With an assist from Charles Pierce, I came across an article in Vanity Fair that details allegations made in court filings against Robert Mercer by a former business associate named David Magerman. I am not surprised by Mercer’s banal views on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its effects, but I am relieved to see Mercer’s views on what’s “not important.”
In court papers filed on Friday, Magerman argues that following a pair of phone conversations in which Mercer expressed arguably racist opinions, Magerman felt obliged to inform the press about his boss’s viewpoints—and that he received verbal assurance by Renaissance C.O.O. Mark Silber that the statements he intended to make were “permissible under company policy.” Those racist opinions, according to Magerman, included comments such as: a) The United States began to go in the wrong direction after the passage of the Civl Rights Act in the 1960s; b) African Americans were doing fine in the late-1950s and early-1960s before the Civil Rights Act; c) The Civil Rights Act “infantilized” African Americas by making them dependent on government and removing any incentive to work;d) The only racist people remaining in the United States are black; and e) White people have no racial animus toward African Americans anymore, and if there is any, is it not something that the government should be concerned with.
The best part of the filing, at least to us, was that when Magerman “point[ed] out that society was segregated before the Civil Rights Act and African Americans were required to use separate and inferior schools, water fountains, and other everyday services and items,” Mercer allegedly responded that “those issues were not important.” In a subsequent phone conversation (the “white supremacist” one), Magerman claimed Mercer initially “disputed that he had said such things, although he did not actually deny saying them” and “in the course of rehashing the conversation . . . repeated many of these same views, and even cited research that allegedly supported his opinion that the Civil Rights Act harmed African Americans economically.” (A spokesman for Renaissance declined to comment.)
I’ve heard many conservatives argue that blacks were infantilized by government assistance that arose out of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. I haven’t really seen the Civil Rights Act itself blamed before. But the basic argument isn’t novel or particularly unusual in Republican circles. It’s just that they usually have the good taste not to blame equal citizenship for this infantilization. They normally stay focused on the idea that poverty assistance had a perverse and unintended effect.
Robert Mercer may be the first person I’ve heard argue that all the depredations that blacks suffered under the Jim Crow regime were “not important.” His reasoning seems to be that blacks were “doing fine” under that regime when compared to what came after the major civil rights legislation of the 1960’s.
Even if you could find some metrics to support this argument, it’s unusual to say that the Civil Rights Act was to blame.
But this is allegedly how Robert Mercer feels, and that probably explains why he funds Breitbart News and is Trump’s biggest benefactor. The view that blacks were better off when they lacked full citizenship and that their welfare had nothing to do with their ability to vote or find housing or have equal access to public accommodations, these are not mainstream Republican or conservative views. They take a noxious and highly contentious set of beliefs about government programs and put them on racist steroids.
With this set of beliefs, you could justify doing almost anything to the black community on the premise that they’d actually be better off.
I see no particular reason to believe that Steve Bannon and Donald Trump don’t share these views with Robert Mercer, and I’d like to see them deny it.
Take blacks off limits and some other class of victims will immediately be chosen.
I see no particular reason to believe that the entire Republican party doesn’t share those views.
Your statement that these are not mainstream Republican or conservative views might once have been true, it is not true now.
I disagree. How many Republicans do you know? How many people do you know who would welcome a restoration of Jim Crow laws?
‘How many people do you know who would welcome a restoration of Jim Crow laws?’
That’s a pretty extreme question if you use ‘welcome’. A more ‘on point’ question would be,
‘How many Republicans in the south would object enough to vote Democratic if Republicans started passing Jim Crow laws?’
I would argue ‘not many’. And that is because what are voter ID laws but subtle Jim Crow laws? And very few republicans object..at all…to such voter suppression.
.
It isn’t just the South anymore. How many people in Michigan or Wisconsion would vote Democratic is Scott Walker or Rick Snyder put Jim Crow laws in front of their Republican legislatures. Flint still lacks clean water. And then there’s Detroit, Pontiac, and Benton Harbor …and the remnants of Sheriff Clarke’s rule in Milwaukee County.
It is interesting that now one doesn’t have to be white to support Jim Crow actions–just think it will bring them personal advantage.
Republicans have nationalized the drive to bring back Jim Crow. So far they’ve police departments enforcing Jim Crow laws that don’t yet exist.
