"Only liberals blindly devoted to identity-politics would assume that someone not suffering from social conditions"

Actually it's "only liberals who themselves aren't suffering from social conditions..."

I'm a "tea-partier" and suffering intensely from the social conditions (recession, insane governmental interference with the job market, environmental regulation, &tc.)

It's the liberals who have money, connections, and a comfortable lifestyle who write crap like Newsweek.

I sit here in the heart of leftland - NYC - and all I can think is that these people are sick in the head. If you were a racist you could scarcely do a better job of keeping minorities down than the left does. And to then be characterized as a racist for disapproving of the left's stupidity is almost too much to bear. Why it's almost as if there's a business model for the left in all of this, with the intent being to keep minorities on a plantation so that they will vote "correctly" en masse.

Liberals and Democrats I know are always trying to discredit the Tea Party on account of its "angry" opposition to President Obama's policies. They never seem to get that even though our policy disagreements are deep and serious, the specifically "angry" emotional response is due far less to that than to this odiously condescending sort of mind-reading that masquerades as well-intentioned critical analysis and compelling argument.

Hey, you don't have to wait for a "liberal zealot" to call you a racist. You can get slapped with that rap right here on good ol' NLT, and for much less than waving a rattlesnake flag on the streets.

Until the Right stops being so allergic to these absurd allegations (or using the weapon against its own), we won't make much progress. "Racism" is an ideology that postulates racial supremacy. Postulating that Americans of European descent might have their own interests, and that America's love affair with multicultural tolerance doesn't serve those interests very well, is a far cry from racism. It also happens to be the truth -- duh.

The "Party of Lincoln" needs to figure this out.

Hear, hear. Newsweek is trash. Irredeemable trash.

It's gotten so trashily and casually hateful/stupid that one perhaps needs to ask the admirable ones that work there, like Samuelson and Will, whether it is not time to publicly quit. And one does need to start confronting the ones there who claim middle-of-the-road admirable-ness but who do not (despite having some merits) deserve it, like Zakaria, with the fact that they carry water for a disgustingly and blatantly biased outfit. That mag needs to die. The NYT, by contast, is an institution with so many different reporters and writers connected to it, that as lamentable as its leadership is, one still wants it around. A liberal elite outfit providing top-flight reporting and other services still has a place in our media landscape. What purpose does Newsweek have other than to brainwash highschoolers (library subscriptions) and to dismay seniors(at least the ones too habituated to cancel)?

Thanks for reading that filth, so I don't have to.

When was the last time you heard someone indicate that there was an important piece in Newsweek?

I suppose I live in a cocoon, though...after all, Thomas Friedman is a reliable bestseller, so somebody's at least buying this sort of junk.

Redwald, either produce the quotes from NLT comments where you've been called a racist, or stop it.

BTW, I agree with you when you say that "Postulating that Americans of European descent might have their own interests, and that America's love affair with multicultural tolerance doesn't serve those interests very well, is a far cry from racism." But unlike you I know that either a) openly organizing "Euro-Americans" as an ethnic interest (besides on a case-by-case local basis in places where they are an abused minority) or b) encouraging the G.O.P. to serve, perhaps even regrettably, as the implicit representative of unspoken white interests, is foolish and dangerous.

One of the evil fruits of multiculturalism is that it gets people (such as our Redwald) thinking seriously about their "European-American-ness" and about defending their interests under that banner.

Thought I would direct attention to this very interesting discussion between John McWhorther and Glen Loury regarding the alleged racism of the Tea Party on blogging heads.

https://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/27736

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent". Emmett Tyrell has offered that it can corrupt the public discourse to appear to take certain propositions seriously. One hopes that at this cultural moment, this sort of thing will finally be met with the indifference it deserves, and the purveyors of it treated dismissively as they deserve.

Carl Scott, I think Redwald is referring to his exchanges with Pete Spiliakos, whose reflex toward the phenomenon in question is to engage in gestures of abasement.

Art, don't dis Pete! Ain't nuthin' debased about trying to present fully thought-out positions on the internet.

Being a true moderate, that takes the most discipline, the most learning, the most patience with the snipes on both sides. That's what Solzhenitsyn said, who like our Pete, knew both that to truly be moderate in our day means being a conservative, and that being an effective conservative means being able to explore moderate policy options and alliances.

