“Populism Needs To Be Popular”: Not A Viable Political Strategy For Conservatives
Having already posted my thoughts on the problems associated with the Republican Party adopting some ideology or message of “libertarian populism,” I will note in passing Ramesh Ponnuru’s succinct rejection of the idea that combining hostility to state subsidies for big businesses and other special interests with the traditional conservative hostility to state “redistributive” efforts on behalf of the needy will work electoral magic.
It was not until Monday that Tim Carney, a libertarian-populist writer (and a colleague of mine at the American Enterprise Institute), got around to publishing a manifesto for the group. It is a document that contains several good ideas — but not a viable political strategy for conservatives.
The main focus of Carney’s work is that big government and big business collude at the expense of the little guy, and he recommends that Republicans run against that collusion in order to win working-class votes. In particular he wants them to break up the big banks, end corporate-welfare programs, clean up the tax code so that powerful interests no longer profit from it, and end regulations that protect established businesses from competitors (regulations that stifle food trucks, for example). He would also cut the payroll tax and end government policies that favor employer-based health insurance.
I’m sympathetic to most of the items on Carney’s list — and those on the list that fellow populist Conn Carroll has compiled. Taken together, though, they do not seem to amount to a winning political platform. A Republican party that took on the U.S. Export-Import Bank might improve its image a bit, but how many Americans really care enough about the issue to change their votes based on it? Nor does freeing the food trucks seem like it would win many votes, however right it might be as a policy matter….
Cutting the payroll tax, unlike most of these ideas, would tangibly affect most people’s lives by raising their take-home pay. If Republicans proposed it, though, they would surely be accused of jeopardizing Social Security and Medicare, which seems like a rather large political defect. Other Carroll proposals, such as ending student loans and the mortgage deduction, seem likely to be unpopular even at first glance.
Republicans ought to propose conservative answers to the concerns that are uppermost on most voters’ minds. The libertarian-populist method seems to be to start with the solutions and then to imagine that voters have the relevant concerns. And while many of the proposed solutions have great potential appeal to conservative voters, few would do much to expand their ranks.
In other words, if you want to sell a political party highly resistant to change a “new” ideology of “populism,” it had better be popular. Because it’s not, you typically find Republicans taking the easier route of defending government programs that benefit their own constituencies against the claims of those people. I don’t think it’s a winning formula in the long run, but it’s more promising than pretending the voters Republicans need would be happier if government stayed out of their lives altogether.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 18, 2013
“We Know Them From The Nightly News”: Washington Post Columnist Richard Cohen Is Terrified Of Black People
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote an offensive, poorly reasoned column about racial profiling. In 1986. And also this week. And once or twice or let’s say perhaps a dozen additional times in the interim. The occasion of this week’s installment of “Richard Cohen explains why black men should be treated as second-class citizens for the safety of us all, which is to say rich old white men” is the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin. Cohen is very sorry that Martin is dead due to Zimmerman incorrectly assuming him to be a criminal of some sort based solely on Martin’s demographic profile — in other words, Cohen is sorry that Martin is dead because of racial profiling — but on the other hand, Cohen argues, racial profiling is correct and necessary because black people are scary, at least when they wear certain things.
I don’t like what George Zimmerman did, and I hate that Trayvon Martin is dead. But I also can understand why Zimmerman was suspicious and why he thought Martin was wearing a uniform we all recognize. I don’t know whether Zimmerman is a racist. But I’m tired of politicians and others who have donned hoodies in solidarity with Martin and who essentially suggest that, for recognizing the reality of urban crime in the United States, I am a racist. The hoodie blinds them as much as it did Zimmerman.
A “uniform we all recognize.” “We all.” “We.” Richard Cohen speaks for us all. Or “us” “all.” That one incredibly dumb assertion, stated with perfect idiotic certainty in the first-person plural, is exactly the sort of thing that makes Richard Cohen America’s worst columnist on America’s worst opinion page.
In the world outside Cohen’s tiny boomer rich guy bubble, “a hoodie” is worn by … nearly all young people and plenty of not-so-young people. To call a hoodie part of a (universally recognized!) “uniform” of Dangerous Black Thuggishness makes about as much sense as invoking high-tops or baseball caps. It is the “uniform” of youth. But then, to Richard Cohen, youth plus blackness makes probable cause.
Throughout much of the column, Cohen, play-acting at being a brave speaker of uncomfortable truths, keeps claiming that no one in America is willing to broach the topic of Black Criminals.
Where is the politician who will own up to the painful complexity of the problem and acknowledge the widespread fear of crime committed by young black males? This does not mean that raw racism has disappeared, and some judgments are not the product of invidious stereotyping. It does mean, though, that the public knows young black males commit a disproportionate amount of crime. In New York City, blacks make up a quarter of the population, yet they represent 78 percent of all shooting suspects — almost all of them young men. We know them from the nightly news.
