| Distortion And Negation Run Wild
Lind's wild generalization from a single misinterpreted post by Kevin Drum is typical of how racism systematically distorts reality. The foundation of racism is that group identity replaces individual identity, and that disowned parts of the self are projected onto the despised "other". With such basic distortions--nay negations of reality at the foundations of racism, is it any wonder that further distortions and negations abound at every turn? Nor can it be any wonder that any attempt to fend off a critical stance toward racism will itself tend to exhibit similar distortions and negations.
For example:
If his Wikipedia entry is to be believed, Kevin Drum grew up in California, the same enlightened California that during his childhood and early adulthood gave our nation Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the tax-revolt politics of Howard Jarvis. More recently, California voters amended the state Constitution to outlaw gay marriage. I grew up in Texas, which gave our nation champions of the New Deal and civil rights like Maury Maverick, Ralph Yarborough, Lyndon Johnson, Henry Gonzalez, Barbara Jordan, Lloyd Doggett and Sarah Weddington, who argued Roe v. Wade. Texas is less progressive than it once was and California is less conservative than it once was, but someone from the land of Nixon and Reagan should think twice about lecturing other parts of the country. Nor are other regions bastions of political virtue.
First off, as Amanda Marcotte justly notes in her excellent response:
Do you see a problem with marshaling a list like this in a specific defense of white Texans? How about the fact that Henry Gonzalez is Hispanic and Barbara Jordan was black?
"Distortion and negation" much?
But there are at least two other problems intertwined here. First is the assumption that racism is just another political embarrassment, everyone's got 'em, so what's the big deal? This ploy becomes particularly evident as Lind goes on to point out corruption in Illinois and New Jersey--as if the South only had a problem with racism, and had never, ever heard tell of political corruption in all its born days.
But, of course, racism is not just another political embarrassment, its ugliest manifestation--slavery--is justly called the "original sin" or American democracy. And it not only is in an entirely different league than other political failings, it is also a prime enabler of those other failings, systematically empowering them to become far more virulent in the South than they have generally tended to be elsewhere.
Thus, political corruption has tended to infest most major growth centers in the North, Midwest and West, but it has not been so extreme as to foreclose the general benefits of the growth that it feeds on. In South, however, political corruption has been part and parcel of the political culture for centuries now, often stifling the very possibility of broader economic growth from taking hold.
The second problem with this passage is that Lind is somehow arguing that because Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan came from California, Kevin Drum should somehow not have standing to criticize anything done wrong anywhere else in the world. By this same logic, Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman, Barbara Lee and Maxine Waters, just to name a few, should also just pack it in.
Crazy, much?
I'm sure that the theocratic thugs running things in Iran just now would applaud Lind's logic. But here at Open Left, not so much.
Indeed, Lind's logic here is virtually identical to that of Bull Connor and George Wallace railing against "outside agitators" disturbing the "peace and tranquility" of their idyllic domains. In fact, I'd really like to see Lind explain precisely how his logic differs from theirs. Because, quite frankly, I don't believe it differs one iota.
If perfection in one's own home were a pre-requiste for ever speaking out against wider evils, then moral progress in human affairs would be utterly impossible. Which is just the way that arch-conservatives want it. We learn and grow by fighting evils in the world, which enable us to face down demons closer to home, every bit as much as facing down demons close at hand empowers us to fight them in the world at large. It was, after all, White Northern women's involvement in Abolitionism that laid the foundation for First Wave Feminism. And this was hardly an anomaly. It is precisely the engagement in multiple theaters that makes it possible for us to acquire the broader perspective that's key in breaking out of parochial viewpoints that limit our very capacity to even recognize the true nature of the evils we fight against.
"Evil Liberal Bigots Called Conservatives Crazy! (Part 1: I Say They're Stupid, Instead!")