Carl, way, way, way, to kind.

AD, I don't think that the problem is that cries of racism make conservatives feel worse about themselves or conservatism. I've never known a conservative that was true of. There are contexts in which indifference and contempt for such claims is the right approach. The problem is more in how the narrative of conservatism as racism or white identity politics influences the opinions of certain subgroups. In some cases neither indifference, nor angry denial, nor apology make much sense. Better to frame the cries of racism as distractions from real life policies that could improve people's lives, and from important principles that many in those subgroups don't even know they share with conservatives (and the ideological distance between those crying racism and the intended audience for those cries.) To any assertion that Republicans are racist, responses should go immediately to specific policies and the specific benefits of those policies. How much will family friendly-tax reform cut taxes for parents and business owners in the audience. Why would your opponents spend time attacking you for racism rather than defending their support for the legality of abortion of full term fetuses. This would mean having an agenda to sell (I was just giving an example of one, but there are others), a rhetoric appropriate for an audience that doesn't have the historical context of most American conservatives (cut taxes to get the economy moving is a meaningful statement to some audiences because it is a shorthand for a set of shared policy opinions, arguments and interpretations of the past, for other audiences it is just a meaningless cliché, not wrong exactly, just incomprehensible absent context) and a willingness to go to audiences that won't immediately nod with approval when you describe liberal race baiting as race baiting

Pete, Do you really think family-friendly tax cuts will all of a sudden deal with the problem of abortion? I'm not sure that conservatives have a compelling rhetoric which can compete with the type that Lucas Morel noted that Obama recently gave at the funeral of the woman from the civil rights movement whose name I can't even remember.

Perhaps more talk against abortion will be effective over talk of tax cuts. But such talk is incendiary--at least in todays dominant media discourse. So called cultural issues are pushed aside and taxes or small government or even state rights (or I should say federalism issues) become the shibboleth. As if we put everything to the states this would solve our problem of the loss of cultural capital--as certain social scientists put it.

Tax cuts, small government, federalism--I wonder if it is too little too late.

Race baiting on a national scale is the name of the game these days. Sign me up for a Heineken at the next beer conference. I'll get drunk and nothing will change.

You need an editor.

People are only going to be prospective intimidated and contemporarily undone by charges of 'raaacism' if they lack a certain self-confidence.

Anon, no I don't think that a more pro-family tax policy will reduce abortion, but I don't think it has to in order to be an attractive and worthwhile policy. The more high salience policies you can get people to agree with you on the better.. You are right tha conservatives don't have a compelling rhetoric in competing for African American votes, but that is mostly a reason to get to work producing one and not every Democratic politician will be Obama. Abortion is a good issue to push in the right way (focusing on the humanity of the late term fetus for one) though only as one issue among others.

AD, I don't think that conservatives being intimidated by cries of racism is a major problem. I just don't think it happens all that much.

Well, Carl, I agree with you about multiculturalism. "White identity" (which is purely synthetic -- less that a century ago we were Saxons, Irish, Italians, Polish, etc.) is purely defensive in this country, and would fade if multiculturalism wasn't shoved in our faces 24/7. You know, the way Pete advocates shouting "black experience" every time Southerns want to celebrate their ancestry. As for the "foolishness" of the GOP embracing racial politics, you are being naive. It already has, and in a big way. It just doesn't call it that. In a way, I suppose, people like you and Pete are "useful idiots" for the conservative movement, mouthing multicultural niceties while most of us pursue our own self-interests. Good job, but I wouldn't want either of you to become more than window dressing.

As for being called a racist, you know damned good and well when and where that happened, and who did it.

Here's your problem. It's a mistake to think that people vote out of pure material interests. More often, it's symbolism and identity that drives party identification. So, as you go about your business of gently pushing for the "big tent," don't forget that your base is sensitive to "signals." The GOP has lost the loyalty of millions in this fashion, and the only thing preserving it now is that the Democrats have revealed their true corporatist/socialist agenda.

Here's your problem. It's a mistake to think that people vote out of pure material interests. More often, it's symbolism and identity that drives party identification.

