Why the Southern Strategy Works

More on my continual thinking about "The South" in the American political imagination.

The bruhaha over Pres. Carter's claim that opposition to The Precious is rooted in racism makes me reflect back on the primary campaigns when that was the standard response to anyone on the left who voiced criticism or opposition to Obama - or who merely said they preferred a different candidate.

The interesting political question for me, however, is not that the idiocy of the campaign is coming back to bite The Precious Administration in the ass, but why the Democratic response to opposition time and again (and not just by Obamacans) is to point out the imagined moral/ethical failings of the opponents on the subject of race, rather than make a political argument about the weakness of opposition's stances or identify the failures of the previous administrations, etc. The response also fails to distinguish between the sources of opposition - criticisms coming from the anti-D/democratic side and opposition from inside the party. The problem here is not that this racism claim is being pushed forward in a cynical way, but that it is what the speakers really believe.

I'm going to make a claim - Pres. Carter was sincere when he asserted that opposition to Obama was based in racism. This was not a calculated use of an argument to fluster opponents, but what Carter believes to be true. This is a politician for whom opposition to racism was his motivation and organizing principle. He is paradigmatic of a certain kind of Democrat for whom racism is the prism through which politics is viewed, unable or unwilling to put that particular battle into its constituent role in liberal politics as such.

As I detailed in The Whiteness of the Whale:

Why this psychotic and self-defeating projection onto the working class? It is the deep guilt of the liberal upper class that we know, every last miserable one of us, that our privilege is due to centuries of white supremacy and to the informal, unspoken, but pervasive advantage our skin color and behavioral patterns gives us in this society. It is our Moby Dick, the whale we pursue obsessively through political seas, frantic to have material proof that we are innocent of the crimes of our nation.

The Democratic Party was the party of slavery and civil war in the 19th century. It was the party of Jim Crow in the early 20th century. The New Deal set it on the path to renouncing that legacy through the mid-part of the last century, and it was a brutal passage. Instead of reimagining the South and what it could become, the Northeast elite who had taken over the leadership simply renounced it – you will be like us or you can get out. When desegregation came to the Northeast and the Midwest, the contempt for “The South” was transferred easily to the working class ethnic whites who resisted this change. Archie Bunker became an eternal truth rather than a thought exercise, a denunciation of the unchangeable cretin in front of the TV instead of a call to reflect on how we become what we are and how, despite ourselves, we can find our common humanity. Most of all, the determined demonization of working class whites, especially those with Southern connections, allows the upper class elites to turn a blind eye to the way in which they are the biggest beneficiaries of the centuries of racism in the nation. There is a growing group within the liberal elite who wishes to jettison “The South” entirely, leaving the working class immiserated and isolated, rather than face up to the obligation of the party to complete the task before it. That task is to create the conditions under which racism is no longer something that can be exploited for electoral gain or needed as a survival tactic in deteriorating and demeaning socio-economic conditions.

I add to this that it wasn't just Northeast elites, but also down-in-the-trenches Southern Democrats, like Jimmy Carter, who had lived in the worst areas of America's apartheid and who understood just how inhuman Jim Crow was, who made the battle against racism the crown of liberal politics. Institutionalized racism had to be dismantled becuase there was no defense for it. Pres. Carter is not wrong when he emphasizes the corrosive effects of racism on the body politic; it is clearly the weapon of choice on the Right to undermine Democrats. The "Southern Strategy" continues to this day, though it could probably be renamed the "Sunbelt Strategy" to take cognizance of the anti-Latino theme.

But here is the irony - the moralistic and non-political use of racism as a shaming mechanism by party leaders in combination with the passionate rejection of "white trash" (the working class) by those same leaders has made the Republicans' political strategy just that much more effective. We're doing their work for them. Instead of policies, like universal health care, that materially improve the lives of people in their current socio-economic location, there are half-assed half-measures that tie provision of common social goods to obtaining stable, high-paying, white-collar career employment. Sure, if you are one of the "creative class" types who provides a service the people with the money consider important, you, too, can have the perks that make life comfortable. If you don't choose to improve yourself (Organic food! More exercise! Fewer children! Higher education! Better dental hygiene!), then you don't deserve a better life. If you don't like the policies being proposed, well, you're probably just a racist who doesn't want benefits going to "those people."

That's a moralistic argument, not a political one. It offers an insult where there should be a promise of material goods. When people voice, however awkwardly, fears and resentment about being treated unfairly by social and political institutions, their discontent is dismissed as individual failings (clinging to guns and God) instead of organizing that discontent into a movement against the real sources of racism - entrenched economic elites who interests are anti-D/democratic.

