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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
“I did say that the Republican electorate is more animated by nationalism than by conservatism…”
Republican voters have wanted the current immigration laws enforced for a long time now. The response of Republican politicians has been either to ignore those pleas, or else lie about sharing those concerns. Why is it surprising that it has now become an overriding priority with voters?
All I see is Avik Roy saying, If I don’t get my way on immigration, I will run to liberal media outlets and try and inflict as much damage as I can on the GOP and their voters.
I could see that being the case. But, too be fair, it’s a terrible looking coincidence, even if it’s wrong.
Thanks for getting back to us, Mr. Roy.
Some things are best kept in the family. When you report your family to the neighbors (who are agents of the Left), you shouldn’t be surprised when the family feels betrayed.
Sorry, I think you’re the one who’s insulated. When’s the last time you spent two-and-a-half hours at the DMV with your urban neighbors? I did it yesterday. The problem isn’t race — it’s the growing underclass of all races. Character and culture are being destroyed by the Left. I have no idea how we arrest its “progress.” Do you?
Who said this? I think you’re mistaking not wanting to pander and make false promises about what government can do for you(!) [now with 80% more corruption!] for not wanting to reach out to individuals who happen to be minorities.
Oh, one more counterpoint:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/347515/frank-rich-wrong-about-civil-rights-kevin-d-williamson
See my comments on living in Atlanta. Maybe that is true for Conservatives living in the NewBosWash corridor, or in LA or Chicago, but here in the deep south, we live in integrated societies. Did you not see that in Texas when you were in school there? I think Rob Long even posted on it once.
Have you noticed the race riots always happen outside of the Deep South these days? I wounder why that is? Do you think minorities just live in fear around here from rednecks?
You sound like a Yankee to me, lecturing us poor, backwards southern boys on how racist we all still are, and how ashamed we should be.
The data has been parsed again and again, and the myth is shown to be empty slander. But it fits the narrative the Dems want, and so it is repeated like so many other phony stats (war on women! campus rape crisis!).
I have used my medical degree to serve impoverished people, usually on my own time or with little compensation. Some were inner city Blacks, many were Hispanic, some were Indians, some were White country hicks. I can’t say it ever mattered to me what skin color was suffering.
I plan to vote for Trump. I reject your broad brush characterizations.
Thank you to all who are making this point.
NYT, October 3, 1993 – “Speaking last Sunday night to a crowd of Dinkins supporters at the Sheraton Hotel, the President [Bill Clinton] lamented that ‘too many of us are still unwilling to vote for people who are different than we are.'”
These accusations are not only made against Southern whites. Thank God enough New Yorkers ignored them and elected Rudolph Giuliani.
From skimming the articles about the South’s conversion to the Republican party I’m getting the impression that the counterargument is that the Southern equivalent of liberal constituencies — urban, educated, white, wealthy — are who make up the core of the Republican party in the south. Interesting…
I live in an extremely non-homogeneous community and have non-whites as coworkers and in my faith community. Having watched local politics for a long time, my observations are:
Unless extreme measures are taken, all civil service employment tends to become an ethnic spoils system. That is the (D) wheelhouse. When @avikroy talks about the fact that many more blacks vote Democrat than collect welfare, he is ignoring black participation in the .gov payroll and contractor classes. This is compounded by expanding the administrative demands on every public institution under affirmative action mandates. Whatever the competing interests of the various groups are, they all have an interest in expanding the size and scope of government.
That’s a bit disingenuous. The fivethirtyeight.com article cited says:
@avikroy and @mikeh are correct that the right does a terrible – disrepectfully terrible – job at retail politics among minority voters.
I am surprised at your list of the four categories. I think they skip most of the most pertinent counterpoints in the responses to this conversation of yours. It is my observation that your four categories are mostly “strawmen”. Similar to a point you made in your OP, you are “disagreeing with things we never said.”
This thread has double-downed on your allegation that racism explains the GOP and Trump, by just attempting to use other words and phraseology, and like others I reject your irresponsible and slanderous premise.
Ball, if the majority of genocidal eugenicists were indeed members of the Libertarian Party because they perceive it to be hospitable to eugenics and genocide it would be entirely appropriate to point that out.
So, I’m rather late to this party, but a sorta-counterpoint:
I agree whole-heartedly that the Republican Party plays identity politics, but I’m less sure that it’s best described as White Identity Politics. I think it’s much (at least in part) better described as Heartland Identity Politics.
