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A Reply to Ricochet Readers on the GOP & White Identity Politics
I’m grateful that so many Ricochet readers have engaged the substance of my interview with Zack Beauchamp of Vox.com, and the subsequent Ricochet interview with @roblong, @peterrobinson and @jameslileks, in which I raised concerns about the centrality of white identity politics and white nationalism within the GOP. I appreciate that most Ricochet readers disagree with my assessment, and that some were even profoundly offended by it. But some of the responses by Ricochet members suffer from one or both of the following flaws: (1) they disagree with things I never said; and/or (2) they reinforce my point by the manner of their disagreement.
First, let me be clear about what I didn’t say.
I didn’t say that the conservative movement was racist, nor that the GOP was. I didn’t dismiss the concern that poor white communities are coming apart. I didn’t say that the way for conservatives to address the problem of our racial homogeneity was to move left on policy. I didn’t say that the way for conservatives to bring minorities into our coalition was to ignore common sense or embrace political correctness. I didn’t say that the left doesn’t practice identity politics, or that the left’s accusations of racism aren’t usually false.
I did say that the Goldwater election was a total disaster for conservatism, because it branded the GOP as the party opposed to civil rights. I did say that the Republican electorate is more animated by nationalism than it is by conservatism, and I did say that conservatism did not deserve to govern the entire country if it reduced itself to a white interest group. I did say that the conservative movement must commit itself to advancing the interests of all Americans, by directly and equally engaging Americans of all races and creeds, and finding common ground.
That’s not what conservatives and Republicans do today. Conservatives and Republicans spend little to no time seriously investing in bringing their ideas to non-white communities.
The ‘minorities want free stuff’ trope
A big part of the problem with the GOP and with conservatism is that so many of its constituents have little to no social contact with minorities, and therefore ascribe unfairly malignant motivations to them.
In the podcast with Rob, Peter, and James, I mentioned several examples of this problem. One is the casual insult that the racially homogenous parts of America are the “real America,” while the diverse, urban parts of America are not. Do you really expect urban and suburban voters of any race to support your policies if your view of them is that they aren’t “real Americans?”
Another is the claim of many conservatives that minorities only vote for Democrats because they want “free stuff.” I pointed out that arguing that non-white voters vote based on fiscal bribes, while white voters vote on principle, is in effect an argument that white voters are morally superior to non-white voters: something that, at the very least, is unlikely to endear non-white voters to your cause, even if they actually agree with your policies. I would go further, and call the belief that white voters are more principled than non-white voters at best an ignorant, and at worst a racially prejudiced, view.
Take the comment of @kylez, who was annoyed by “the idea that it is somehow wrong to say minorities vote Democrat because they want government aid, which is paid for by mostly white working Americans.”
Actually, the vast plurality of entitlement and welfare spending is directed toward whites. The recipients of Medicare and Social Security—the capstones of the Great Society and New Deal respectively—are over 80 percent white.
You could argue, as white identity politicians often do, that Medicare and Social Security aren’t really welfare, because enrollees fully paid for those benefits via payroll taxes. You’d be wrong, especially when it comes to Medicare. Retirees today receive $3 in Medicare benefits for every $1 they’ve paid into the program.
The tax code is littered with loopholes large and small whose beneficiaries are overwhelmingly white: most notably the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance and the mortgage interest deduction. And don’t get me started on the corporate tax code.
You might say, “I pay taxes! I fully deserve the entitlements and tax breaks coming my way. Tell me about straight-up welfare for the poor.” I don’t agree, but ok.
In 2013, 40 percent of food stamp participants were white, 26 percent were black, 10 percent were Hispanic, and 2 percent were Asians. In 2011, Medicaid enrollees were 40 percent white, 22 percent black, 25 percent Hispanic, and 3 percent Asian.
Certainly a higher proportion of Hispanics and blacks are on welfare, because on average they’re poorer than whites (while Asians on average earn more than whites). But perhaps that’s a reason to work harder to lift blacks and Hispanics out of poverty, and not just the white working class!
Are there Americans who want free stuff? Absolutely. But the silver-haired Tea Partier shouting “hands off my Medicare,” and the golf-addicted real estate broker shouting “hands off my mortgage interest deduction,” are just as often guilty of that as the single black mother on Medicaid.
It’s a strange coincidence that conservatives so rarely see it that way.
Here’s another way to think about it. About 55 percent of black Americans are on welfare (i.e., means-tested anti-poverty spending). But over 92 percent of black Americans vote Democratic. Are the extra 37 percent of Democratic-voting, non-welfare-receiving blacks also addicted to “free stuff”?
Let me put it frankly. If you believe that 92 percent of blacks vote Democratic because they’re all addicted to free stuff, you might be someone who lacks the capacity to listen to, or relate to, African-Americans. You might even be what the left thinks you are.