Downplaying the significance of racism, making it out to be the equivalent of any other sort of political embarrassment, is merely a prelude to the real game, which is to turn the tables and attack the critics of Southern racism. This is how the game has been played since well before the Civil War. But Lind's counter-attack on liberal criticism of Southern racism is much stronger on other fronts. We've already taken note of how he attempted to brand Drum a bigot. But there's another theme that's struck in Lind's first paragraph, and raised again several times thereafter: the theme of liberals calling conservatives "crazy."
This theme in Lind's essay could well deserve it's own diary series in response, so I'll just try to name a few highlights here:
(1) Perhaps most devastatingly, Lind argues that "liberal" social scientists were wrong--that conservative voters we're crazy, they were just reflecting a different set of values. But if this argument is valid, then it undermines the entire premise of his piece.
Here's Lind laying out his thesis in the first two paragraphs of his piece:
Back in the 1960s, Seymour Martin Lipset and Richard Hofstadter and other liberal sociologists, historians and political scientists, puzzled that anyone could support Barry Goldwater rather than Lyndon Johnson, concluded that Goldwater supporters were deranged. They didn't say so directly, of course. They said that members of the radical right were emotionally disturbed victims of "status anxiety." The evidence? They didn't vote the way that Lipset and other academics thought that they should vote. Therefore they had to be crazy.
In the decades since, far better scholars than Hofstadter and Lipset, for whom history and sociology are not exercises in partisan Democratic mythmaking, have established that Goldwater and Reagan Republicans often were highly educated, socially secure individuals who happened not to share the values of liberal professors and journalists. This scholarship has been wasted, to judge by the glee with which the liberal blogosphere, in the aftermath of the ephemeral "Birther" flap, has dusted off the old conservatives-are-crazy meme, and revised it to suggest that all white Southerners are crazy.
There are so many misrepresentations, if not downright falsehoods, in these two paragraphs that one does not know where to begin. So I'll put off the larger task to the next section. For now, I'll just note that if Lind's argument were to be taken at face value about Goldwater and Reagan voters in the past, then it should apply equally to Birthers today, in which case the following prescription makes no real sense, once you think about it:
Here's how I see it. Liberals should respect and promote the interests of working Americans of all races and regions, including those who despise liberals. They are erring neighbors to be won over, not cretins to be mocked....
The traditional liberal solution to such alienation is economic reform, education and political empowerment. But reform is difficult and expensive. And it is much less fun than caricaturing entire ethnic or regional groups, particularly those whose members tend to have less money, less education and less power than those who lampoon them.
Far from being deeply opposed to Lipset, Hoftadter & company, Lind's position is much more similar than opposed: both assume there are real material interests of "rational self-interests" that these voters are deviating from. They differ only in how to characterize the deviation, and what to do about it. But those differences are relatively minor--compared to wide range of theoretical perspectives that are effectively kept out of the debate. Of course, my previous diary underscores that Lind's political economic analysis is deeply flawed--it's not the poorer strata of Southern White workers we're talking about. But that was an empirical problem with Lind's argument. This one goes to the very heart of Lind's logic, which is only potentially compelling if one thinks that Lind and his straw men from the 1950s exhaust the realm of possibilities. Once one realizes the existence of very different explanations of poltical action, Lind's argument is revealed as essentially self-contradictory.
"Evil Liberal Bigots Called Conservatives Crazy! (Part 2: Details, Details...)
Returning to Lind's first two paragraphs, it's time to take a deeper look at the problems involved. For one thing, it was McCarthy that first got these intellectuals going--and Hitler who seeded the interest that preceded them. Goldawter's emergence in 1964 brought renewed interest to the subject from this crowd, but Reagan is Lind's own backwards interpolation in time, to make his argument neater for the present moment, in typical history-be-damned Versailles fashion--something Lind is usually much better than.
This dislocation in time completely removes Lind's argument from the realm of serious analysis, and transposes it into the realm of political narrative. The narrative is: "Liberals keep calling conservatives crazy!" But this narrative has a further problem: the liberals involved did not call conservatives crazy, as even Lind is forced to admit.
