One strange theme that keeps cropping up in Republican circles is the idea that America cannot function as a Scandinavian social democracy because, unlike them, we have all these non-white people. It seems like a simple non-sequitur to me. I simply cannot find the thread of logic that I am supposed to follow. For example, explain to me why race is injected into Ross Douthat’s analysis:
Historically, the most successful welfare states (think Scandinavia) have depended on ethnic solidarity to sustain their tax-and-transfer programs. But the working-age America of the future will be far more diverse than the retired cohort it’s laboring to support. Asking a population that’s increasingly brown and beige to accept punishing tax rates while white seniors receive roughly $3 in Medicare benefits for every dollar they paid in (the projected ratio in the 2030s) promises to polarize the country along racial as well as generational lines.
Now, I have real doubts about all of the numbers Douthat throws out in his column, but that isn’t what concerns me here. Let us stipulate, for the sake of argument, that he’s correct in asserting that the median income for a family of four is $94,900 and that their tax burden is set to increase 10% by 2035. If they are going to be getting soaked in taxes while the elderly collect far more in entitlements than they paid in, then maybe we can expect some intergenerational resentment and tension. But what does race have to do with it? It seems like a tangential and non-causal concern.
What Douthat seems to be saying is that if we don’t slash entitlement spending now then a horde of young brown and beige people are going to riot against white retired people in the 2030’s. This seems like an excessively contrived and remote way of injecting fear into the debate. Am I wrong? Am I missing something?
Why do conservatives think that Scandinavia’s racial demographics are essential to their political philosophy? Is it because they are so attuned to feelings of racial resentment (their taxes being transferred to people of color) that they can’t imagine any society tolerating such a thing? And, even so, can you reverse this? Can you assume that people of color would never support a system that transfers wealth to (mostly white) retired people?
It’s not so much race as it is a cultural thing, I guess.
For example, if we introduced maternity and paternity leave with pay, it would take a while for these policies to have an effect on our culture. In Scandinavia, it’s just been a cultural acceptance that we need to pool resources together to help each other out. In America it’s not so much the case. So when Scandinavia begins seeing an influx of “non-whites,” things might change in their model as well.
I don’t think the argument holds, but at least it’s an acknowledgment that the welfare state can and does work.
They actually have seen an influx of non-whites, but I don’t know the percentages.
Yeah, and you’ve also seen a rise in far-right nationalist groups as a result. Not to the point where we should be worried, but they’re started to get representation in their parliaments for the first time.
Although when people point out that “Europe is more racist than here,” especially with regard to their more recent Islamophobic laws, I would like to point out that we have not seen nearly the same influx of Muslims here as they’ve seen there; and the Muslims immigrating their tend to be far more fundamentalist.
It’s the same old story: conservatism = hatred of giving shit to “the other,” whether it’s Very Serious People on the NYT payroll or over at PowerLine.
Please ignore the grammatical errors. I slept on my design lab’s couch after working on my group’s design paper that’s due on Tuesday for 14 hours.
Europe also has a more fundamental (sic) clash with Islam that we do because of their reverence for secularism. In the U.S., the typical Muslim is probably only modestly more socially conservative (and no more religious) than the typical Republican. In Europe, the same cannot be said.
Could it be more smoke & mirrors to keep our minds from the sacred & untouchable MIC spending trust area of the budget?
I have heard this one countless times. The homogenous theme is THE theme right now. I have never heard it from a person who was not a racist.
It’s transference. They truly and honestly feel that right now, right this minute, their money is being used to support brown people. They really hate that. So they transfer those feeling on everyone else, exaggerated. ‘If white people hate it, how will the stupid, subhuman brownies feel about it when it is their turn? OMG, they will kill us!’ that is their mind set.
Honestly, a bigger worry to society is why the NYT would give lines in their newspaper to a certain racist, and allow him to just spill it out with no consequences. ‘Asking a population that is increasingly brown and beige to accept punishing tax rates …..’ that sentence is just flat out racist. And racism to put forward a political agenda (lower taxes).
The only answer that I can come up with of why a major newspaper would print that is because the owners agree and feel it needs to be said. The same reason the republican party loves them emails with monkeys in them. Because they see it as ‘truth talking’.
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BTW, if you follow the column and this theme to it’s logical conclusion then you send the brown people back where they came from. You must do that, because they are so filled with hate and resentment they will riot and kill us when they ‘take over’.
THAT is the subject he is really talking about. Reclaiming our country, to save our future.
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It amazes me no end how permeated with fear these people are. Surprising they can leave their homes without wetting their undies.
Now that is something I’ve also seen. It’s just projection, which is what makes it really disgusting. Ie, if Chunky Bobo was in the Brown People’s position, he would want revenge and would actively seek it. Thus, the Brown People must want the same thing.