And, obviously, the nightly news has no ingrained bias in favor of fear-mongering and sensationalist coverage of crime.
That statistic is the only one in the column. Left out are numbers indicating current crime rates, the historical trend of crime rates, the probability of any given person, or any given wealthy white person, becoming a victim of violent crime, the percentage of crimes committed by black men in Sanford, Fla., or really any number at all that would’ve provided more enlightening context than “number of black shooting suspects in New York City.” Political scientist Jamie Chandler says, “Cohen should be embarrassed by his innumeracy,” but Cohen does not embarrass easily.
If he did, he might remember the lesson of his 1986 Washington Post Magazine column justifying racist treatment of black men. In it he defended shopkeepers who deny black men entrance into their stores. “As for me,” he wrote, “I’m with the store owners, although I was not at first. It took Bernhard Goetz, of all people, to expose my sloppy thinking.” Bernhard Goetz was a man who shot four young black men on a New York City subway car after he became frightened that they were going to rob him. (It was never actually proven that they were going to rob him.) Because this column ran in a newly relaunched Washington Post Magazine featuring a cover story on a young black rapper accused of murder, black Washingtonians protested, and eventually earned an apology from Post executive editor Ben Bradlee.
They did not receive an apology, at least not right away, from Cohen, who instead wrote a newspaper column headlined “‘Accused of Racism,’” in which Cohen complained of being accused of racism. In this column he defended cabdrivers who refuse to pick up black people. (Two years later, as Tom Scocca reports, Cohen acknowledged that his critics were “mostly right.” He acknowledged this after he went to Atlanta and met rich black people.)
That lesson, apparently, was short-lived. In an interview with Politico about this week’s column, Cohen explained how racial profiling isn’t inherently racist, because everyone does it:
“Now, a menace in another part of the country could be a white guy wearing a wife-beater under-shirt. Or, if you’re a black guy in the South and you come around the corner and you see a member of the Klu Klux Klan.”
This is Richard Cohen defending his position — that “young black males” dressed in “hoodies” deserve to be targeted not just by the police but by armed idiot civilians pretending to be the police — by invoking the Klan. For Richard Cohen, a young black person dressed in not just politically neutral but also omnipresent attire is basically the equivalent of a guy dressed in the actual official uniform of a terrorist organization dedicated to the violent establishment and maintenance of white supremacy. Richard Cohen just has a pathological fear of black men, and he wants not just to espouse and justify this view, but also to be allowed to do so without anyone calling him racist.
Richard Cohen is obsessed with the notion that no one in America is ever brave enough to talk about race, or at least brave enough to talk about it in the way he would like to talk about it, bearing in mind that he probably doesn’t actually read anyone outside his immediate professional sphere, or anyone below the age of 50, or probably women or writers of color. “In the meantime, the least we can do is talk honestly about the problem,” he says in this week’s column. (“The problem” is the black male crime wave.) “Crime where it intersects with race is given the silent treatment,” he says. He complains that instead of addressing the fears of white people like Richard Cohen head-on, Barack Obama has instead sold out his own grandmother for being racist, a malicious misreading of his 2008 Philadelphia speech that is common among right-wingers complaining of reverse racism. (Cohen does not add, as FAIR’s Peter Hart notes, that in the same speech, Barack Obama did explicitly say that “wish[ing] away the resentments of white Americans” as “misguided or even racist” is unfair, because “they are grounded in legitimate concerns.” It’s not clear that Cohen bothered to read the speech before quoting the bit about the grandma.)
It could be argued that politicians and public officials everywhere are addressing the fears of Richard Cohen, and they are doing so by locking a breathtaking number of young black men in prison, in addition to regularly stopping and harassing them on the streets of large American cities. But Cohen doesn’t concern himself with that. What he wants is for politicians — liberal politicians, preferably black ones — to tell him that it is OK to be scared of black people.
Here is Cohen in 2012, sort of defending stop-and-frisk, and again invoking the story of Trayvon Martin as an opportunity to discuss America’s single most pressing racial issue, people calling Richard Cohen racist:
As with the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, race is not only a complicating and highly emotional factor but one that does not always get discussed in an open manner. A suffocating silence blankets these incidents. Accusations of racism are hurled at those who so much as mention the abysmal homicide statistics — about half of all murders are committed by blacks, who represent just 12.6 percent of the population — and they come, more often than not, from liberals who advocate candor in (almost) all things. Others reply as if there are not basic questions of civil rights and civil liberties at stake.
It never occurs to Cohen that perhaps accusations of racism hurled at Richard Cohen constitute the “open discussion” he is so desperate for.