Bingo. Subcultural identifications and affinities are a big driver of the lenses people use to evaluate what goes on in public life. That, in turn, influences their voting behavior. I do not think these lend themselves to ready manipulation by ad men. (If I am not mistaken, people are also influenced in their voting behavior not merely by their own situation, but their assessment of the situation of the country in general, which is in turn influenced by the lenses they use).

Barack Obama is not collaring a 17:1 approval rating in an amongst the black population because of the splendor of his policies. The priority given by the N.A.A.C.P. et al. to expunging the Stars-and-Bars from public surfaces may be an exercise in demagogy and may indicate that the useful life of the organization has run its course; it may also indicate what is truly important to the people who run these organizations.

There is an irony you all have not noted. The civic and social standing of blacks in this country is considerably better than it was in 1955, but the political culture of that subpopulation has grown markedly divergent. The voting behavior of blacks sixty years ago was not much different from that of the general population. Have a look at some of the Eisenhower ads archived here

https://www.livingroomcandidate.org/

and ask yourself what assumptions about black voters are encoded within them.

"The article is a glimpse into the mind and prejudices of liberal zealots."

And this blog appears to be a glimpse into the mind and prejudices of right-wing teabaggers. My entire law class had a real laugh looking it over today. This Paulette fellow, as well as Ponzi - what crazy kooks....

"The article is a glimpse into the mind and prejudices of liberal zealots."

And this blog appears to be a glimpse into the mind and prejudices of right-wing teabaggers. My entire law class had a real laugh looking it over today. This Paulette fellow, as well as Ponzi - what crazy kooks....

Redwald, you're right about symbols and signals. I may fall into the language pol scientists use to talk about interest groups, but my view of the black identity of our day and its political slant owes way more to Shelby Steele's theories than to any interest-driven account. And still speaking of symbols and identities, while I am generally displeased to see the Stars-and-Bars flaunted by Southerners, I would be deeply dismayed/alarmed by a general campaign to expunge it, and not simply for 1st amendment reasons.

Now as for the rest, well, you can think that about the likes of Pete and I if you want...(and honestly, I do not know of when you were called a racist on NLT! you'd better admit it if said instance was not the word itself but your interpretation of other words.) ...but the deeper issue is your radical pessimism about the ongoing promotion of multicultural ideology and its relation to race relations. Because if things are as screwed up as you say, and if what the G.O.P. is already doing is actually racial politics with most knowing this but fools like yours truly believing the words, then aren't we eventually pushed to the conclusion that Malcolm X and the white nationalist guys were right about the need separate the black and white races into distinct states? Wouldn't the opposed stakes and the bred hostility (all the bad fruit of multiculturalism, acc.to you) logically have to come out into the open eventually? Despite all the "good (also multicultural!) work" done by the likes of Pete and I? Or, should we fear that multicultural pieties will simply brainwash whites, to prepare them for some kind of oppression under bipartisan PC masters, all serving the interests/vengeance of non-whites? In that latter scenario, the ONLY solution would be a white nationalist wake-up call, right?

Or, put it this way, if Art Deco agrees with your statement that the Republicans are a defacto (defensive, as you would have it) white interest/identity group, why should it bother him that blacks approve of Obama 17:1? Wouldn't it simply make sense? Most blacks would not be naive enough to be an even more pathetic sort of window-dressing than Pete and I are.

And why should the Tea Partiers be so offended at the charges of racism and white-interests, and seek so vigorously (successfully, I might add) to refute them? Why, indeed, should you be so offended if anyone here in fact did charge you with racism, when your pessimism seems to indicate that, willy-nilly, whether you wish it or not, you and yours will wind up pitted against blacks and other minorities, and thus will inevitably get called a racist?

Could it be that your offense at the prospect of being called a racist is a sign that you are less pessimistic than you let on, but in fact, even with regards to the sad story of race-relations in America and its connection to the current pathetic but-all-too-effective race-rhetoric in our politics, you are one of those who "hunger and thirst for righteousness?"

Clive, that's some classy brood of lawyers you're shaping over there, what with their laughing at those they regard as yokels to curry favor with their obscenity-using('tea-bagger") and clueless-about-America professor.

I am having terrible trouble making much sense of your second paragraph.

