“Why Bigotry Persists”: The Neanderthals Among Us Are Getting Better At Camouflaging Their Prejudices
Soon after Barack Obama’s electoral victory in 2008, conservatives began depicting the event as a triumph of cosmopolitan and secular intellectuals, people of color, liberal pieties, and “socialist” hopes. Grassroots organizing accompanied an agenda of legislative sabotage led by the Republican congressional hierarchy. Media demagogues stoked the flames of resentment. President Obama was mockingly called “The One” and excoriated as an Arab, an imam, even the Antichrist. Posters identified him with Hitler, placed his head on the body of a chimpanzee, implied that he was a crack addict, portrayed him with a bone through his nose, and showed the White House lawn lined with rows of watermelons. Six years later, the fury has hardly subsided: Thousands of young people check on racist websites like Stormfront every month, anti-Semitism is again becoming fashionable, Islamophobia is rampant, and conservative politicians are suing President Obama in the courts for his supposed abuse of power while their more radical supporters are labeling him a traitor.
Most of these people don’t see themselves as bigots. They long to reinstate the “real” America perhaps best depicted in old television shows like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. This completely imaginary America was orderly and prosperous. Women were happily in the kitchen; gays were in the closet; and blacks knew their place. But this world (inexplicably!) came under attack from just these (ungrateful!) groups thereby creating resentment especially among white males on the political right. They feel persecuted and wish to roll back time. Their counterattack is based on advocating policies that would hinder same-sex marriage, champion the insertion of “Christian” values into public life, deny funds for women’s health and abortion clinics, cut government policies targeting the inner cities, protect a new prison network inhabited largely by people of color, eliminate limits on campaign spending, and increase voting restrictions that would effectively disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged citizens.
Neanderthals still exist along with blatant examples of old-style prejudice and hatred. But the bigot is adapting to a new world. The bigot now employs camouflage in translating his prejudices into reality. To forestall criticism, he now makes use of supposedly “color-blind” economic and anti-crime policies, liberal notions of tolerance, individualism, the entrepreneurial spirit, local government, historical traditions, patriotism, and fears of nonexistent voter fraud to maintain the integrity of the electoral process. The bigot today is often unaware either that he has prejudices or that he is indulging them.
Unfortunately, popular understandings of the bigot remain anchored in an earlier time. His critics tend to highlight the personal rather than the political, crude language and sensational acts rather than mundane legislation and complicated policy decisions. Many are unwilling to admit that bigotry has entered the mainstream. It is more comforting to associate bigotry with certain attitudes supposedly on the fringes of public life. Words wound but policies wound even more. Everyday citizens grow incensed when some commentator lets slip a racist or politically incorrect phrase. But they are far more tolerant when faced with policies that blatantly disadvantage or attack the bigot’s traditional targets whose inferiority is still identified with fixed and immutable traits: gays, immigrants, people of color, and women.
Reactionary movements and conservative parties have provided a congenial home for true believers, provincial chauvinists, and elitists of an aristocratic or populist bent. Not exclusively: Liberals and socialists—though usually with a guilty conscience—have also occasionally endorsed imperialism, nationalism, racism, and the politics of bigotry. But while the connection between right-wing politics and bigotry does not hold true in every instance, it is true most of the time. It is certainly true today. Ideologues of the Tea Party provide legitimacy and refuge for advocates of intolerance while the GOP provides legitimacy and refuge for the Tea Party.
Not every bigot is a conservative and not every conservative is a bigot. Yet they converge in supporting an agenda that aims to constrict intellectual debate, social pluralism, economic equality, and democratic participation. Either the bigot or the conservative can insist that his efforts to shrink the welfare state are motivated solely by a concern with maximizing individual responsibility; either can claim that his opposition to gay rights is simply a defense of traditional values; and either can argue that increasing the barriers to voting is required to guarantee fair elections. Whatever they subjectively believe, however, their agenda objectively disadvantages gays, immigrants, women, and people of color.
