Democrats hark back to the politics of race
By Matt Bai
12 hours ago
Yahoo News
Rep. Steve Israel
.
View photo
Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., chairman of the DCCC, speaks at
the National Press Club's Newsmaker series on how Rep. Paul Ryan's, R-Wis.,
budget will effect the midterm elections. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ Roll
Call/Getty Images)
So now it's out there. After five years of studied reticence
(unless they were talking privately to one another or their supporters),
Democratic leaders in Washington finally went public last week with what they
really think is motivating Republican opposition to Barack Obama. As Steve
Israel, one of the top Democrats in Congress, told CNN's Candy Crowley, the
Republican base, "to a significant extent," is "animated by
racism."
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Just to make himself clear, Israel did allow that not all
Republicans were the ideological descendants of Bull Connor. To which I'm sure
his colleagues across the aisle responded, "Oh, OK. Cool then."
But it's not the reaction of Republicans that Democrats
should probably have some concern about. It's the way American voters, and a
lot of younger voters in particular, may view a return to the polarizing racial
debate that existed before Obama was ever elected.
Coming in an election year, and in the wake of sporadic
campaigns to solidify support among women and gay voters, the sudden Democratic
focus on race felt like an orchestrated talking point. Israel's comments came
just a few days after Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, suggested that
racism was keeping Republicans from voting on an immigration bill. And Pelosi
was reacting to a speech by the attorney general, Eric Holder, who complained
to a civil rights gathering in Washington of "ugly and divisive"
attacks against the administration.
"What attorney general has ever had to deal with that
kind of treatment?" Holder, who is African-American, pointedly asked.
"What president has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment?"
As far as I can tell, though, this eruption on race actually
wasn't born in the kind of strategy session where consultants lay out which
issues will move which voters. What seems to have happened was something rarer:
Washington Democrats, unable to suppress their frustration for a minute longer,
simply blurted out what they have always believed to be true but had been
reluctant to say. One catharsis emboldened the next.
As a unifying explanation for the abject dysfunction of our
political system, latent racism seems unsatisfying, at least by itself. Is
there a lingering prejudice lurking among some older, rural, white
conservatives in the country? It would be ignorant of history to argue
otherwise. Is this "birther" business, for instance, a reflection of
racism? Without a doubt.
But conservatives do have profound and principled
disagreements with Obama's view of expansive government. And it's worth noting
that racial resentment has been a part of the partisan divide for at least 50
years now; it's doubtful that "birther" types hate Obama any more
than they did Bill Clinton (whom they accused of serial murder, among other
things). What's happened over that time is that the presidency has become
increasingly personality-based, and the country more culturally cleft, so that
each successive president becomes subject to an ever more irrational kind of
attack on his very legitimacy as a leader.
Embracing the rallying cry in the Daily Beast this week,
Michael Tomasky, a sharp and reasoned political observer on the left, pointed
out that not a single Republican had shown the courage to stand up and declare
racial bigotry intolerable in his party. A good point – except that I don't
recall Pelosi or Israel making a version of that same speech when the highly
educated liberals who despised George W. Bush circulated emails, after their
defeat in 2004, depicting a red map of the "United States of
Jesusland" and blaring, "F--- the South." Bigotry in our
politics now takes myriad forms.
Still, a lot of Americans who voted for Obama probably find
the racism argument at least somewhat persuasive. And how persuasive you find
it probably depends not just on your ideology and where in America you live,
but at least as much on when you were born.
We're living in a strange moment, after all, where
generations who inhabit the same neighborhoods and social networks nonetheless
draw on wildly different experiences of growing up American. For the purposes
of race and politics, let's assume that voters who sympathize with Obama break
down, more or less, into three cohorts.
The first group, to which Holder, Pelosi and Israel belong,
might be called the civil rights generation. For this group, which came of age
politically in the 1960s and '70s and helped bring about a revolution in social
justice, race is the essential, underlying fissure that runs through all our
political debates. This group believed, by and large, that a black man probably
couldn't be elected president (that's the main reason that a lot of older
African-American leaders supported Hillary Clinton over Obama in 2008), and it
continued to whisper, even after his election, that Obama would never be
allowed to govern.
For this segment of liberals, the suggestion that racism is
the principal motive for Republican obstruction is both intuitive and
exculpatory. They knew there was darkness and loathing in the heart of the
country (or at least in the parts that don't have Apple stores and artisan
coffee), and the ugliness of Obama's opposition has proven it.
The second generational contingent, which includes Obama
himself, grew up in what you might call a moment of racial reconstruction. The
actual war was over by the time we came along, but there remained a minefield
of racial tensions to be explored and negotiated – stubborn prejudices,
lingering stereotypes, the new and inviolable lexicon of political correctness.
These Democrats and independents hoped Obama's election,
whatever else it might portend politically, would at last turn the page on all
of the age-old animosities that seemed to underlie every stalemated debate.
They've been disappointed by Republican intransigence during the Obama years,
and by the president's own ineffectiveness at transcending that dynamic.
Chances are last week's allegations from Democratic leaders struck a lot of
them as depressingly familiar.
The third and probably least predictable group is the
so-called millennials, who have grown up in a vastly different, more racially
complex country. The racial recrimination that felt inescapable 30 years ago is
as far removed from their experience as the Red Scare was to Obama's and mine.
It's telling to hear today's college students campaign against the hurtful
slights (or biased compliments) they call "microaggressions." Even
the terminology suggests that all the larger racial battles have already been fought.
While these voters are more progressive than older
Americans, they are in fact less affiliated with political parties than any
previous generation. According to an exhaustive survey conducted recently by
the Pew Research Center, about half of all millennials (now ages 18 to 33) call
themselves independents. They overwhelmingly supported Obama, as a personality
rather than as a party leader, because they thought he might be young and
dynamic enough to revitalize and modernize Washington, to somehow make
government as relevant to their lives as Twitter.
Their passion for Obama has now cooled (his approval rating
among millennials, while still higher than it is among other cohorts, has
fallen below 50 percent in recent surveys, according to Pew), and certainly
nothing that's happened in the years since his election has made the very idea
of a political party seem to them like any less of a relic. Far from being
lifelong Democrats in the New Deal mode, these voters are largely up for grabs
by any candidate or cause that feels transformative.
And so you can imagine that the sudden outburst from party
leaders about racism did little to advance their cause with these voters, who
are, just by the way, crucial to the Democrats' electoral math for years to come.
The politics of racial grievance and identity feels about as contemporary to
millennials as a floppy disk. (Look it up on Wikipedia.) They're still
wondering what kind of politics comes next.
Calling out Republicans as racists probably felt familiar to
Israel and the others, like returning to a place where all the landmarks are
known. But the terrain of American politics is shifting fast, and there's not
much to be gained by turning back.
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