Pat Buchanan? the polite and dignified members of the League of the South?
I know some Republicans. mostly the old-fashioned wallet voting kind. Most aren’t racist and would be appalled at restoration of Jim Crow. They would also probably vote for a Jim Crow supporting Republican over a tax-raising Democrat.
so appalled but not appalled enough to do anything about it 🙂
Those Republicans are the kind of people who say they aren’t bigots, but will divide African Americans into the “good ones” and the “bad ones” when talking about them. Like, “I work with a black guy, but he’s one of the good ones”. You know, one of those racial outliers, in their mind.
Sadly, that view is also not strictly isolated to Republicans.
Well, I know a lot of Republicans. Not many at all would openly “welcome a restoration of Jim Crow”.
But I think the better question is, “How many self proclaimed Republicans (particularly those who say they reluctantly voted for Trump) would quietly close the curtains and shut the doors while a modern day version of Jim Crow was implemented by the leaders of their party”?
I think the answer to that question is probably, “more than we are likely to realize”. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot fussing from them about these “baby steps” that are being implemented right now with voter suppression and disenfranchisement. In fact, a whole lot of Republicans I know really kind of love that whole thing about making it hard for minorities to vote. It’s all couched the dog whistle of “safety at the ballot box”.
word in booman’s question: “openly”.
I think a not insignificant number of them would passively accept, and probably welcome, a world where they were once again a comfortable majority who ruled their world from singularly white perspective. Discomfort, and outright loathing of “the other” is just baked into their cultural DNA. I think many people severely underestimate how many closeted bigots and racists are walking among us. As a white male I hear it all the time. My county is 90% white. About 3% African American. To many people, that 3% is three too many for their tastes.
You write: “My county is 90% white. About 3% African American.”
Move.
Vote with your feet.
AG
Not anymore.
The scales have fallen from my eyes, “thanks” to Trump and his vile supporters.
I see no particular reason to believe that most white people don’t share those views. They voted for a guy who made an explicitly racist appeal. Can you deny white privilege without holding those views? I don’t think so.
My concern is that Republicans have learned that a loud defense of white majority and privilege is a winning electoral strategy when coupled with voter suppression and a campaign dehumanizing the Democrat.
Money for poors/minorities demotivates and makes them dependent. Money for the rich/our superiors increases motivation/innovation/job creation. Isn’t it obvious?
Even stating it baldly like that won’t get conservatives to see the irony or the contradiction. (Believe me, I’ve tried.) It doesn’t work because tehy believe that the poor are intrinsically underperformers; lazy etc. — whether for racial reasons or not — just like the rich are superior thoroughbreds who “got there through hard work” (never mind inheritance, luck etc.)
The whole “job creators”/”supply side” mythology is based on this Randian bullshit. There’s no getting around it. Of course we give tax breaks to the rich — they see it as akin to awarding Fulbright Grants to extraordinary people. And of course helping the poor just “encourages” their lazy behavior that made them poor in the first place.
This goes back to the Puritans. There’s no getting around it; it’s baked into the Conservative mindset. The racial elements are just an elaboration of this central belief.
It’s not easy to be optimistic these days.
But the one good thing that Trump has done is that he has flipped on the lights and we can now very clearly see all of the cockroaches that have been living in the couch as they scatter around.
All of these people have been hiding in plain site. Now there is no denying they exist and there may be some room for progress.
Trump’s inadvertent achievement, in my hopes, is that he sets them all on fire. Because that’s what Trump does – he breaks things.
I’m actually glad this is starting to come out, because I’ve felt for awhile that the left gives rich people a pass on racism charges. You see this in ways subtle and not subtle. One way is the idea that the rich themselves aren’t really racist, but are using racism to attract votes to receive a tax cut. Once one reaches a certain income level it seems, reason and self-interest and greed kick in and one is exempt from racism. Robert Mercer did not fund Steve Bannon because he’s after a tax cut and deregulation of the hedge fund industry. He wants to use his money to promote racial division much in the same way Bill Gates wants to use his money to fight diseases.
Mercer is 71. He likes to sue people he thinks have over charged him and he is sued by people who think he has under paid them. Sound familiar?
I’ve heard that perspective before, on several occasions, that the passage of the Civil Rights Act actually infantilized or made African Americans dependent on government. Its not unusual.