Cases in point: Sarah Palin dismissing “the coasts” and praising “real America” or Ted Cruz’s “New York Values” line. This correlates heavily with race, but race isn’t the actual motivation.
Avik Roy:
” 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. …
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.”
You say republicans and conservatives are more nationalist than conservative and then back that up by suggestimg we’re a white interest group that doesn’t reach out to minorities enough. You call us nationalist and link it to race and then you claim this isn’t just calling us racists. This is dishonest.
Would someone born to a Ukrainian father in Hawaii have questions about his citizenship? Did he claim to be an immigrant in the past when it was convenient to him? Did he spend his childhood in a third country? If this is proof of racism for you then you might as well go join the race baiters like sharpton. Clearly race drives your thoughts more than ideas.
On the the “free stuff” rant, you make up a racial issue. Our complaint is that democrats vote for free stuff. That is not a racial belief. Do we have to stop criticizing democrats to appeal to minorities?
Don’t you people know from sarcasm?
“The coasts” and “New York Values” correlates heavily with race?!
Yes. The places Republicans — especially in presidential campaigns — praise the most tend to be whiter and the places they hold in most contempt tend to be more racially diverse.
That’s obviously 1) a very broad brush and 2) hardly the only way of cutting things and 3) not an argument about causality, but I think it’s relevant.
Another way of looking at it is that Republicans are more the country party while the Democrats are the urban one (which, again, sort of correlates with race). The reason Cruz’s “New York Values” dig is illustrative is that he’s a Cuban-American from Texas bashing a lily-white dude from New York.
I should add that a good deal of this may simply be the fault of our presidential campaigns starting in New Hampshire and Iowa, both of which are whiter than a polar bear who’s just rolled in snow.
“Vote for me”
“What are you going to do for me?”
“Let’s talk.”
Trump’s recent direct appeal for the black vote is gonna get real interesting real fast:
Trump:
Roger Simon at PJMedia:
Ball’s scowl can throw one off that way.
Donald Trump is many things, but lily-white ain’t one of them.
#OrangeLivesMatter
I disagree with the implication, Tom.
First, consider references to “Northeast liberals” or the “Acela corridor”, etc. You are talking about a far whiter area than most red states.
Consider the term “inside the beltway” being used instead of “DC”. That’s a clear attempt to target white liberals who live in the DC suburbs. Similarly, consider the specific references to California (like calling Los Angeles “La-La land”) that target white liberals.
I did. Aside from the directly misleading bits from the President himself, he is also a master troll and seeks to get a rise out of his political opponents so that he can cluck his tongue at them. It doesn’t help that there are multiple conduits for some people who are genuine conspiracy theorists to get far more attention than they should these days as well who provide President Troll with precisely that.
If over half of blacks in America are on some form of welfare that means that inevitably means that every black person in this country essentially has an immediate relative on one of those programs. A father, mother, sister, brother or child.
Those people have sympathy for their relatives and a vested interest in keeping them on that program because they understand who the burden would fall on if that program were curtailed.
Let me examine the claims about voting more closely as well. In 2008 and 2012 reports vary, but Blacks voted for President Obama in what can only be described as statistical unanimity. If whites had done that with the white candidate, we might have some cause to attribute that to “racism” and President Romney would have won in a 50 state landslide. The idea that white racism holds blacks back is a disgusting trope fostered by the self-appointed black “leadership.”
Here’s a different way of looking at it: Is it remotely possible that it is anti-white racism which motivates blacks?
Here’s Heather MacDonald from City Journal earlier this week:
Here in Baton Rouge Anti-White Racism is alive and well, Avik. This is a city that is over half black and there are areas which I don’t venture into because you are taking your life in your hands. Especially after the sun goes down. I can drive (I would never walk) 3 blocks south of where I work and find unemployed black men loitering on street corners right now.
I’ll bet you a dollar you can guess what their main occupation is.
Your reality needs to stop messing with a perfectly good theory.
An extremely inconvenient truth underlies Social Security and Medicare: Since the Social Security retirement age used to be the life expectancy, people are living too long. That’s why they keep running out of money.
Obamacare looks to be on track to fix that problem.
Kinda brings to mind a bumper sticker I used to see:
THIS^!
Deserving of repeating … over and over. Thank you @kcmulville! Trump rally crowds aren’t “white” because they are nearly all-white, they are about limited government, traditional families, strong defense, minimal regulation, etc ……..