Cohen is not always such a fan of “open” discussions, as we learned in 2006, when he built an entire column around the fact that he’d received a lot of emails criticizing and insulting him. In that column he described getting a lot of mean emails as being the target of “a digital lynch mob,” so, yes, this is definitely the right guy for an informed and constructive conversation on race in America.
As a man who still somewhat incoherently clings to the label of “liberal,” Cohen does acknowledge, in what amounts to an aside in this week’s column, that there are some complicating factors in his diagnosis of Black Criminality:
The problems of the black underclass are hardly new. They are surely the product of slavery, the subsequent Jim Crow era and the tenacious persistence of racism. They will be solved someday, but not probably with any existing programs. For want of a better word, the problem is cultural, and it will be solved when the culture, somehow, is changed.
Whoops, we created a huge impoverished underclass. There is probably nothing we can do for them now, and they scare me, so they should work on fixing their “culture.”
The problem actually is cultural. It’s the culture that created and still coddles Richard Cohens.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, July 17, 2013
“It’s Time To Talk About Race”: We’ve Been Tiptoeing Around The Elephant In The Room For Centuries
It’s a four letter word we need to talk about: race. Since the death of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of George Zimmerman, emotions are running high and all of us are tip toeing around this elephant that has been in the middle of the room for centuries; and this badly needed discussion is long overdue.Yesterday , Rush Limbaugh has boasted he can now say the “n” word. As a talk host, I am appalled at his irresponsibility and immaturity. Just say no, Rush, shut up and grow up. But America’s been shutting up and being juvenile about the fact that we as a nation have a race problem and have been in denial about it. In order that Trayvon’s death not be in vain, let’s start the conversation now.
It’s a topic every parent dreads discussing with their kids, but they know it’s necessary. Attorney General Eric Holder discussed in his speech at the NAACP how his father had that conversation with him and he must with his children.
For those that say the Trayvon Martin shooting wasn’t about race; many of us feel it was. And if it wasn’t, it has become that, it is now and this topic can no longer be avoided.
Many Americans perceive that we don’t have a problem with race. Or that because of affirmative action or moreso because a black man was elected as president; but that isn’t the case.
Sure legislation was passed. Blacks can vote, serve in the military alongside whites and we integrated the schools, stopped marriage to a person of another color from being illegal, stopped the separation and inequality at lunch counters, drinking fountains and stopped shoving black Americans to the back of the bus…
But is that enough?
Our prisons, death row all hold a disproportionate amount of black Americans compared to any other race in this nation.
Although our juries are no longer all white men, our defendants are still disproportionately black. And when a young black man is killed, those of us who believe there were racial undertones become “race baiters.”
For hundreds of years of slavery for which no one has received their 40 acres and a mule or a public apology, for the ongoing discrimination and mistreatment of African-Americans by others with skin lighter than theirs…
We need to have this conversation. We have to stop denying our feelings, our anger – and our prejudices.
By: Leslie Marshall, U. S. News and World Report, July 17, 2013
“Making Whiteness Visible”: We Are Not Trayvon Martin
If there is one hopeful note amidst all the anguish and recrimination from the acquittal of George Zimmerman, it’s that growing numbers of white people have come to appreciate whiteness for what it is: an unearned set of privileges. And as a result of that dawning awareness, it’s become possible to imagine a day when that structure of privilege is dismantled – by white people.
Recall that immediately after the killing of Trayvon Martin, people of every race took to the Internet to declare “I Am Trayvon Martin.” They wore hoodies. They proclaimed solidarity. That was a well-meaning and earnest attempt to express empathy, but it also obscured the core issue, which is that Martin died not because he was wearing a hoodie but because he was wearing a hoodie while black. Blackness was the fatal variable.
And so now, post-verdict, a more realistic meme has taken root. On Tumblr and Facebook and elsewhere there is a new viral phenomenon: “We Are Not Trayvon Martin” (emphasis mine). Huge numbers of white Americans are posting testimonials and images to declare that it is precisely because they are not black that they have never had to confront the awful choices Martin faced when Zimmerman began to pursue him.
This isn’t about empathy or the posture of equivalency that empathy can tempt us to assume. It’s about owning up to the unequal privilege of being non-black and saying, in essence, “I Am George Zimmerman.” And because I am George Zimmerman, I get to have my fears trump reality. I get get-out-of-jail-free cards. I get a presumption of innocent victimhood, no matter what my own acts or attitudes.
Much has been made about the fact that Zimmerman is white and of Hispanic ethnicity, as if he therefore couldn’t possibly embody white privilege. This is a deep misreading of the dynamics of race and the media in America. As an Asian American, I am endlessly frustrated by how binary and black-and-white – literally and figuratively – the portrayal of race is in our country. Much of the time Asian Americans are an afterthought, or simply presumed foreign. But I assume that had I been the neighborhood watchman that day in Florida, I would have been understood in the media as the non-black actor. Which is to say, for the limited purposes of this trial, I would have been granted “honorary white” status – whether or not I wanted it.