In fact, you could go back to the early days post Reconstruction, and read of how black people supposedly had the minds of children and needed the “strong hand” of white patriarchy as provided by Jim Crow. And that this was necessary to blunt the excesses of Reconstruction because otherwise, like children, freed blacks couldn’t be responsible for themselves. That’s what Mercer is arguing about the Civil Rights Act, what some historians refer to as the Second Reconstruction.
This is the same perspective that underpins the idea that if you are black and succeed professionally it must be because of affirmative action, otherwise its simply not possible for a black person to reach a level of achievement that whites routinely achieve. I am a technology professional who happens to be black, and I can’t count the number of times this has been expressed to me in some manner. This is why Trump and others demanding to see Obama’s college transcripts, with the idea that it just wasn’t possible that, as a black man, he could have achieved all that he did, without some “help,” resonated to the extent it did with the bigoted birther crowd, today’s Trump supporters.
I think if you ask, most black people will tell you this view is not unusual, and thus one would not be wrong, at least anecdotally, to say that the view is “common;” its just not something that is routinely expressed openly. And to be frank, based on my own experience and that of my peers, many whites hold this view, but understand that this is not something to be openly expressed in “polite society,” if you want to maintain the persona of being a “good person.”
What Trump has done is made it acceptable, at least in the eyes of some, that it is now “okay” to openly say these types of things. You can be bigoted and still be “very fine people,” as Trump said of the Charlottesville nazis. And this is his value to the Mercers, Bannons et al, who want to return to a time of open, justified white supremacy.
Interesting perspective about who got infantilized and when. To the manor born…has traditionally been infantilizing. Hedrick Smith two decades ago in a PBS special about globalization and the US economy made the point that US CEOs to a person tended to be infantilized by the deference and services presented them. The current President is an extreme version of the phenomenon, likely burdened with what used to be called senility.
And blacks were better off before slavery was abolished, too. It is all the same argument. Slavery, Jim Crow, James Crow, esquire. The fundamental moral underpinning for all the attitudes is white supremacy.
Phil Robertson of “Duck Dynasty” (now much lionized at conservative fora such as the “Values Voters Summit”) seems to share the view that African-Americans were happier and better off before the civil-rights era:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/19/phil-robertson-black-people_n_4473474.html
Mere projection of Robertson’s experience.
Ha. Giving freedom to blacks just gave them the ability to harm themselves, I guess. Rope to lynch themselves with, as it were.
If we were to be charitable-not-charitable to Mercer, you might think his ideal is to take rights away from all plebes, thereby putting all of us non-plutocrats on equal footing with pre-civil-rights-act black Americans. That would make him kinda not racist, right?
He is most likely the reason trump is pushing us to a nuclear war. I recently read that Mercer has a very nice fallout shelter/bunker made for a possible nuclear war; and, that he believes that we (he) can survive a nuclear holocaust. Going with that, he also believes that radiation is good for us. Wonderful. Stupid rich men seem to be a very serious problem for this country. Can’t give you a link because it was in a magazine in a doctor’s office.
Although it doesn’t mention a bunker, I think you may be referring to Jane Mayer’s March NY-er portrait of Robert Mercer.
The nuclear stuff:
“Another onetime senior employee at Renaissance recalls hearing Mercer downplay the dangers posed by nuclear war. Mercer, speaking of the atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, argued that, outside of the immediate blast zones, the radiation actually made Japanese citizens healthier. The National Academy of Sciences has found no evidence to support this notion. Nevertheless, according to the onetime employee, Mercer, who is a proponent of nuclear power, “was very excited about the idea, and felt that it meant nuclear accidents weren’t such a big deal.”
… Arthur Robinson–the biochemist, sheep rancher, and climate-change denialist. The Mercers became his devoted supporters after reading Access to Energy, an offbeat scientific newsletter that he writes. The family has given at least $1.6 million in donations to Robinson’s Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. Some of the money was used to buy freezers in which Robinson is storing some fourteen thousand samples of human urine. Robinson has said that, by studying the urine, he will find new ways of extending the human life span.
Robinson holds a degree in chemistry from Caltech, but his work is not respected in most scientific circles. (The Oregon senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat, has called Robinson an “extremist kook.”) Robinson appears to be the source of Robert Mercer’s sanguine view of nuclear radiation: in 1986, Robinson co-authored a book suggesting that the vast majority of Americans would survive “an all-out atomic attack on the United States.”
