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.

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  1. Amy Schley Coolidge
    Amy Schley
    @AmySchley

    If there was nothing else of merit in this post, I would applaud you for taking the time to write this rebuttal.

    I will also applaud you for pointing out the facts of our blue-haired welfare queens, though it’s an incredibly unpopular fact, even in conservative circles.

    • #1
  2. Albert Arthur Coolidge
    Albert Arthur
    @AlbertArthur

    Thanks for this post, Avik.

    I appreciate that you enunciated what you didn’t say.

    I really disagree that the election of 1964 has very much at all to do with black people’s allegiance to the Democrat party, for the following reason:  Almost no one, and not just blacks, but literally almost no one, has any idea who Barry Goldwater was. A significant percent of Americans don’t even know who Joe Biden is, for God’s sake.

    • #2
  3. RyanM Inactive
    RyanM
    @RyanM

    Avik, thank you for taking the time to read and discuss with ricochet members. It is always appreciated.

    We also had the opportunity to speak on a podcast with Troy Senik about this same issue, just after your appearance with James, Peter and Rob:

    http://ricochet.com/flyover-country-episode-58-dispatches-from-manhattan/

    • #3
  4. Albert Arthur Coolidge
    Albert Arthur
    @AlbertArthur

    Avik Roy: In 2013, 40 percent of food stamp participants were white, 26 percent were black

    And yet… Whites make up something like 80% of the population and blacks 13%….

    So…

    Avik Roy: 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.

    Barack Obama himself claimed to have been born in Kenya in his author bio when his book Dreams of my Father was published, and he didn’t correct it until he ran for US Senate about a decade afterward.

    Avik Roy: If Obama had been born in Hawaii to a Ukrainian father instead of a Kenyan one, would so many Republicans be questioning his citizenship?

    The answer is yes, since many, many, many presidential candidates, as well as presidents, have had the citizenship status questioned over the years. Why…even Barry Goldwater’s citizenship was questioned in 1964 because he’d been born in the Arizona territory!

    Thanks again for the post, Avik.

    • #4
  5. DocJay Inactive
    DocJay
    @DocJay

    Wow.  The arrogance of intellect is alive and well here.  There’s enough tap dancing Ray Bolgers for a month.

    • #5
  6. Albert Arthur Coolidge
    Albert Arthur
    @AlbertArthur

    DocJay:Wow. The arrogance of intellect is alive and well here. There’s enough tap dancing Ray Bolgers for a month.

    To whom are you speaking?

    • #6
  7. DocJay Inactive
    DocJay
    @DocJay

    Albert Arthur:

    DocJay:Wow. The arrogance of intellect is alive and well here. There’s enough tap dancing Ray Bolgers for a month.

    To whom are you speaking?

    To the author.

    • #7
  8. Sabrdance Member
    Sabrdance
    @Sabrdance

    I concur with those who who thank Avik for responding to comments.

    I retain my doubts that “showing up and listening” is going to turn the US into Texas -it isn’t like it hasn’t been tried.  Bush, Romney, Rand Paul -all made notable attempts.  All of them were rejected.  At a certain point “just keep doing it” ceases to be a compelling argument.  At minimum, tell us how to do it such that it works.

    I somewhat strongly suspect that Canada had an easier time of this because their Federalism is stronger than ours, in turn because they have the Quebecois -thus their racial and regional division is between two white ethnic groups.  This would be consistent with America’s history, where Federalism was strongest when it was being actively protected by the Southern Whites against the Northern Whites.  Even post-Civil War.  So, I guess, anytime the Cajuns want to start rattling their sabers…

    Regarding the believe Obama was not born in the USA -I’m not sure how much of an indictment it is, or rather what to make of it.  Americans believe a lot of stupid things -this has been pointed out in the number of Democrats who think 9/11 was an inside job, AIDS and Crack were government conspiracies, and many more.  At worst, this is an argument that we owe George III an apology.  I’m open to that.  It is more likely foolishness mixed with statement of “screw the other guys.”

    • #8
  9. KC Mulville Inactive
    KC Mulville
    @KCMulville

    I’ll repeat an argument I made in another post:  what’s “white” about limited government? What’s “white” about traditional families? What’s “white” about strong defense, and minimal regulation? These, and most of the fundamentals of conservatism, have absolutely nothing to do with race. They have to do with principles of government. If you want an effective government, no matter what specific policies you advocate, these are the principles that make government work.

    Despite your comments to Peter in the podcast, you are plainly referring to stereotypes of Republicans as a electoral party, not any of the basic beliefs of conservatism as a political philosophy.

