Digby makes some observations:
Turn on Fox News on any given day and you’ll be convinced that white Americans can hardly get a break these days.
The ongoing conversation about race in the U.S. has evolved in recent years to include a lament from white Americans that they are the real victims of racism. Yes, that’s a fairly bizarre interpretation of how our society operates but it’s a surprisingly widespread belief among a certain sub-group of Americans. In some ways this idea goes all the way back to the Civil War when Southern slave owners felt they were being put-upon by non-slave owners by not being allowed to expand their institution into new states and so staged the most epic hissy fit of our nation’s history. They always felt persecuted by people they believed were trying to destroy their “way of life,” but the loss of that war was the catalyst for an ongoing sense of victimization, often believed to accrue to the benefit of African-Americans. The civil rights movement and resulting federal action to deny states and cities the right to discriminate further inflamed those feelings. A part of white America believes, and has always believed, that African-Americans are at the heart of all their troubles.
I know that there is a strong continuity of anti-black feeling in this country that can be traced seamlessly back to Jim Crow and slavery when being explicitly and unapologetically anti-black was an overt, viable, and constant political position in this country.
But there was a break at some point when this open racism ceased being respectable and had to go underground. When I was growing up in the seventies, there were fights about school busing and the forced integration of school districts, but people (at least, politicians) were generally polite enough about it to avoid making their arguments in an explicitly racist way. The grievances and prejudices were nurtured, however, by the Conservative Movement. Call it “The Southern Strategy” or the “Reagan Democrats” or whatever you want, but stoking resentment of black access to quality education or black poverty or black crime became the most potent political argument that conservatives had, and it allowed them to not only make comebacks after the disasters of Goldwater and Watergate, but to literally take over control of the Republican Party. When the Democrats realized they had a problem big enough to threaten their historic dominance of Congress and to shut them out of the White House in seeming perpetuity, their answer was Welfare Reform and “Mending, not Ending, Affirmative Action.”
The most important point I want to make is that it doesn’t matter if there are some valid reasons for people to be skeptical about the effectiveness or fairness of government programs aimed at redressing past disenfranchisement and discrimination and inequality of opportunity and inequality before the law. We should expect taxpayers to be concerned about how their money is spent, and we should expect people to worry about policies that give others an advantage over them in education or business. If poverty and disparate outcomes persist in the face of programs aimed at combatting them, we should expect people to question the utility of those programs. Liberal efforts to wage a “War on Poverty” and even the playing field have not been successful across the board and should not be above critique.
But the Conservative Movement, as exemplified by Fox News, goes way beyond critique. Their political strategy/business model is based not on finding better policies to alleviate poverty, redress past wrongs, and improve the black condition in this country. Their model is based on convincing white Americans that they “can hardly get a break these days.” The model demands an increase in white racial animosity for minorities (usually blacks), along with an insistence that “secularists” are interfering in their way of life by doing things like waging a “War on Christmas.”
The main problem with this is that it involves a commitment to wage a campaign of constant 24/7 activity to make people like and trust each other less than they otherwise would.
In other words, people would be worried about the fairness of the system and the efficacy of public policy whether or not politicians told them anything. But one party/movement in this country is dedicated to telling them that they are getting screwed because they’re white, and the message remains the same even when conditions change or the specifics cannot warrant the charge. White people are told to resent and fear and mistrust minorities (particularly blacks) and secularists, and the result is that they resent and fear and mistrust those groups more. They are worse people because of the messaging they receive from the Conservative Movement. They’re angrier than they should be. They’re more afraid than they need to be. They’re more hateful than is healthy.
This is what is so morally wrong with conservatives and their movement. They make us worse people. They divide us and fuel our worst human frailties and shortcomings. They weaken us as a nation.
And it is a (pardon the pun) progressive disease. It gets worse as the years go by.
But it mainly effects the people who are most saturated with hate-messaging, which means that a gulf has opened up between most of the country, which is growing more tolerant and open-minded about issues of race, gender, and sexuality, and the Republican Party’s political base, which has begun to abandon science because they’ve been led so far away from reality in the effort to sustain their state of fear and insecurity.
So, now we’re at the point where we are beginning to see signs that openly racist messaging is on the verge of becoming respectable again. When right-wing politicians start justifying the murder of black citizens by white police officers regardless of the specifics of the case, we’re one step below the level of just calling for a system that acknowledges white supremacy as the natural and “correct” order of things. We’re just one step away from openly saying that equality before the law is not the goal, and never should be.
Recent remarks by Rep. Peter King and Rudy Giuliani, plus the openly-expressed sentiments of countless white citizens, indicates that we’re dangerously close to a situation where white supremacy is just one side of the political argument…again.
And we have the Conservative Movement to thank for that.