Also important to note:
“Magerman told me, “Bob believes that human beings have no inherent value other than how much money they make. A cat has value, he’s said, because it provides pleasure to humans. But if someone is on welfare they have negative value. If he earns a thousand times more than a schoolteacher, then he’s a thousand times more valuable.” Magerman added, “He thinks society is upside down–that government helps the weak people get strong, and makes the strong people weak by taking their money away, through taxes.” He said that this mind-set was typical of “instant billionaires” in finance, who “have no stake in society,” unlike the industrialists of the past, who “built real things.”
This might also be of importance:
“Renaissance’s profits were further enhanced by a controversial tax maneuver, which became the subject of a 2014 Senate inquiry. According to Senate investigators, Renaissance had presented countless short-term trades as long-term ones, improperly avoiding some $6.8 billion in taxes. The Senate didn’t allege criminality, but it concluded that Renaissance had committed “abuses.” The I.R.S. demanded payment. (Renaissance defended its practices, and the matter remains contested, leaving a very sensitive material issue pending before the Trump Administration.)”
In 1959,historian Stanley Elkins published his thesis that slavery infantilized African-Americans, popularly known as the “Sambo” thesis.
Nothing new under the sun, I suppose
FWIW, I’ve viewed most Republicans as racist since forever (or at least since the days of Nixon).
There’s been no secret about Lee Atwater’s Southern Strategy, and that wasn’t just about Southern Republicans. It’s about All of Them, Katie.
A lot of prominent Republicans are known racists, anti-Semites, etc. Frankly, growing up a LOT of the wealthier Republicans I knew via my family (didn’t know lots of rich people but knew some) were VERY outspoken racists behind closed doors at their lily white Country Clubs where No Jews need apply.
In my younger years it seemed to me that the middle class Republicans that I knew were more circumspect and gracious about their racism than their wealthier counterparts, but not by a lot. Kids in my high school used the “n” word routinely. I heard all kinds of racist jokes.
There seemed to be a phase in the ’70s when things got better, but that’s when Nixon’s evil minions went to town with the Southern Strategy.
Frankly, not much has changed, imo.
Yes, I, personally, have always viewed ALL Republicans as bigoted, racist, Anti-Semitic, sexist people.
Trump just took things to a newer more Nazified level is all. Am I surprised by this? NO.
It’s really revolting, but color me utterly unsurprised. These people had parents and grandparents who were racist @zzholes, and then they “enjoyed” 40 years of Fox/Hate Radio/”Prosperity” Mega Church brainwashing.
This is the logical outcome.
Trump reminds me SO MUCH of a sibling’s father-in-law. EXACTLY the same kind of weathly SOB jerk racist sexist Anti-Semitic entitled white POS.
P.S. The Mercers equally don’t surprise me. Again I’ve known some wealthier Republicans. Why they believe that nothing will touch their lily white posteriers – including a nuclear holocaust – is beyond my comprehension. But most of the wealthy people I knew (and they are the super-duper mega wealthy) certainly seemed to live in a sort of dream world of magical thinking that encompassed such notions as:
etc.
The Mercers seem unhinged but not all that different from some other rich people I know. Something about money and greed and the teachings of prophet called Hey-Zeus, whom these white people claim to follow but pay scant attention to.
And finally, encouraging bigotry and racism is one of the easier divide and conquer mechanisms out there.
That’s all the GOP does: divide and conquer.
Well that’s mostly all politics is about.
Dems aren’t better by much, but the GOP is particularly venal. But what they do is very effective. And the Ds seem unable to counteract it. I wonder why.
Maybe money and serving the bigoted mega-wealthy has something to do with that.
Then it can be argued that the GOP and it’s numerous racist members have been infantilized by voicing their racist views via the 1st Amendment protections, could it not?
The War on Poverty was mainly stimulated by high levels of poverty in Appalachia which has very few minority inhabitants. To the extent that the War on Poverty achieved success it was mainly white people that benefitted.
“His reasoning seems to be that blacks were “doing fine” under that regime when compared to what came after the major civil rights legislation of the 1960’s.”
Which sounds remarkably similar to what these same types say about the end of slavery.
Where’s Jonathan Swift when we need him? I think I’m about ready to start talking about eating children…