Whiteness is the unspoken, invisible default setting of American life. We frame our conversations about race in terms of how white people see and what they think they see. We imagine that nonwhite Americans want to be more like white Americans. We imagine that to be American is to be white. When racial minorities complain about the slurs of a Paula Deen or a prank like the faked names of the Asiana pilots, they are often told by whites to stop being so sensitive or to take the context of tradition or history or humor into account. That ability, to dismiss and minimize people of color for being oversensitive, is itself one of the privileges that whiteness confers. The broader privilege that whites have by occupying the omniscient vantage point in media and civic life has to be named and then undone.
How will it be undone? Not, in the end, by the work of communities of color alone. Minority groups can and must be vigilant, vocal advocates for fair treatment and representation in public life. But if America is to transcend its long conflation of whiteness with Americanness, it will fall to white people – those wise enough to see they are not Trayvon and humane enough not to become George – to lead us all to that promised land.
By: Eric Liu, Time, July 17, 2013
“Lower Premiums Is A Big Effing Deal”: The House GOP’s Futile Poorly Timed Efforts To Gut Obamacare
Guess whose heath care premiums are poised to drop considerably?
House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) timing could be better. Hoping to capitalize on the bad press surrounding delay in the implementation of the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate provision (even though the move was substantively meaningless), House Republicans are set to move on their latest idea: a vote on delaying the individual mandate, too.
Politically, the move arguably makes some sense. Even though Republicans came up with the idea of the individual mandate, they’ve since turned it into one of the least popular provisions in “Obamacare.” By singling it out for a delay, GOP lawmakers bring attention to a controversial health care policy and put Democrats on the spot for defending it. Their bill won’t become law, of course — Republicans love symbolic, post-policy governing — but they might get a few attack ads out of this.
But substantively, there’s a problem. In fact, there’s more than one.
First, by going after the individual mandate, House Republicans are taking a bold stand in support of leaving 13.7 million Americans without any health care coverage at all.
Second, GOP lawmakers are also simultaneously (and admittedly) positioning themselves in support of a policy that leads to higher premiums and gaps for Americans with pre-existing conditions.
And third, Republican lawmakers are, for purely political reasons, obsessed with gutting federal health care law at the same time as new-but-inconvenient evidence emerges that the law is working extremely well.
Individuals buying health insurance on their own will see their premiums tumble next year in New York State as changes under the federal health care law take effect, state officials are to announce on Wednesday.
State insurance regulators say they have approved rates for 2014 that are at least 50 percent lower on average than those currently available in New York. Beginning in October, individuals in New York City who now pay $1,000 a month or more for coverage will be able to shop for health insurance for as little as $308 monthly. With federal subsidies, the cost will be even lower.
Supporters of the new health care law, the Affordable Care Act, credited the drop in rates to the online purchasing exchanges the law created, which they say are spurring competition among insurers that are anticipating an influx of new customers. The law requires that an exchange be started in every state.
If elected officials’ principal goal is to pursue policies that benefit the public, launching a crusade to sabotage the Affordable Care Act really doesn’t make any sense.
Skeptics have noted this morning that New York’s insurance market is uniquely messy, so the results aren’t representative of the impact we’ll see elsewhere. Perhaps. But Matt Yglesias argues persuasively that it’s “a big deal anyway.”
The first reason is that New York is a really big state. Its almost 20 million residents account for over 6 percent of the American population.[…]
But this is also important because there’s a lesson here. At various points, the Affordable Care Act’s critics in Congress have suggested that they might be interested in keeping the popular-sounding aspects of Obamacare — the community rating, the guaranteed issue — but just scrap all that unfortunate mandate talk and tax increases. The New York experience shows why that won’t work. That lesser plan is essentially what New York did some years back, and the consequences were enormous premium hikes as the state’s market was rocked by adverse selection. Affordable Care Act implementation, by adding the nasty elements back in, is fixing a huge problem that other states don’t suffer from but that would exist everywhere if Congress took the approach of just doing the easy parts.
In light of this, House Republicans are eager — desperate, even — to boast about their efforts to gut the law, no matter what it does to the uninsured and people with pre-existing conditions, and even though it does more of what we already know doesn’t work.
Before we move on, let’s also not forget that this isn’t limited to the Empire State. In California, exchanges are taking shape and premiums will be even lower than expected; insurers in Oregon are also lowering premiums; and health care expenditures overall are slowing, just as Obamacare was designed to accomplish.
Congressional Republicans and a few too many pundits want you to believe the implementation of the Affordable Care Act is a disaster. It’s not. They want you to believe gutting the law would make things better. It won’t.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 17, 2013
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