And little has changed in the decades since then: the evidence is overwhelming that conservatives are cognitively biased in some ways (just as liberals are cognitive biased in others) and that these biases constitute an impairment of ideal function in some ways.
But this is a far cry from labeling conservatives "crazy" either individually or as a group. Rather, what has been found is a greater propensity to be mislead, and this helps to explain why political organizing on the right tends to be less reality-based than organizing on the left. These are all relationships based on correlations and tendencies, no one who is knowledgeable is talking in the sorts of iron, deterministic ways that Lind imputes to them.
Point # 2: As noted in my off-shoot diary, "Who's Calling Who Crazy? Centrist/Extremist Theory & The Marginalizaiton of The American Majority", the intellectual history here is far more complicated than Lind lets on. So much more so that it entirely vitiates the thrust of Lind's argument. It's centrists who perpetuate the "crazy" discourse, and they make much more fundamental use of it against the left, as opposed to the right.
At the same time, rightwing discourse routinely is "crazy" if one uses the framework of rationalist discourse as one's model. This is not the case, however, if one understands such discourse in terms of mythos rather than logos. As mythos, rightwing discourse makes tremendous sense: If one were to take the official mainstream ideological narrative as factually true, then the rightwing mythos makes very good sense at the individual level in terms of explaining why your typical upstanding rightwing citizen has not gotten the goodies promise him (even today, the prime actors are disproportionately male),
Of course, it would be a grave mistake to take the official mainstream ideological narrative as factually true, that should go without saying. But after all, it is rigidly supported by virtually the entire political class, so it's easy to see why one would take it as true.
The correct message to take from all this is that the left needs to seriously start crafting a mythos of its own. But this is precisely what Southern apologetics stands in the way of. So long as one is afraid of offending Southern conservative sensibility, one cannot freely create an oppositional narrative that will diametrically oppose those sensibilities. It's a fundamental impossibility. And it has nothing at all to do with whether you think Southern conservatives are crazy, stupid, or simply misinformed and confused.
Not All Conspiracies Are Created Equal
Drum's piece really starts to come unhinged right about here:
Oh, those dumb white Southerners! No other group in American society could possibly believe in preposterous conspiracy theories. Well, maybe one other group, the most reliably Democratic demographic in the whole U.S. electorate. A 2005 study by RAND and Oregon State University showed that a majority of blacks believed that a cure for AIDS was being withheld from the poor; that nearly half believed that AIDS was man-made, with a quarter believing that it was created in a U.S. government laboratory and 12 percent naming the CIA as its source. Black paranoia about AIDS is understandable, given the Tuskegee experiments. Even so, the theory that AIDS was created by the CIA to commit genocide against black people is wackier than the craziest Birther conspiracy theories. Would Kathleen Parker write, or the Washington Post publish, a column arguing that black Democrats "have seceded from sanity"? Would Kevin Drum applaud Parker's insult and extend to it to all African-Americans?
Even Lind can't ignore the fact that there's actually a good reason for blacks to suspect government agencies of conspiring toward their deaths. Which makes it all the more remarkable how easily he shrugs off that inconvenient truth:
Even so, the theory that AIDS was created by the CIA to commit genocide against black people is wackier than the craziest Birther conspiracy theories.
One simple question, Mr. Lind: Why?
Why is the AIDs-was-created-by-the-CIA conspiracy theory "wackier than the craziest Birther conspiracy theories"? And why didn't you think you needed to justify that claim?
The Birther conspiracies require us to ignore or explain away a birth certificate that's been published on the web for well over a year now. They require us to ignore not one, but two birth announcements printed in Hawaiian newspapers. Also available on the intertubes. What similar sorts of definitive documentary proof are commonly available to everyone disproving the AIDs-was-created-by-the-CIA conspiracy theory?
Answer: None.
Furthermore, Amanda reminds us:
It's not that big a leap, if you assume that federal intelligence agencies have historically had it out for black people, which there's piles of evidence to show that they have. Remember, the FBI tried to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into committing suicide, and that's not a conspiracy theory.