The ‘Obama is a Kenyan Muslim’ trope
Notable in the comments to the Ricochet podcast: almost nobody commented on the remarkable fact that a substantial proportion of Republican voters doubt that Obama was born in the United States, and a substantial proportion believe he is a Muslim. I completely understand why readers wouldn’t want to respond to this point, because it is deeply incriminating of our movement.
Here’s a summer 2016 poll from NBC News, which asked voters if they agreed with the statement that “Barack Obama was born in the United States.” Among those who were registered Republicans, 41 percent disagreed with the statement that Obama was born in the U.S., while only 27 percent agreed. 32 percent were unsure. In other words, 73 percent of Republicans are either unsure or certain that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.
Among Republicans who exhibited a high amount of political knowledge, the results were pretty much the same: 40 percent believed Obama wasn’t born in the U.S., and 30 percent were unsure.
If Obama had been born in Hawaii to an Irish father instead of a Kenyan one, would so many Republicans be questioning his citizenship? I think we all know the answer, even if we don’t want to admit it in public.
Is the GOP’s homogeneity a problem that conservatives want to solve?
Obviously, we conservatives are not going to attract minorities to our cause if we have have no interest in attracting them. And there are a number of Ricochet readers who plainly view minority outreach as futile and/or undesirable.
Representative of the “futility” camp was commenter @rebark, who agrees with me that many members of minority groups agree with us on policy, but that “no amount of supplication on our part, no amount of desperate virtue signalling to prove that we are not racist will win these votes back, because there will always be one offhanded remark that can be construed as indicative of some evil ulterior motive.”
Representative of the “undesirable” camp was commenter @Douglas, whose avatar is the logo of the Confederate Navy, and wrote that “I wish we had written them off [urban and minority voters], simply so those precious resources could have gone to wooing people who could be swayed.”
My conviction is that we have to sacrifice none of our core principles in order to attract minorities to our cause. We simply have to treat them with the same respect and affection with which we treat whites. We have to go into communities where we’re less comfortable, and build relationships with people who don’t look like us or worship like us.
To those who say this is impossible: it’s not. As commenter @ToryWarWriter tried to explain, with little apparent success, the Conservative Party of Canada has done it. Jason Kenney, one of Stephen Harper’s key deputies in the last Conservative government, spent an enormous amount of time traveling to immigrant communities in Canada and building relationships with them. He found that the simple acts of showing up and listening did wonders for Conservatives’ prestige in those communities.
That we haven’t taken Kenney’s playbook and run with it says a lot about where we are today, and why we deserve our status as a failing and losing movement.
In my view, the lack of appeal of our ideas among minorities is the most urgent moral and political problem facing our cause. I hope to persuade at least some of you to join me in doing something about it.
Published in General
It’s more an question of whether A) enough people heard it, and B) the media don’t spin or ignore it.
Might also be too late. We’ll see.
Probably because they can’t see past everything else. Change the overall impression of the party and I’d expect these kinds of issues would become big winners.
If he stays on message, yes. If he starts tweeting [expletive] next week — which he probably will — then it’ll get forgotten.
Always with the negative waves,
MoriarityTM …… ;-)Here I’ll quote you back at yourself:
So, the question “why don’t blacks respond to conservative arguments about family formation, accumulating intellectual capital and patiently saving so that their children can attend college and/or enjoy the benefits of that saving?” might be answered by the fact that many Blacks tend to have shorter time preference. The policy prescriptions that we’re recommending to say, a 19-yr old black single mother sound like this: “Because you don’t have an education your labor isn’t worth all that much… but work your tookus off at a low-paying job for 20 years anyways and save a reasonable amount of that money so that you can send your children to college, who will then have a better future. PS: This will get better and easier if you’re married.”
That’s a tough sell for people to accept – there are few people in their communities who are married and people who go to college, get good grades and follow our prescriptions become social pariahs who are branded as “sell-outs” for “acting white.”
It also doesn’t sound very pleasant. It isn’t all that attractive to people who are looking at tomorrow and wondering what’s going to happen to them and aren’t concerned about 20 years from now. The Democrats appeal is to that short time preference.
So, we have a very narrow window to get through: we have to be able to urge them to buy in to longer time preference activities such as “education” and “career-building” and then be willing to wait approximately 20 years ourselves to see positive results.
So it’s catch-22. We’re supposed to appeal to minorities (but not buy them off!) by proposing policies that are non-racist. But they won’t listen to our non-racist policies because we’re perceived as racist.
They won’t listen immediately. Proving that you respect someone doesn’t happen overnight when they currently feel that they are disrespected.
Right, it’s a long game and requires persistent work.
But they don’t all suffer from this! We don’t have to get every black voter to win elections. If we can change the ratio of voting from 95%-5% to 85%-15%, that’s like a 4 percentage point vote swing. That could change the outcome of a lot of elections.
I’m playing the long game. Students educated outside the public school system will be more open to the conservative message when they are of voting age. Because hopefully they won’t have heard the opposite exclusively their entire lives.