Reasonable people can disagree about this or that policy as it applies to any of these groups. Any policy, progressive or not, can be criticized in good faith. But ethical suspicions arise when an entire agenda is directed against the ensemble of what President Reagan derisively termed “special interests.” No conservative political organization today has majority support from women, the gay community, or people of color. There must be a reason. It cannot simply be that the conservative “message” has not been heard; that members of these groups are overwhelmingly parasitical and awaiting their overly generous government “handouts;” or that so-called special interests are incapable of appreciating what is in their interest. A more plausible explanation, I think, is that those who are still targets of prejudice and discrimination have little reason to trust conservatism’s political advocates.
Is the conservative a bigot? It depends. Is the particular conservative intent upon defending traditions simply because they exist, supporting community values even if they are discriminatory; and treating political participation as a privilege rather than a right? Critics of the bigot should begin placing a bit less emphasis on what he says or feels than what he actually does. That conservative can always rationalize his actions—platitudes come cheap. But then perhaps, one day, he will find himself looking in the mirror and (who knows?) the bigot might just be staring back.
By: Stephen Eric Bronner, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University; The Daily Beast, September 28, 2014
“About That GOP Clown Car…”: Oh My, Cruz, Carson And Huckabee
Ed Kilgore has been writing lately about the Mitt boomlet and the possibility that the GOP could see yet another clown car field of presidential candidates in 2016. Republican leaders obviously hope otherwise.
But they’re still married to their wackiest base groups, including most prominently the so-called religious right. And that group just made their feelings known:
Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz won the Value Voters Summit presidential straw poll on Saturday. The crowd burst into applause on Saturday, as Family Research Council President Tony Perkins announced that Cruz won 25 percent of votes at the annual Washington conference.The victory is a big victory to the Republican firebrand and Tea Party icon, coming just a day after he drew standing ovations with a religious and emotional speech that blasted ObamaCare, congressional Democrats and called for Republicans to take over the White House in 2016.
Cruz also won the straw poll in 2013. Coming in second was neurosurgeon Ben Carson, a political novice who has a large following in conservative circles but said earlier this week that there is a “strong” likelihood that he would run for president. He won 20 percent of the votes. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) came in third, with 12 percent of the vote.
Cruz, Carson and Huckabee. Oh my. A lineup like that wouldn’t just lose to Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warren or Joe Biden. It would lose to almost anyone credible on the Democratic side in 2016.
That doesn’t mean the candidates of the religious right will win the GOP primary. But even if they don’t, they’ll certainly drag the eventual nominee off the cliff during the primary in such a way that they may not be able to make it back to anything approaching center during the general.
By: David Atkins, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 28, 2014
“Collaborating With The Enemy”: Can Republicans Be Convinced To Help Improve The Affordable Care Act?
When the Affordable Care Act was passed in early 2010, people made lots of predictions about how its implementation would proceed, in both practical and political terms. While the law’s opponents all agreed that it would be a disaster from start to finish, the law’s supporters were slightly less unanimous, if nevertheless optimistic. Most figured that though there would probably be problems here and there, by and large the law would work as it was intended, enabling millions of uninsured Americans to get coverage and providing all of us a level of health security we hadn’t known before.
And that’s what has happened. But there was one other assumption among the supporters that’s worth examining anew, now that most of us agree the law isn’t going to be repealed. Like every large and complex piece of social legislation, it was said, the ACA would have to be tweaked and adjusted over time. For instance, when it was passed in 1935, Social Security excluded agricultural and domestic workers, just coincidentally shutting most African-Americans out of the program. Those workers were added later on, and other changes were made as well, like adding cost of living adjustments to account for inflation. Medicare, too, has undergone changes both large (like adding a prescription drug benefit) and small. So what are the possibilities for adjusting the ACA in the near future? In the current atmosphere—one not just of intense partisanship, but one in which one party has made venomous opposition to this law the very core of its political identity—can we hope to actually fix the things about the law that might need fixing?