The Southern Strategy has become the de facto operating principle of the Democratic Party. Divide the working class on racial lines and designate these groups as deserving and undeserving. Focus on individual failings rather than the deep structures of power. Make people pick tribes.

Paul Krugman, in The Conscience of a Liberal, methodically dissected the use of race by the Right to undermine the advances of the New Deal. When he expresses amazement that "zombie" ideas of the Movement Conservatives just keep resurrecting themselves no matter how badly they fail, he overlooks the way in which the use of race by the Left has also undermined the advances of the New Deal. The economic claims of the Right have staying power because their social claims are confirmed by the actions of the Left. The 2008 campaign was breathtaking in the way it laid bare these fault lines on the Left, presenting the ideologies in their pure form, unmoored from any supporting reality. It was an incredible display of contempt for people living on the edge.

Racism is the hueristic of the Stevensonian elite. These people keep the Southern Strategy going to the detriment of us all.

Anglachel

PS - Right after I posted this, I saw Historiann's excellent post Race and Barack Obama’s political opposition. Go read it. Now. It's good.

Easy Come, Easy Go

Or, Manufacturing Jobs and the GI Bill

One of the Affirmative Action issues I have read in comments on the blog, have read in various publications and newspapers, and have discussed with the spousal unit is the perception, accurate or not, that AFAC (to distinguish from AA) will not help anyone who is white and male, regardless of his family background. It has been described as everything from an unforseen side-effect to a deliberate reverse discrimination objective. I think this is the biggest area of failure in the equal opportunity measures and is what Democrats should have been addressing all along. What I'm going to try to do in this post is talk about the blind spot in equal opportunity programs, why it is there, how it was allowed to grow, and how this is a fertile ground for the Right's politics of resentment. First, we have to talk about manufacturing jobs in the post-war period.

If you have not read Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins novels, get yourself to a bookstore or library at once and devour them. While these are great detective novels, the reason to read them is for the picture Mosely paints of post-war Los Angeles, which was a manufacturing powerhouse and a big draw for African Americans extricating themselves from the segregated South. While most people know about the AA northern migration to New York, Chicago, Detroit and various manufacturing centers in the Northeast and Midwest, LA was also a prime destination. People of all races and backgrounds flocked to LA for the great weather and plentiful manufacturing jobs that expanded exponentially during the WWII factory boom. No or little education? Not a problem if you are willing to learn the line work. Mosely's novels chronicle the rise and fall of manufacturing employment in Los Angeles and the devastation it inflicted on the AA population starting in the 60s, long before the same downsizing, plant consolidation and move to overseas locations hit the traditional manufacturing centers of the East and Midwest.

The contraction of the manufacturing economy, the largest source of high-paying manual labor jobs (ranging from unskilled to highly skilled), started first in plants located in urban cores with large black populations. It took until the Reagan recession of the early 80s for it to wreak the same kind of destruction on white working class populations. The popular narrative describing the impoverishment and unrest among black populations ignores the economic catastrophe and pathologizes the brutalized community itself as "ghetto culture". This is where Mosley is highly instructive by following the life trajectory of a WWII veteran, Easy, through the height of AA working class affluence in LA through the destruction of that brief period of expanding wealth and stability. A similar story can be told about the effect of de-industrialization on white populations, but it takes place over a longer period of time and the affected populations were simultaneously glorified by the Right, who gladly helped undermine the manufacturing base while they undermined the social safety net that would have protected this displaced population, and treated equivocally by the Left, who too often argued that if only these Archie Bunker types would have taken advantage of higher education, they wouldn't have been trapped in these dead-end jobs.

Which gets us to the GI Bill. To the degree that there was an equal opportunity program that was targeted directly at white poor and working class men, it was the GI Bill. It was never thought of in this way, though that was its effect. The GI Bill forced open access to higher education - and thus routes into the white collar middle class - in a way pretty much unheard of. It wasn't a soldier's pension to allow someone to live comfortably within his class the rest of his days, but an actual opportunity to leave behind the danger and uncertainty of manual labor and gain socio-economic status where wealth could be accumulated and life prospects improved. The GI Bill was the fuel that powered the engine of post-war college and university expansion. The California college system - still the finest three-tier public higher education model in the world - has its roots in this program. People who would never have been considered college material before WWII now had the means and the political backing to get the training to enter professions.