If it is of interest to you, what concerns me are

1. The actual social conditions in the black population and the ways in which public policy avoids addressing them and instead generates pathology;

2. Political behavior as a manifestation of subcultural affinities. The electorate constitutes the matrix in which the politician operates. If the electorate is motivated by affiliations and affirmations rather than by the effects of policy (or persistently perceives policy through the lens of affiliation) no information is transmitted to political actors which will suggest or induce different courses of action. Whether it is Quebecois particularism or black particularism, it confounds the political process. The social geography of Canada is such that you can render Quebec a separate commonwealth. That you cannot do with the black population in the United States. Our past history indicates that it does not have to be the way it is; the political culture in the black population in 1955 was very different.

---

Which does not mean we should be confident we can influence dispositions and events. Mr. Spiliakos and I have locked horns on this issue several times. He has at times argued that the Republican Party is somehow culpable for its situation. It is not, unless you take Paul Krugman's fanciful alternative history seriously. He also argues that we need to do this, this, and this and never mind if it has no effect. I don't know why. It is just his shtick.

What Erin O'Connor is given to saying is true, "Bluntness is now a therapeutic necessity." Pete's essential disposition strikes me as an invitation to cravenness. We have, in this country, considerable and severe disputes over questions of political economy - over public expenditure and over the allocation of capital by politicians. I am anxious about the frame the Tea Party puts around this, but that is neither here nor there. A discussion of political economy is just that. If Ellis Cose or Jon Meacham or that graphics editor at The New York Times wish to drop non sequiturs and say it is about race relations, we should be free to say we have no time for other people's malice, self-centeredness, and stupidity and now back to the issue at hand. Ellis Cose will not like being told that the world does not revolve around his ass and that when people are thinking about their tax bill they are not thinking of him, but it makes our political discourse ever more stilted and stupid to tell him much else.

Personally, I think that induced changes in how a critical mass of the black population interacts with the state and commercial enterprises might just induce changes in the self-understanding of individuals within that population, which in turn will have an effect on their political intelligence. Such reforms would be good to do anyway, of course.

AD, I don't need to buy into Paul Krugman's approach to history to be instructed by William Voegeli. I actually agree that blunt rebuttal to charges of racism are a good idea, but also think that it makes sense to deploy them (along with other approaches) in situations in which they might do good. The cries of Republican racism are (among other things) attempts to reinforce the identification of African Americans (and other nonwhites of course) with the Democrats and they have on the whole been pretty successful. It s not simply a passive process in which African Americans refuse to think about arguments made by Republicans (though in some cases it is that.) The affiliation is regularly reinforced and the demonization of the Tea Parties (like the James Byrd ad) is part of the demonization and an attempt to redirect politics away from contemporary issues in which African American opinion might not line up with that of the Democratic nominee by ratios of 9 to 1. But for all its effectiveness in the recent past, the approach is hollow at its core. This hollowness would be an exploitable weakness if, in the right circumstances, and with sufficient persistence, alternative and relevant policies were offered.

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

Art Deco, just so you know, what I'm doing in that second paragraph is arguing to Redwald that his approach and his pessimism logically ought to lead him to white nationalism. It is to his credit that he hasn't gone where his logic leads, because we all know (I hope and assume) that white nationalism is a dead end, and tends to make the slide into racism unavoidable.(Theoretically, racism-foreswearing racial nationalists are possible...but you almost never find any, as they always seem to take that extra step, and that applies, albeit in a slightly tweaked way, to the serious black nationalists also.)

But unfortunately, Redwald is resigned to saying that the G.O.P. is the white man's party, that's just the way it regrettably is and will be and Pete and I are dreamin'. I think you can see how that plays 100% into many a Demo narrative, narratives of the sort that Voegli and others have largely refuted again and again, but without the MSM/Demo (and alas, black) habit changing. And of course, it cannot be denied that with our fairly open primaries and two-party system the G.O.P. has had to accept the votes of white racist haters just as the Dems have had to accept the votes of black vengeance-seeking haters. Of course, any intelligent black today should not choose their party simply on the basis of certain entirely predictable calculations some Republican politicians and activists made in the 60s, 70s, and 80s to not ask too many questions of some of their new-found Southern supporters.