The administration has already made some changes to the law using its executive authority. Most notably, it has delayed the employer mandate; as it stands now, the mandate won’t fully take effect until 2016. As it happens, few people are particularly enthused with the employer mandate in its current form; conservatives have never liked it, and more than a few liberals have their doubts about it. As Mike Konczal recently explained, there’s an alternative:
The employer mandate has been another major roadblock for the ACA. The current “Obamacare” plan requires employers with more than 50 full-time workers to pay a part of the health care costs for employees who work more than 30 hours a week, or pay a fine. This is unpopular with employers, and it fuels larger worries that workers are getting their hours capped or that expanding businesses are hitting a major road bump the moment they reach 50 employees.
As the Roosevelt Institute’s Richard Kirsch writes, the way the final House bill tackled this issue was much smarter: Under the House plan, employers that didn’t provide health care to their employees would pay a percentage of payroll as a tax to cover health care. Consequently, there would be no incentive to juke the number of new hires or their hours. Also, current health insurance premiums don’t vary according to an employee’s income, which discourages employers from hiring lower-wage workers. Charging a percentage of payroll for coverage would help companies cover the costs even as the system moves towards the exchanges.
If you were a Republican who cared about this issue, this would be a perfect opportunity to change the law in a way you’d like. It wouldn’t be giving up something to get half a loaf, it’d be giving up nothing to get half a loaf. Democrats and Republicans could agree to change the mandate, whether it’s to more closely resemble the original House version of the bill, or something else. I’m sure that creative legislators could come up with any number of ways to produce the maximum number of people with employer-sponsored coverage—or even, now that the exchanges seem to be working quite well, devise a new way for employees to use them without employers just getting off the hook for providing coverage.
But we all understand the present reality, which is that no Republican is willing to work with Democrats to improve the ACA, even in ways that address particular complaints conservatives have about the law, because that’s considered collaboration with the enemy and would guarantee you the wrath of the Tea Party and a primary challenge from the right. Within the GOP, changing the law for the better is actually thought to be a terrible sin, while making futile gestures in opposition to the law while tacitly accepting its existence in its current form is thought to be the height of ideological integrity.
It’s possible that over time, as the repeal fantasy looks more and more ridiculous, Republicans will begin to grow more open to legislation making changes to the ACA to improve its operation. That’s what logic would dictate, but anything other than fist-shaking opposition to the ACA may remain politically toxic for a long time in the GOP.
But maybe there’s something Democrats can do to affect that conversation. It’s easy for them to just say:
“If Republicans really cared about improving people’s lives they’d join with us to make improvements, but instead they’d rather just have talking points.” It’s even true. But that doesn’t get you anywhere. So perhaps Democrats could try getting more specific. They could come up with whatever they think is the best way to deal with a weakness in the law, like the current form of the employer mandate. Turn that into a bill. Start moving it through the legislative process in the Senate. Force Republicans to answer specific questions about it, like: “Congressman, you’ve criticized the current employer mandate. Tell me why you think this new proposal isn’t an improvement.”
I’m not naïve enough to think that all Republican opposition to improving the ACA is going to melt before the power of those questions. But it only helps Republicans if they can stay vague in their discussions of the law. The more specific the discussion gets, the harder it is for them. And at least you could introduce the idea of Republicans joining with Democrats to improve the law, which is something barely anyone has brought up until now.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 8, 2014
“Boehner’s Constitution Of Convenience”: Sermonizing Politicians Cannot Meet Even Their Most Rudimentary Responsibilities
People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Especially when your glass house is the House of Representatives. Speaker of the House John Boehner made headlines last month, when he launched a misguided lawsuit against President Obama for ostensibly violating “his constitutional authority.” Yet if anybody is treading on the Constitution, it is Boehner himself. Speaker Boehner and his conservative caucus have shown a blatant disregard for the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment, which guarantees criminal defendants “the assistance of counsel.” In the process, they have failed to meet their basic constitutional responsibilities.