    And when you refer to “the golf-addicted real estate broker shouting ‘hands off my mortgage interest deduction’ …” that’s just a superficial straw man of Republicans depicted as white rich people. Once you use that straw man to advance your argument about conservatives, frankly, you conflate Republicans and conservatives to the point that you lose any credibility.

    • #9
  10. Mike Rapkoch Member
    Mike Rapkoch
    @MikeRapkoch

    Why is this so controversial among conservatives:

    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.

    This is much more than merely trying to convince minority voters that conservative policies will benefit them. The key is affection–the desire for friendship. We simply cannot succeed with minorities until we see them as “in the same boat with us,” and work to demonstrate an “we’re in this together message.”  If we’re not going to try then yes, minorities will never trust what we say. Is that what we want? A fractured community?

    I really don’t understand the hostility to Avik’s ideas.

    • #10
  11. Ontheleftcoast Inactive
    Ontheleftcoast
    @Ontheleftcoast

    Avik Roy: 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.

    That speaks more to the brilliance of the way Obama handled the whole birth certificate issue. This masterpiece of political rope-a-dope was very effective way to shield him from substantive criticism of his ideology. It is deeply incriminating for Republicans though: It is no accident that Conservatives have long referred to the Republican Party as the Stupid Party (in contrast to the Evil Party across the aisle.) It isn’t necessarily racist to be incredulous that a race hustler who loathes many of his countrymen and many of the values (which they share with Avik Roy) could be elected President

    Speaking of consequential mistaken beliefs: Many of Obama’s supporters believe he is a Constitutional scholar.

    • #11
  12. Salvatore Padula Inactive
    Salvatore Padula
    @SalvatorePadula

    Avik Roy: 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

    Right, but white middle class welfare recipients don’t like to think of themselves as welfare recipients.

    • #12
  13. Salvatore Padula Inactive
    Salvatore Padula
    @SalvatorePadula

    KC Mulville: I’ll repeat an argument I made in another post: what’s “white” about limited government? What’s “white” about traditional families? What’s “white” about strong defense, and minimal regulation? These, and most of the fundamentals of conservatism, have absolutely nothing to do with race.

    Right, but one thing this election has demonstrated is that the Republican electorate isn’t nearly as conservative as it has previously claimed. I think Avik’s point that nationalism is more the driving ideology of the GOP electorate is pretty spot on.

    • #13
  14. rebark Inactive
    rebark
    @rebark

    Mr. Roy, I think that you’ve mis-characterized or at least misunderstood my comment on the other post. While I appreciate your response, I would like to clarify.

    You describe me as representing the “futility” camp, but my point in that comment was not that minority outreach was futile, but that minority outreach by way of self-flagellation is futile. We will not win people over by saying “oh no we’ve been so racist”, but by actively promoting our ideas, as you suggest, in communities of all colors and creeds, and demonstrating the superior outcomes for all that arise from conservatism.

    So why did I feel the need to post that comment? Because I don’t feel that taking a big detour to talk about ugly racial problems in our movement will advance our cause. Serious self-evaluation on the part of the conservative movement is in order, but doing it in an excessively public, exhibitionist sort of way will win us no sympathy and no respect, and I am extremely skeptical that it will create any inroads into minority communities on its own.

    We need to explain our ideas better. There is no shortcut to that, it’s a hard uphill climb against an unfriendly media and a suspicious electorate. While our side has a problem with white nationalists who uneasily coexisted with principled conservatives, we’re not going to convince anybody by making a big show of taking them on. This is the wrong battlefield – no matter what we do to say, “look guys, we’re not racist any more”, there will always be democrats with an incentive to say “I don’t believe you – you’re still just as bad”.

    This is a long way of saying that the problem you describe is not insignificant, but that focusing all our attention on fixing the reality of metastasizing identity politics on the Right will not change the perception of the Right as being identity-driven. We have to explain and demonstrate our ideas, and the proof will be in the pudding for groups that don’t trust us – and in the process, those who really are just driven by some kind of bigotry will find that they don’t like the way the party is going and either detach or silence themselves.

    Trump’s impending shellacking in November will, I dare to hope, be a big kick in the teeth for the alt-Right, and then we can get back to talking about what we’re really about.

    And one final note – I’ll file that statistic about high belief in Obama’s non-citizenship alongside this one:

    http://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2011/04/more-than-half-of-democrats-believed-bush-knew-035224

    People are credulous and stupid, and they are very willing to believe negative rumors about their political opponents. That doesn’t, to my mind, prove that they believe stupid things because they are racist, but because they are uninformed.