School choice is an important part of the equation on the policy side, for sure. So is the high cost of a college education (driven by crony capitalism and subsidized student loans). Criminal justice and police reform are other important policy areas. Urban economic growth matters too. Rick Perry discussed all of these areas in the speech I linked to earlier.
But as @mikeh said, you won’t get a hearing on the policy front unless people feel like you genuinely care about them and their support. Too many people—on this board, and in the GOP—don’t care. That’s the most important thing we have to change.
It would help if we listened to minorities’ concerns more, and lectured them less. If you are a defeatist who thinks no amount of outreach could ever work, read this op-ed by Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune, in response to a speech on black poverty Perry gave last year.
Yes. If we had ham, we could have ham and eggs. If we had eggs.
Correct. Policies alone don’t work unless they are accompanied by mutual respect and a genuine desire for personal friendships.
Painting with a pretty broad brush Mr Roy.
Why wait for a hearing on the policy front? My friends didn’t sit and wait for Roe V Wade to get over turned, they have taken small, local steps and have a lot to show for it.
I came up with a solid solution that everyone agrees would help. What solution(s) do you have? Your only solution seems to be that people “care” more. How would you suggest, with deeds, that manifest itself?
I think I’m accurately representing the views of some people in this community. There are plenty of comments to quote from to that effect. Having said that, there are others who get what I’m saying and share my goals for the conservative movement, which is great.
On the policy front, I’ve encouraged you several times to read Perry’s speech on why “Black Liberty Matters.” Please do.
You know, comments like this always crack me up.
Several of my children have dated outside their race. You know who had a problem with it? The only two Obama-voting relatives in the family.
My step grandson is almost certainly gay. We will be relieved if he doesn’t become a transvestite.
You know what a well-known, outspoken proponent of gay rights and gay marriage said to me? (This is a guy you’ve almost certainly read and heard of)
“My God, what are you going to do? I have no idea what I would do in that situation.”
I just looked at him with incredulity.
Do? Do!!??? I asked. We’ll do nothing but love him. And discourage the cross dressing.
Such hypocrisy I see from the left side of the aisle.
The junior high theory of politics.
It’s like walking and chewing gum at the same time.
Can’t we do both–quit lecturing them when we have not earned their trust enough to do so (sure, 11/20 of blacks receive welfare, but there’s no sense rubbing that fact in the noses of the the 9/20) and support policies that benefit them (like school choice)?
I have read it and it makes me deeply regretful that Rick Perry was stoned out of his mind when he decided to run for President in 2012, and therefore disqualified himself in 2016.
I read Page’s article as well and what struck me was that there wasn’t really a single positive suggestion about what Perry’s message was or what his proposals were that were attractive to blacks. He mentioned Perry’s bringing up the 14th Amendment. I wonder what Page’s opinion would be about Rick Perry’s support for something solid like Voter ID or Drug Testing Welfare Applicants?
We have been assured that the desire to implement such legislative curbs can only arise out of moral turpitude and the racist intent to keep black people from voting and getting welfare.
The Institute for Justice has had some success in these areas. I have a friend who works there.
No. But plenty of us who are conservatives pride ourselves on our sternness and misanthropy. We think of “warm fuzzies” as innately suspicious and phony – “feel good” stuff that’s utterly ineffective. But people like being made to feel good, especially about themselves. Even Republican primary voters evidently like to be made to feel good about themselves. As long as being warm and fuzzy toward folks isn’t actually accompanied by leftism, why not? I mean, unless you’re as socially inept as I am – in which case approaching complete strangers and trying to be sweet to them is more likely to come off as goofy and creepy than anything else :-)
I think it has to do with respecting the intelligence of people vs exploiting their perceived lack thereof.
IJ seems to be doing a better job than most, and it respects the intelligence of those it advocates for.
I suppose I have known a reasonable number of geniuses in my time. Even they appreciate being treated warmly by others. I know the “trivial”, “unprincipled” aspects of sociability make a difference precisely because I’m so naturally bad at them. Is part of our problem really that we perceive Gemütlichkeit as an insult to others’ intelligence?
Who said anything about “lecturing”. I’m talking about concrete policy that is supported by conservatives/republicans and opposed by liberals/Democrats. And we get no votes from it.
And they don’t have to “trust” that we’ll do it – Republicans have actually put school choice policies into place (over the screaming opposition of democrats). And are trying to expand them.
What on earth are you talking about?
Can you please answer the question I posed two pages ago, when all you did was question my conservatism? I will ask it again in another way:
What are your prescriptions for what conservatives should do?
I want specifics, not ” mutual respect and a genuine desire for personal friendships”. That is not quantifiable.
I have In Laws with Dark colored skin that I love. Am I still a racist white guy to you?
Gemütlichkeit is usually authentic. Pandering is never authentic. And people can tell the difference.
Well, I feel pretty disrespected by the people who assume I;’m a racist because I’m a conservative.
Wait, now I have to be personal friends with them too?
Well…OK, but I’m drawing the line at giving them a ride to the airport or helping them move.