Boehner is cynically using the very process he refuses to fund for others less fortunate. In announcing his decision to sue the President, Boehner made the anodyne observation that “the legislative branch has an obligation to defend the rights and responsibilities of the American people.” These rights include those contained in the Sixth Amendment, which specifies the procedures of criminal prosecution. Notably, the Amendment protects the fundamental rights of criminal defendants to a speedy trial and to be represented by legal counsel.
Congressional Republicans’ extreme budget cuts threaten the core of the Sixth Amendment. Since 2010, Congress slashed hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal judiciary and federal public defense programs. Simultaneously, Congressional Republicans allowed states to enact draconian cuts to public defense. From Michigan to Mississippi, state legislators balanced their budgets on the backs of poor Americans who rely on public defenders. States rights are all well and good, but states do not have the right to violate the Constitution. Despite efforts by Democrats in Congress to stop the damage, Congressional Republicans refused to increase appropriations and provide reasonable levels of funding.
The results have been catastrophic. And the victims are some of the most vulnerable people in our society: low-income Americans trapped in a biased justice system. As noted by the ACLU and other advocacy organizations, the “deep cuts to the federal public defenders’ budget” resulted in “significant layoffs, 15-20 day furloughs, and the complete elimination of defender training.” Continuing on this dangerous path, according to the advocacy coalition, would “decimate the federal defender system.” On the state level, the consequences have been equally devastating. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, many state public defenders spend as little as six minutes per case because of paltry funding. The Brennan Center also found that public defenders often juggle “more than 300 cases at one time.”
Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) and Argersinger v. Hamlin (1972) are unequivocal: the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution entitles criminal defendants to effective legal representation. Congress has the responsibility to secure this right with appropriate funding. And it is not doing so. Low-income Americans are paying a very real price for this constitutional abdication.
Tea Party Republicans frequently pontificate about the Constitution. The 112th Congress, in which John Boehner was elevated to Speaker, began with a ceremonial reading of the document “for the first time ever.” The House Republican Caucus introduced a rule in 2011 that requires all legislation to “cite its specific constitutional authority.” Republicans routinely allege that President Obama’s actions menace the Constitution. To quote Republicans in Congress, America faces a “constitutional crisis” because “King Obama” has “rewritten the Constitution for himself.” But when it is time to actually stand up for the Constitution, these sermonizing politicians cannot meet even their most rudimentary responsibilities. America doesn’t need politicians who lecture about the Constitution; we need politicians who follow it.
Conservative Republicans don’t stop at undermining public defense. They also embrace extreme cuts to civil legal assistance. While not protected by the Sixth Amendment, civil legal aid is a vital component of the safety net. Every year, it helps 1.8 million low income Americans facing everything from domestic violence to foreclosure. Like criminal legal aid, it is also egregiously underfunded. Almost every House Republican supported a 2011 plan to chop nearly 20% from the annual appropriation of the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), the nation’s primary provider of civil legal aid. For some Republicans, these severe cut to LSC did not go far enough. 170 Republicans, or 70% of the Congressional Republican Caucus, subsequently voted to eliminate all funding for the LSC.
Fortunately, the Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats have successfully blocked the most radical reductions in public defense. Attorney General Holder and Solicitor General Verrilli have been tireless advocate for reversing the cuts and establishing an equitable judicial system.
Ironically, Speaker Boehner resorted to the American justice system to sue President Obama, the very system he has worked relentlessly to underfund for indigents. Instead of suing Obama, he should start fixing the system he and his colleagues broke.
By: Duncan Hosie, The Huffington Post Blog, August 26, 2014
“Obama And The Warmongers”: The Drums Of War And The Chants For Blood; The Politics Of The ISIS Threat
We seem to be drifting inexorably toward escalating our fight with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, as the Obama administration mulls whether to extend its “limited” bombing campaign into Syria.
