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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
By the way, folks, we must keep in mind that Ricochet is not representative of the GOP or American conservatives generally. People here tend to be more amenable to local, limited government than most Americans. We take greater interest in political philosophy and history, which is why we were willing to pay for a community of such conversations.
So when Roy talks about Republicans who won’t consider any cuts to entitlement programs or who care about little more than their tax returns, remember that he’s talking about the GOP and conservatives generally. It’s not an accusation against Ricochet members.
Yeah, there was a tremendous amount of inertia, and you could say the data support a bunch of different narratives, probably because there were many different things going on. I’m not even claiming there was intentional courting of racist voters, but something appealed to a lot of people in the south and it’s hard to win over people without then having those people in your party.
This can’t be emphasized enough. I like to think most of us are here because we’re willing to dispassionately talk about sensitive issues.
So the GOP didn’t win over the racist southerners explicitly with racist overtures, but southern GOP voters are still racist. Got it.
Wait, why isn’t Mr. Roy in the dock for failing to win me over?
That is a little more artful than useful. I am sure it is not personal, as we have never met. Yet, it is not so sterile as to not apply to us here.
Racist.
If you want to argue that the segregationists would have voted GOP if not for Wallace in ’68, I have no specific counter argument. Only that the trend line going all the way forward to today was stable except for ’64.
By telling the truth?
Check out today’s video. We’ll see if your opinion of @ryanm changes. :-P
http://ricochet.com/morality-and-law/
By emphasizing the negative aspects of certain groups whenever an opportunity is presented.
Is that how the democrats are failing? You are countering what is perhaps the single least arguable moment of outright racial politics in American history by saying it’s rude to point it out.
It begs the question that conservatives treat minorities with less respect than whites. I.E. it presents as fact something that has not yet been demonstrated.
Like Republicans and Southerners?
Don’t mention the woah.
I mentioned (I think) in the original post that trying to sell conservatism to ANYONE after years of indoctrination in a public school is damn near impossible.
I struggle mightily with my nieces and nephews.
I heard an interview recently of a college professor who does a survey of his incoming freshmen each year. The vast majority believe that slavery was unique to the US
School choice should be the first hill we take.
This is one of the major reasons I think Democrats are winning.
Saw that one coming. In my article I just posted above this comment I talk about why I think Trump happened and a lot of it has to do with people like me looking down on a large portion of the Republican electorate.
It appears Mr. Roy won’t be engaging in the comments here, so I’ll just address this to a general audience rather than to him.
It seems to me Roy’s first mistake was going to Vox and surrendering ground as an unelected representative of conservatives (I haven’t listened to the podcasts lately, which will remain unexplained and unexcused <cough>. Ahem. I’ve just been following the controversy here on Ricochet.) The Left is The Man now. It has all the mojo. If you’re going to roll over and expose your belly, expect to have your throat ripped out by the alpha dog and then the betas to follow behind and clean up the entrails. That’s what we’re doing here.
The birther stuff is maddening because we’ve bought into the idea of birth-right citizenship as geographical, rather than parental allegiance. It wouldn’t matter if Obama was born on the moon. His mother was an American, which, according to the current understanding, makes him an American. That she and her parents who raised Obama were anti-American wannabe communists isn’t commented on at all…
As to the racist right, when the media starts reporting on Black Lives Matters agitating to “take that [violent] s–t to the suburbs” at a “peaceful prayer rally” [as
reportededited by CNN], we’ll talk.If you look at state legislatures and governorships, it’s even more clear that the south didn’t abandon the Democrat party for decades. Some of the southern states had pretty ironclad Democrat majorities in their legislatures all the way up through 2010.
The only response the accusation of “racism” deserves is a one-finger salute.
Austin Murrey made this point better than me already, I see…
http://ricochet.com/a-reply-to-ricochet-readers-on-the-gop-white-identity-politics/comment-page-2/#comment-3462470
How many times must the myth of the racist Dems of the south turning into repubs be debunked? It’s an old saw, and it has been shown untrue on a number of occasions. The reality is: the old racist democrats died out, while their children (who were raised witnessing and living in the civil rights movement) rejected their parents’ old attitudes and voting patterns. You can see this in the way the voting patterns gradually shifted, as the boomers came of age and as people moved from northern states looking for work. That this coincided with the rise of Reagan is just that: coincidence. It has been a shameful liberal slur for decades now that the Republican somehow captured the old racist wing of the Dems, and that it is still repeated even here bears out how embedded that myth is. But it is slander.
This blog post by @mikeh about the importance of showing respect to minorities (and to the white working class) is exactly on point—I highly recommend it.
Let me try to respond to some of the categories of critical comments on here:
Great response!
As a southerner, I am used to people in the North calling me racist.
As lifetime citizen of Metro Atlanta, I am used to many people moving down her from the north because it is some much more welcoming of minorities. Blacks are moving to Atlanta in high numbers. Could it be that DC and NYC and Chicago are not as nice places for Blacks to live?
I’m sorry but I don’t really understand your argument. Is it that Democrats hated Republicans for 100 years due to the Civil War, but then because of Goldwater they warmed up to the GOP 15-40 years later? I don’t understand.
Yes, the counter-argument to “Racist Democrats became Republicans because of Goldwater” is “…But they didn’t. The South continued to vote for Democrats for decades.”
This seems much more plausible to me:
True. What it really shows is that Obama has been an opportunistic liar from day 1. I don’t know if he was born here or not. He’s Kenyan just like Elizabeth Warren is Indian… for political convenience. I think when this book was written, he had little notion of running for president, so it’s either a story concocted to make him special (like, NPR special) or it’s the truth. No way of telling. But neither opinion is racist, and you are absolutely correct that Roy’s assertion is irresponsibly false.
Counterpoint 1: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/04/30/southern_whites_shift_to_the_gop_predates_the_60s_118172.html
Counterpoint 2: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346861/desegregation-brown-kevin-d-williamson
Corollary to Counterpoint 2: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/346900/republicans-and-civil-rights-kevin-d-williamson
Or a summary: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/04/the-southern-strategy-debunked-again.php