I notice they don’t mention The Netherlands. Maybe Oui can post some useful up to date links, but iirc Surinamese, for example, were extended citizenship.
…as a way of setting working class people against each other to FORESTALL the creation of social democracy in countries with multiple ethnicities.
Perhaps, Ross was letting on more than he realized. 🙂
Perhaps it is not the ‘intrusion’ of people of color into the Scandanavian societies, but instead the reaction from whites to that intrusion.
I’m amazed nobody has brought up the obvious, and BooMan didn’t catch it. With politics, the rule is “follow the money.” With racists, it’s “How are white people the victims?”
Arguments like this start with the assumption, shared by the author and his targeted readers, that brown-skinned people are addicted to their entitlements – they’re lazy, and only want the government to give them everything. (E.g., welfare, affirmative action as conservative hot-button issues.) Now, what would people like that do if they suddenly realized another class of people, in this case white retirees, was getting more than they were? And you have this racist, piece-of-trash argument.
This type of thinking is so embedded in conservative white culture that the NYT’s editors didn’t even notice, or care, how racist it is. Disgusting.
Douthat is making the rather common observation that racial animus in the United States creates a barrier against the creation of a strong social safety net. IE, “Barack Obama wants to take money from people like Joe the Plumber and give it the the Welfare Class.”
However, he isn’t describing this racial prejudice as a bad thing to be denounced or overcome, but as something like a state of nature to be accepted and assumed.
I had an ironic object lesson yesterday from my father, a strong and vocal supporter of his local Tea Party, who also has this deep-seated belief that Obama’s goal is to take money from people like him and give it to the “others”.
He expressed amazement that when he picked up his tax return from H&R Block last week that his Federal refund was $400 more than he actually paid in Federal Tax all last year. “I don’t know how that happens”, he said, “but I’ll take it”.
Hmmm….I figured as a loyal Tea Partier he would want to send that back to be applied to that evil deficit.
Did you tell him that it was a gift from Kenya?
No. I should have, though. That would have been a good one.
All I said to him was, “Wow, they must have your ethnicity wrong in the federal database.”
He didn’t get what I meant.
His numbers are completely off.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/NYTimes-Columnist-Douthat-dg-1886434488.html?x=0
The idea comes from the recent work of two prominent, and more liberal than conservative, economists: Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser.
They’ve done some good recent work looking at the question of why Europeans have large welfare states while America doesn’t, from the point of view of trying to find variables in social data that correlate with the variations among the proportional sizes of state’s welfare systems. There has been a lot of research going back decades on this, providing for various theories. What Alesina’s and his collaborators’ empirical research showed is that there are really only three significant variables that account for the relative sizes of welfare systems in advanced industrial economies, and they work by providing or sapping political strength for right-wing parties in national polities:
The research has also been backed up by other research from the left wing of academia (New School in NYC for example, but I can’t remember who at the moment), which shows that when people of mixed ethnicity live in close proximity to each other their support of larger welfare systems increases, but when they live apart, such as in racially segregated suburbs, support goes down. This finding is key for Alesina because it provides the theoretical justification of why his findings in the data might exist: People are basically racist, everywhere, maybe especially in Europe and Japan. Welfare is easy to do in tribally homogeneous areas. Only when people have learned to overcome their prejudices by living with diverse neighbors in places like NYC do they find the fraternal bonds that allow more support for people of different ethnicity as well.
That’s why in the US, places like racially homogeneous Minnesota and close-quartered, but diverse, New York City have more generous welfare systems than places with more segregation and higher racial diversity. It also explains the reduction in welfare generosity in places like Minnesota as the racial diversity of the population increases, resulting in more Republicans (Pawlenty, Bachman, etc.) getting elected from the white flight suburbs in a state that had been the bastion of Scandinavian welfare in the US. So there is definitely something to the argument worth paying attention to.
The right implication of this research is to seek policies which reduce segregation, especially regarding suburban sprawl and urban development patterns that allow people to settle based on economic means and preferences for types of neighbors. But the Republicans, true to form, take the perverse implication instead — scapegoating by blaming racial diversity helps them make their point about the impossibility of being generous here in America.
The other main scholar of welfare states is Jonas Pontusson, who provides a good critiques Alesina’s and Glaeser’s work. Read it. It’s good.
This has been shown before too. You saw it in how likely Dem whites were to support Obama in the primaries. Where there was a lot of mixed areas, he had support, or in a lot of lily white areas, but it was these middling-mixed areas where people were dealing with greater non-whites that he encountered more resistance among the white populace.
With the exception of Appalachia which obviously doing its own thing.