    • #14
  15. Andrew Chouinard Inactive
    Andrew Chouinard
    @AndrewChouinard

    I think the reason so many people are turned off by proposals of ‘minority outreach’ is that the GOP’s most recent attempt to do so was blatant pandering. Basically, nobody (Excluding Paul Ryan and Rand Paul) is interested in doing the years of hard work necessary to build genuine relationships with these communities. The DC consulting class instead sees this as an opportunity to decide which core principles the party needs to bail on to make a 1% gain over 2 years. I want to see conservatism embraced by a more diverse populace, but doing this will take several election cycles of constant work to make that happen. I’m pessimistic that sufficient resources (including getting the right people doing the selling) will be committed to these sorts of projects.

    • #15
  16. KC Mulville Inactive
    KC Mulville
    @KCMulville

    Salvatore Padula: Right, but one thing this election has demonstrated is that the Republican electorate isn’t nearly as conservative as it has previously claimed. I think Avik’s point that nationalism is more the driving ideology of the GOP electorate is pretty spot on.

    Agreed – but as I say, we need to stress that distinction between the GOP and conservatism. I agree that the Republican party appeals to whites and nationalism, often to the exclusion of minorities, but that’s a problem that shouldn’t be tacked onto conservatism.

    Perhaps my unstated assumption is that I don’t feel anchored into the GOP as the only political vehicle for conservatives, and I suspect that Avik Roy takes that for granted. I’ve frequently said that I’d be delighted to find some other political party to advance conservative principles. (It’s kind of like having FoxNews as the only right-leaning TV network … I wish we had some alternative.)

    • #16
  17. rebark Inactive
    rebark
    @rebark

    KC Mulville: It’s kind of like having FoxNews as the only right-leaning TV network … I wish we had some alternative

    Frankly, this election cycle has made me yearn for the days of yore (before I was born, so maybe I have an overly romanticized idea of something I’ve never experienced, but still), when Fox News did not exist and conservatives had to put up with so much bias on a daily basis that they were more likely to be ready to argue back coherently. See the excellent article below:

    http://www.nationalreview.com/article/438651/fox-news-conservative-media-echo-chamber-hurts-conservatives

    • #17
  18. Frank Soto Member
    Frank Soto
    @FrankSoto

    Avik,

    I agree with your larger point about the current state of the conservative movement.

    However I don’t agree that the Goldwater election was a moment where the conservative movement absorbed many segregationists.

    I looked at every election since Eisenhower and what we see in Southern States is a very slow movement toward the Republican Party. In the Goldwater election it’s very clear that large numbers of racists switched and voted Republican. Likely for exactly the reason you gave in that Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act.

    However in the elections that follow these states revert back to where they were before the Goldwater election. They then continued on a slow trajectory towards the Republicans.

    I can only conclude that for a single election racist Southerners went Republican. I see no evidence that they remained.

    • #18
  19. Salvatore Padula Inactive
    Salvatore Padula
    @SalvatorePadula

    KC Mulville:

    Salvatore Padula: Right, but one thing this election has demonstrated is that the Republican electorate isn’t nearly as conservative as it has previously claimed.

    Agreed – but as I say, we need to stress that distinction between the GOP and conservatism. I agree that the Republican party appeals to whites and nationalism, often to the exclusion of minorities, but that’s a problem that shouldn’t be tacked onto conservatism.

    Perhaps my unstated assumption is that I don’t feel anchored into the GOP as the only political vehicle for conservatives, and I suspect that Avik Roy takes that for granted. I’ve frequently said that I’d be delighted to find some other political party to advance conservative principles. (It’s kind of like having FoxNews as the only right-leaning TV network … I wish we had some alternative.)

    Agreed, though I’m skeptical about there being a viable replacement for the GOP as the political vehicle for conservatism.  GOP politicians and conservative pundits have spent the last three to four decades trying its best to elide the distinction between the Republican Party as a political institution and conservatism as an ideology. Part of the reason I think Trump so disastrous is that if he is able to significantly remake the Party in his mold (not a sure thing, but a definite possibility) the bulk if the populace seems likely to conclude that Trumpism is conservative.

    • #19
  20. Carol Member
    Carol
    @

    Salvatore Padula:

    Avik Roy: 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

    Right, but white middle class welfare recipients don’t like to think of themselves as welfare recipients.