Art, you're about rhetorical toughness, about conservatives looking the race-carders in the eye with unblinking and unbudging contempt. No concessions. I think Pete is with you in that, and I know I am. I think all three of us want to find a way for conservatives to make a decisive blow against the present construct of black political identity, to free the "captives" from their cynical Democrat and Black Caucus race-baiting masters. 17:1 is shameful, and we shouldn't be ashamed to say it. But we can't press blacks that way and at the same time say about white insularity, pessimism, and prickliness, "well, that's just the way it is, and especially down South...it's only you Democrat blacks that gotta change."

Yes, by all means, it's better to be talking about illegal immigration or the economy or big govt. or cultural values, than about Race, or the Confederacy and What It Means to Many Southerners Today, but our leaders do have to talk about those topics at some point. They will have to do more so, not less, given what I think really are going to be growing numbers of blacks voting Republican in the next two decades.

I'm anonymous.

No, I am not a white nationalist. There is no future there. But I am a white American, and to the best of my ability I will fight to make sure this country remains a comfortable and dignified place for my children and my children's children. I will not stand by and let other groups denigrate our accomplishments or shove our political concerns aside with cheap accusations of racism and historical grievance, nor will I idly stand by and watch out-of-control immigration turn our nation into a polyglot cauldron of identity politics.

And, as I said at the very beginning of this (in another of Pete's threads), I welcome voters from other groups so long as I don't have to sacrifice my interests to curry their favor. For blacks, I think that's exactly what would be required -- both symbolic and material sacrifices to gain a few pathetic percentage points of the black vote.

How can we win in the short term? Rove proved that by mobilizing the base you can win, and I think we can peel off the working-class whites and ethnic independents by ACTUALLY GIVING THEM WHAT THEY WANT (for a change). Another "Contract with America" is called for. What should it promise? Lower taxes, simplified tax code, less government regulation, re-privatization of Govt. Motors, etc., the end of affirmative discrimination, strict border control, an industrial policy that helps rebuild our manufacturing sector (even Reagan had such), and so on. Not hard -- you just have to have the stones to do it. And you will win in a landslide.

My strategy for black voters is to show them they can't win being "plantation blacks" for the democrats. Contrary to what Pete is suggesting, I think you have to prove you absolutely don't need their votes before they'll come around. And of course remind them that the Democrats really haven't done much for them.

Clive from Leeds merely wrote in to prove Justin Paulette's point.

Carl, I agree with just about everything you say (though you say alot of it better than I could.) My only reservation is that while I think it is possible that more African Americans will vote Republican in the next few decades, the institutional Republican Party and right-leaning thinkes and writers will have to make a decisive contribution to such eventuality. A large parf of it won't actually involve talking about race as such all that much - though an understanding of where other people are coming from would certainly help. It would involve using that rhetorical toughness and relevance-driven policy agenda in forums and media that the race-baiters of the left currently dominate.

I am not a working politician, so there is much I do not understand. I cannot figure how or why you would follow PS suggestion and incorporate discussions about the historical experience of the black population into political speeches and advertisements. Elections should be about public policy - where we go from here. Generally, I think discussions of race during election campaigns is scarcely ever worth the trouble.

Margins of 17:1 are not 'shameful'; just the way things are. It is an embarrassment, to be sure, but of the sort where you are embarrassed for someone, not for yourself. (The political class of Detroit is both embarrassing and shameful).

PS thinks we should respond to charges of racism in the course of effecting political strategy. I am giving no thought to electoral politics myself. I think we should respond to Ellis Cose and Paul Krugman because falsehoods pollute public discourse and collective memory and foolishness and fraudulence should be spoken of for what they are.

What does it indicate that the Stars-and-Bars and hate crimes laws are so prominent on the agenda of the N.A.A.C.P and others? Pick from the menu:

1. That the people who run these organizations are vacuous, and the organizations lack any serious mission;

2. That the people who run these organizations are clueless about the social reality in the country which they inhabit (one feature of which is that white-on-black crime is verrry uncommon).

3. That the people who run these organizations are engaged in gamesmanship.

A digression:

I had some training in resource economics years ago. One school of thought in resource economics on how to assign shadow prices to untraded natural resources is to conduct surveys. Critics of this approach have had several arguments against this, which tend to boil down to two observations: 1.) talk is cheap and 2.) when you ask someone a question, they often do not respond to your question, but to their question.