Part of the reasoning is alarm at the speed and efficiency with which ISIS — a militant group President Obama described as “barbaric” — has made gains in northern Iraq and has been able to wash back and forth across the Syrian border. Part is because of the group’s ghastly beheading of the American journalist James Foley — which Michael Morell, a former deputy director of the C.I.A., called “ISIS’s first terrorist attack against the United States” — and threats to behead another.
But another part of the equation is the tremendous political pressure coming from the screeching of war hawks and an anxious and frightened public, weighted most heavily among Republicans and exacerbated by the right-wing media machine.
In fact, when the president tried to tamp down some of the momentum around more swift and expansive military action by indicating that he had not decided how best to move forward militarily in Syria, if at all, what Politico called an “inartful phrase” caught fire in conservative circles. When responding to questions, the president said, “We don’t have a strategy yet.”
His aide insisted that the phrase was only about how to move forward in Syria, not against ISIS as a whole, but the latter was exactly the impression conservatives moved quickly to portray.
It was a way of continuing to yoke Obama with the ill effects of a war started by his predecessor and the chaos it created in that region of the world.
In fact, if you listen to Fox News you might even believe that Obama is responsible for the creation of ISIS.
A few months ago, the Fox News host Judge Jeanine Pirro told her viewers that “you need to be afraid” because of Obama’s fecklessness in dealing with ISIS, adding this nugget:
“And the head of this band of savages is a man named Abu al-Baghdadi — the new Osama bin Laden — a man released by Obama in 2009 who started ISIS a year later.”
That would be extremely troubling, if true. But the fact-checking operation PolitiFact rated it “false,” saying:
“The Defense Department said that the man now known as Baghdadi was released in 2004. The evidence that Baghdadi was still in custody in 2009 appears to be the recollection of an Army colonel who said Baghdadi’s ‘face is very familiar.’
“Even if the colonel is right, Baghdadi was not set free; he was handed over to the Iraqis who released him some time later. But, more important, the legal contract between the United States and Iraq that guaranteed that the United States would give up custody of virtually every detainee was signed during the Bush administration.”
Fox, facts; oil, water.
But the disturbing reality is that the scare tactics are working. In July, a Pew Research Center report found that most Americans thought the United States didn’t have a responsibility to respond to the violence in Iraq.
According to a Pew Research Center report issued last week, however: “Following the beheading of American journalist James Foley, two-thirds of the public (67 percent) cite ISIS as a major threat to the United States.”
The report said that 91 percent of Tea Party Republicans described ISIS as a “major threat” as opposed to 65 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of independents.
The report also said:
“Half of the sample was asked about ISIS and the other half was asked about the broader threat of ‘Islamic extremist groups like Al Qaeda,’ which registered similar concern (71 percent major threat, 19 percent minor threat, 6 percent not a threat). Democrats were more likely to see global climate change than ISIS as a major threat.
Americans were thrilled by our decision to exit Iraq when we did, but support for that decision is dropping. In October 2011, Gallup asked poll respondents if they approved or disapproved of Obama’s decision that year to “withdraw nearly all United States troops from Iraq.” Seventy-five percent said they approved. In June of this year, the approval rate had fallen to 61 percent.
Yet 57 percent still believe that it was a mistake to send troops to fight in Iraq in the first place.
Now, Republicans are beginning to pull out the big gun — 9/11 — to further scare the public into supporting more action. Senator Lindsey Graham has said on Fox News that we must act to “stop another 9/11,” possibly a larger one, and Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen has warned, “Sadly, we’re getting back to a pre-9/11 mentality, and that’s very dangerous.”
Fear is in the air. The president is trying to take a deliberative approach, but he may be drowned out by the drums of war and the chants for blood.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, August 31, 2014
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