    Maybe that has something to do with the fact that Democrats convinced them that all the money they paid in is in Al Gore’s lockbox waiting for them. And the fact that any time anyone on the right suggests reforming SS and Medicare, Democrats shriek that we are pushing Grandma over a cliff.

    • #20
  21. Aaron Miller Inactive
    Aaron Miller
    @AaronMiller

    I don’t believe Obama is Christian because he doesn’t act like it. He might have been baptized and so introduced into the Christian family, but his public career has been decades of deceit, calumny, and tribal agitation. Evidently, he cares neither for truth nor for his political opponents. That’s not Christian.

    As much to the point, only a fool would take Obama at his word about anything. The man lies constantly.

    Avik Roy: 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.

    It’s also significant that, like Democrats generally, President Obama didn’t lift a finger to help Christians being massacred in the Middle East but frequently fretted about Muslims in the region. Domestically, he has shown no concerns for the religious liberty of Christians.

    Does this suggest he’s secretly a Muslim? No. It suggests he’s overtly a Democrat, first and foremost. The party has become implicitly anti-Christian, despite the self-deceptions of its leaders like Pelosi and Biden.

    • #21
  22. Aaron Miller Inactive
    Aaron Miller
    @AaronMiller

    We have discussed before on Ricochet why major cities are regularly dominated by Democrats. I believe there are various reasons which have nothing to do with ethnicity. Big cities require more government management of resources. Their laws must deal with more conflicts and more variation of conflict because of a greater variation of residents, so laws abound. Constant interaction means little rest for the weary and city residents are endlessly bombarded by competing ideas, so multiculturalism (cultural and moral apathy) is a strong temptation and common escape. Factionalism is easier to incite and voters are more easily hoodwinked in huge populations in which citizens don’t actually know most of their “fellow” residents.

    Poor people do need more exposure to conservatives and conservatism. But there are many challenges involved in interacting with poor people outside of one’s own immediate area. If those interactions are via scripted meetings, conversations tend to be short and impersonal. Charitable organizations typically end up being managed by Democrats because managing other people’s money is what they do. And poor people are pointedly trained by Democrats to distrust outsiders, especially Republicans/conservatives.

    To be incorporated into conservatism, poor people need three things. First, they need real relationships, not just fleeting encounters. Trust is necessary to overcome indoctrination, and you don’t win trust with a pretty speech. Truth is necessary — trust rewarded. And, statistically speaking, they need not to be poor!

    • #22
  23. Salvatore Padula Inactive
    Salvatore Padula
    @SalvatorePadula

    Frank Soto: I can only conclude that for a single election racist Southerners went Republican. I see no evidence that they remained.

    Could you elaborate a bit? The way I see it, the south was the Democratic Party’s heartland prior to 1964. Goldwater won his home state of Arizona and five states in the Deep South. In 1968 Nixon won the entire south except for four states won by the explicitly racist George Wallace (all of which had gone for Goldwater in ’64). The Democrats won back the south in 1976, helped by the fact that their nominee was a folksy Georgia peanut farmer. Republicans won the entirety of the south until 1992, when Bill Clinton won four southern states including his home state. In 1996, Clinton lost one of those states, despite winning nationally by nine points. The only southern state Democrats have carried since then was North Carolina in 2008.

    Now I agree with you that it’s a bridge too far to attribute everything to Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act (Nixon ran on a Southern strategy that, while not actually racist, definitely made much of appealing to white identity politics), but I think it’s hard to argue with the idea that the southern white racist Democrats of the 1950s who supported segregation and voted for Wallace in ’68  largely ended up Republicans by the 1980s.

    • #23
  24. Ray Kujawa Coolidge
    Ray Kujawa
    @RayKujawa

    DocJay:

    Albert Arthur:

    DocJay:Wow. The arrogance of intellect is alive and well here. There’s enough tap dancing Ray Bolgers for a month.

    To whom are you speaking?

    To the author.

    I don’t even want to start to get into this. I feel like I/we’ve been buried under a couple bucket loads of anecdotal incriminations, cherry picked comments and insinuations even based on avatars and pseudonyms. If all this stuff were true (for the majority of people at Ricochet), why in heck would I want to associate with you guys? But the actuality is, most people I know on Ricochet are the greatest people and don’t come off all stereotypical, and don’t have these negative views. A person might come off negatively within post or comments, but some of that is the challenge of dealing with the printed page. My advice to the author is: 1) please remove your tarnhelm (aka, “magic helmet” that makes one immune to countercriticism); 2) get out and attend a Ricochet meetup. After he does that, if he still wants to mudsling from up on his high horse, I’ll officially consider him a lost cause.