Not to mention the various other actions involved in COINTELPRO. Or the incredibly racist war on drugs, the incredibly racist death penalty, the incredibly racist health care non-delivery system, etc., etc., etc.
Amanda continues:
But I've written about conspiracy theories before, and while spreading one is always wrong (even if done so unintentionally), the content of different conspiracy theories tells you a lot about the believers' values and fears. People who believe the CIA created AIDS are just like 9/11 Truthers---they turned a case of criminal neglect into a conspiracy theory of active malice. But the birther conspiracy theory is about transmitting the idea that non-white Americans will never be "real" Americans. The levels of cruelty here differ dramatically.
While I agree with the main thrust of Amanda's argument, this is actually a considerable understatement on her part. There really isn't any cruelty to speak of in the AIDs conspiracy theory, per se.
In fact, there's a general rule here: When Black Americans theorize about why White people treat them so badly, one can critique the reasoning involved, but there's simply no escaping the fact that they are trying to make sense of something that's an overwhelming historical fact. OTOH, when White Americans theorize about why Black people just aren't good enough, they are trying to come up with a new excuse for continuing to treat Black Americans so badly.
There is simply no comparison between these two quite opposite motives. None at all.
Who Let The Angry White Women In Here?
Having completely unhinged himself from reality, Lind shifts into high gear:
When liberal pundits are not arguing that white conservatives are insane, they are explaining conservatism in the patronizing spirit of Lipset and the '60s liberals as the result, not of ideology or theology, but of the irrational resentment of the "angry white male." But what about the angry white female? If white men in the South and elsewhere who do not vote for the Democrats are by definition hate-filled racists upset by social progress, then the same must be true of white women who vote the same way.
At this point, Lind has slipped into full-throttle anti-liberal rant mode. What any of this has to do with the Birthers Lind doesn't even try to explain. It's time for the Two Minute Hate, and liberals are the object of the day. Lind next goes on to cite evidence of White women voting for Republicans. But nothing he cites addresses the actual sorts of things that people have written about, such as the kinds of political rhetoric employed, which have always had a distinct gender slant to them. (Even the Willie Horton ad was about the emasculation of the white man, rather than the rape of a the white woman.) The fact that White women might vote similarly to White men doesn't necessarily mean that they're moved by the same logic, or motives. But the nature of the propaganda used strongly suggests that there are key differences--that men feel anger based in self-pity, and women feel sympathy for their men. These are clearly related, but quite different motivations, and white male anger is the sine qua non.
This is certainly well understood by Democratic-leaning groups who specifically target White single women--they are much more likely to vote Democratic. If White women per se really were 'just as angry' as Lind alleges, such a strategy would make absolutely no sense.
And, of course, the ultimate come-back to Lind is "So what?" Amanda writes:
Just because someone's a woman doesn't mean you're immune to racial prejudice. Or sexism or homophobia, for that matter. Self-hating misogyny is epic in its proportions. Strawman. Feminists never said women weren't capable of being bastards.
All of which is also true. But Lind's operating off of his own anti-liberal prejudice, in which all liberals march in lock-step hating white men without reason and giving everyone else a free pass. It's downright delusional, but delusional is pretty much normal when you sign up for defending the White South.
And so it is that Lind thinks he's scoring even more points when he goes on to talk about homophobia amongst minority groups. He's got more straw men than Carter's got little liver pills.
It's truly remarkable that he can just go on and on and on like this, and never feel the slightest need to quote a single liberal on any of the topics he takes up, aside from the original brief passage from Kevin Drum.
Which, finally brings us to the ultimate truth of the matter: just like Lind's long-winded anti-liberal screed, the Birthers have absolutely no need of liberals saying anything at all to hurt their tender White Pride feelings. If they just make shit up about Obama being born in Kenya, and they make shit up about liberals creating death panels, they will happily make shit up about liberals calling them dumb-ass dipshits, even if we shifted in unison to non-stop praise of their top-flight intellects.
Reality simply isn't a factor here. It's just as simple as that. |
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