It is difficult to understand just how limited access to higher education was before this program. My grandfather, who was a Navy surgeon in WWII, had to leave medical school (despite being a lecturer in the school, despite having written a text book still in use today by most major medical schools, despite laying the ground work for what we know today as arthroscopic surgery) because he was a poor farm kid from South Dakota and couldn't pay for tuition. No student aid in the 20s and 30s. He joined the military to pay the education bills. If you've had your knee repaired with arthroscopy, thank my Grandpa and all the sailors whose knees he operated on over the years. His own sons were able to take advantage of the GI Bill, with two doing so directly as veterans themselves and the third who now had an expanded UC system that accepted all California high school students with minimum academic achievements and the rediculously low in-state tuition amount. Students whose academic levels weren't so good could go in at the Cal State level, and everyone else was welcome at the community colleges where they could learn the basics and transfer to a Cal State or a UC - like the spousal unit did.

When begun, the GI Bill was really only available to the white soldiers from WWII. Minorities may have been eligible for it, but what schools would admit them? Women were doubly handicapped as they were not GIs and they were not accepted in most colleges. Their experiences in WWII, where they built things, ran things, worked outside the home and were in charge of their lives, got squashed very badly with their "domestication" in the 50s (read Stephanie Coontz's The Way We Never Were). The identity politics of the 60s and 70s had access to higher education as a central concern because it was a route to wealth and security being denied to minorities and women at an institutional level. It was not just training for professions, of course, but also access to the informal networks of trained professionals who could then help you get in the door at companies where you would not be considered without someone to "vouch" for you. Ironically, AFAC as applied in the workplace is precisely to disrupt those informal, insider networks where personal relationships (family ties, old friends, membership in the same academic clubs, etc.) were the grounds for employment and not formal job qualifications. If you could no longer just hire the manager's niece's new hubby for that managerial slot, but had to actually look at education and had to demonstrate that you were not silently discriminating by hiring minorities and women at a level consistent with their percentage in the population, then the institutional practices of inequality and discrimination became more costly to maintain than to abandon.

As mentioned above, lurking in the background to these advances for larger portions of the public was the contraction of the manufacturing sector. (Note, the conservative attack on unions was also part of this, but is too much to address in a blog post.) Starting in the 60s in urban cores and working outwards through the 70s and hitting full force in the early 80s, the erosion of this employment base hit all working class groups hard, but did not hit them at the same time. With the Reagan recession, where were working class white males to go? Higher education was starting its enormous climb in cost, the military was still rebuilding from the Vietnam War (read up on Wes Clark's account of these times for the military), and the minorities and women who had finally been allowed to take advantage of open admissions for white collar training were entering the workforce in substantial numbers. If decent paying manufacturing jobs were gone, and you didn't want to (or were to old to) join the military, and you didn't have a sterling high school record, and you weren't elegible for some really sweet scholarships and stipends, and you had a family to support and weren't really that into going back to school, and you were white and male, just what were you supposed to do?

The changing economy came for minorities first, creating inner-city blight that was then ascribed to racial failings, but eventually it worked its way out to the white working class. The biggest failure of the Democrats at this period in time was failing to address this new socio-economic condition, when the post-war boom was ended and majority of the country lost economic ground. Instead, they remained wedded to a simplistic identity politics model for enforcing equal access to education and employment. It was not so much wrong (entrenched privilege always needs to be challenged and dismantled) as inadequate, unable to shift and address the very real economic distress assailing a large portion of its own constituency.

AFAC has developed its own patterns and modes of entrenched privilege, which is pretty much a given for any program that can actually create access to wealth. The internal contradictions and tensions of trying to dismantle institutional advantage are both being exploited for gain by people who are not particularly disadvantaged and being exaggerated to encourage class division when we most need unity. That's the next topic of discussion.

Anglachel

Posts in this series:

1. Affirmation
2. Easy Come, Easy Go
3. Qualified Success

Taking Time to Think

A few people have contacted me about the lack of comments on the dog whistle post, or about why their comment wasn't released.

I am at 100 comments and counting on that post. I am not releasing them, but I am reading them and thinking about what they say. It's clear from the replies that I touched a very big political and cultural nerve, managing to piss off many, inspiring bizarre rants by others, and generally unearthing the importance of this policy to how the country as a whole and Democrats in particular are (and are failing to) address equity, race, economic comeptition, political strategy and related topics.

I'm trying to compose a post (most likely several posts) to talk more specifically about affirmative action and not just in the context of this election.

Anglachel