    • #24
  25. Ray Kujawa Coolidge
    Ray Kujawa
    @RayKujawa

    BTW, @albertarthur, you used to irritate me a bit, but with your recent videos, I have a totally different impression of you. It’s really cool what you do, you seem like a pretty cool dude. I’m sorry that I misjudged you based on what came across the printed page. This is just an illustration how easily negative judgements can be formed in casual viewing of Ricochet, so I think this remark goes with my meagre attempt at rebuttal to this topic.

    • #25
  26. Salvatore Padula Inactive
    Salvatore Padula
    @SalvatorePadula

    Ray Kujawa: If all this stuff were true (for the majority of people at Ricochet), why in heck would I want to associate with you guys? But the actuality is, most people I know on Ricochet are the greatest people and don’t come off all stereotypical, and don’t have these negative views.

    That’s certainly true, but I think it an error to believe that Ricochet is representative of the American Right. It pretty clearly isn’t.

    • #26
  27. Martel Inactive
    Martel
    @Martel

    Republicans consider speaking at a national NAACP convention to be “minority outreach” when in fact it’s merely “hostile Democrat outreach”.  But that’s all they do.

    There are plenty of ways to engage minority communities, but they all involve time, strategy, and worse of all:  risk.  You see, the second we make the slightest headway into minority communities, we’re going to face a barrage of RACIST! RACIST! RACIST! unlike any you’ve ever seen.  We fear that more than anything.

    So it could be done, but it requires both brains and stones.  The GOP has neither.

    I still think Obama’s probably a Muslim, though.  If he worships anything other than himself.

    • #27
  28. Frank Soto Member
    Frank Soto
    @FrankSoto

    Salvatore Padula: Could you elaborate a bit? The way I see it, the south was the Democratic Party’s heartland prior to 1964. Goldwater won his home state of Arizona and five states in the Deep South. In 1968 Nixon won the entire south except for four states won by the explicitly racist George Wallace (all of which had gon for Goldwater in ’64).

    I took election results for every election since Eisenhower. I compared how each state voted for the Republican Party to how the nation as a whole voted for the party. This gives you a number where a given state might be + 4 or – 4 for the GOP (just examples) compared to the rest of the country.

    This controls for the popularity of individual candidates moving the entire map in their Direction and lets us see more of a trend line.

    When you do this exercise the south is moving slowly but consistently more towards the GOP for the entire duration that I analyzed. There is one exception which is the 64 election where the South overwhelmingly moves in the Republican Direction.

    It’s very clear that goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act bought him a ton of votes in the south. It’s also very clear that these voters didn’t stick around for 68. The trend line goes back to where it was moving slowly Republican. It doesn’t continue on from the peak of the Goldwater election.  It continues on as if 64 never happened.

    • #28
  29. Salvatore Padula Inactive
    Salvatore Padula
    @SalvatorePadula

    Frank Soto:

    It’s very clear that goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act bought him a ton of votes in the south. It’s also very clear that these voters didn’t stick around for 68. The trend line goes back to where it was moving slowly Republican. It doesn’t continue on from the peak of the Goldwater election. It continues on as if 64 never happened.

    In ’68 are you accounting for Wallace? It seems to me that if someone was motivated to switch parties based on racism, having an overtly racist option would divert support from the not-racist-but-also-not-multiethnic GOP.

    • #29
  30. Salvatore Padula Inactive
    Salvatore Padula
    @SalvatorePadula

    Frank Soto:

    Salvatore Padula: Could you elaborate a bit? The way I see it, the south was the Democratic Party’s heartland prior to 1964. Goldwater won his home state of Arizona and five states in the Deep South. In 1968 Nixon won the entire south except for four states won by the explicitly racist George Wallace (all of which had gon for Goldwater in ’64).

    I took election results for every election since Eisenhower. I compared how each state voted for the Republican Party to how the nation as a whole voted for the party. This gives you a number where a given state might be + 4 or – 4 for the GOP (just examples) compared to the rest of the country.

    This controls for the popularity of individual candidates moving the entire map in their Direction and lets us see more of a trend line.

    When you do this exercise the south is moving slowly but consistently more towards the GOP for the entire duration that I analyzed. There is one exception which is the 64 election where the South overwhelmingly moves in the Republican Direction.

    Thanks for elaborating. Like I said, I don’t think Goldwater was the catalyst for Southern racists leaving the Democratic Party for the GOP, but the fact of their shift is something we should probably acknowledge.

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