With that in mind, we might regard with some degree of reserve PS citation of poll results about that in which the black electorate is interested (or any electorate, for that matter). The most reliable gauge of people's interests is their observed behavior, which is what they do and what they are willing to tolerate on the part of their working politicians.

Did you catch this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Black_Caucus

Did you think it possible that fussing and the Stars-and-Bars, incidents like that above, some of the demands for dispensations from ordinary and conventional performance standards, and the fact that Al Sharpton has a considerable constituency among New York's blacks and Rudolph Giuliani has almost none are part of the same phenomenon?

If you are concerned about the quality of life in predominantly black neighborhoods and in the development and nurture of the black labor force, the amount of crud in our public discourse is truly dismaying, and, indeed, shameful.

Maybe I suffer from confirmation bias, or am missing something, or reporters just do not report a great deal, but in thirty-odd years of reading newspapers, I have seen little that indicates much other than those of the modal type among the black political establishment have two priorities, and that the electorate is not manifestly discontented with them for a' that. They are:

1. RESPECT
2. Patronage.

It does not foster the development of human capital in the black population to ply them with wraparound social services and stuff them into low productivity civil service jobs. In addition, RESPECT is not respect. RESPECT is acceding to obnoxious and obstreperous behavior because I can intimidate you into doing so. For those receiving RESPECT, it may rock in the short term; it diminishes them in the long term. I think you and PS should consider the possibility that the caterwauling over the Stars-and-Bars may be a thoroughly self-aggrandizing exercise and that to concede is merely to invite more such exercises.

Me, I would like to live in a world where daily life in Watts or Bedford-Stuyvesant isn't much more anxiety provoking than any other inner city neighborhood, where long-term doles are reserved for the old, crippled, and insane; where humble and humbling work can assure you of a certain baseline standard of living; where the average person is protected against catastrophes; where schools just teach and channel students in to their optimal courses of study; where the civil service is lean and recruited and promoted to perform, period; and where the therapeutic state and its army of social workers does not exist. Taking down the Stars-and-Bars gets us not one step closer to that world.

With regard to the Wikipedia reference, scroll down to the heading "Ralph Nader Incident".

Gentlemen, I think this has been a helpful discussion, and I think we can see ways in which our views are perhaps closer than first seemed.

While she's a little long-winded or (just too meticulous), black political scientist Carol Swain is particularly good on many of the issues we've been tossing around. When she wrote The New White Nationalism in America, she was intending to write a book about affirmative action, but wound up getting interested in white nationalist grievances/groups. (AD, she's got a good chapter on black-on-white crime in there.) And, she was intending to remain a moderate Democrat. But registration aside, I think it's safe to bet she's voting more R than D judging from various pieces I've read since NWMA came out. People have mentioned Shelby Steele, and his thinking on these topics is profound, but Swain's writings and her own development can give white conservatives another sort of insight into what it would take to do what Pete wants. And her courage and charity in being willing to talk with all comers, including the white nationalists she researched, is a good model to emulate. Search around on the web if interested--she used to post on some site linked to the Booker Rising blog.

Yes, a productive conversation.

I think we have to get over white guilt to improve the country, although that sounds counter-intuitive. What I've observed over the decades is bullying by minority politicians and use of white guilt as a kind of jujitsu on mainstream American interests. The best way to stop a bully is to confront and defeat him.

Swain is good, but I wonder what kind of a following she has among blacks. I suspect she's considered just another Uncle Tom. Too bad.

Here are some bottom line questions all liberals, leftists and progressives should be asked:

Without racism as a leg of support for your platform, what do you actually stand for?

Why do you continually champion the cause of racism, yet have shown not the slightest tendency in decades of allowing racism to die, much less working toward any real solution?

What are your true intentions regarding racism?

What will you next use for a stick with which to beat the opposition over the head if racism does die?

Again, what do you actually stand for, if it isn't to keep racism alive as a tool to keep Americans, especially minorities, poor and thus in "need" of a champion?

How long will you continue to delude yourselves into believing that a majority of this center-right country can't see the fraud, the scam, you're committing, the scheme you're failing to successfully perpetrate, the snake oil you're unsuccessfully trying to sell us?