not the series of recent events demonstrating the racial bias still so prevalent in this country, whether in the actions of Dylann Roof, the noxious responses by some on the Right to this event, the racial disparity in treatment of suspects by police and the responses to that, can bring this country as whole to the point of honestly reexamining our problem with race is still debatable.
That we still have a problem is undeniable.
That the response to social welfare is at least tinged if not defined by those who use racial fear, prejudice and stereotyping for political advantage is still an unfortunate part of one major political party. And insofar as they have political success, that they are not consistently challenged on this by the media, that political figures who know better do not stand up and call them out, then even superb analysis such as that offered here by Krugman will be insufficient.
But using that analysis, confronting people with it, perhaps can help begin to change us away from our "original sin."