I
spent a depressing amount of time this weekend trying to think up a
scenario in which someone might say the following without being
motivated, to at least some degree, by malign intent.
“We have got
this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not
working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or
learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real
culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”
What I came up with was strained and unlikely, but troubling if true.
In
case you slept through last week, the person who said this was
congressman and one-time GOP vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan. It
ignited a fairly heated debate over whether he was intentionally
trafficking in racial code words to pander to white conservatives. Ryan
claims he spoke inarticulately and was thus misunderstood. For
proponents of the dog-whistle theory, the fact that Ryan cited Charles
Murray, author of “The Bell Curve,” was the smoking gun.
For my
part, I don’t think they need a smoking gun, because Occam’s razor does
all the dirty work. You can take Murray completely out of the equation
and the likelihood that Ryan wasn’t at least subconsciously playing to
the prejudices of resentful or racist whites is pretty low.
But let’s assume Ryan’s playing it straight, and his defenders, like Slate’s Dave Weigel, are correct when they
argue
that this is just how Ryan and other conservatives “think about
welfare’s effects on social norms.” If that’s true, it’s actually a
bigger problem for the right. If Ryan was even a little bit aware of how
people would interpret his remarks, or understood the reaction to them
when it exploded online, we could just say that some conservatives want
to play the Southern Strategy at least one more round, and leave it at
that. Close the book on this controversy, without drawing any larger
conclusions about the state of conservative self-deception.
But if
Ryan genuinely stumbled heedless into a racial tinderbox then it
suggests he, and most likely many other conservatives, has fully
internalized a framing of social politics that was
deliberately crafted
to appeal to white racists without regressing to the uncouth language
of explicit racism, and written its origins out of the history. If
that’s the case it augurs poorly for those in the movement who are
trying to broaden the Republican Party’s appeal, because it’s easier to
convince people to abandon a poor tactic than to unlearn rotten
ideology.
In
his 1984 book “The Two Party South,” political scientist Alexander
Lamis quoted a conservative operative later revealed to be Ronald Reagan
confidant Lee Atwater, who traced the evolution.
”You
start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N—-r, n—-r, n—-r,’” Atwater explained.
“By 1968 you can’t say ‘n—-r’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say
stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re
getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and
all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a
byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And
subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m
saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are
doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me —
because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much
more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more
abstract than ‘N—-r, n—-r.”’
Treating
intergenerational laziness of inner-city men as established truth, and
bemoaning the ways social spending programs supposedly nurture that
“culture,” blends seamlessly into Atwater’s framework.
Weigel
interprets the fact that Charles Murray has lately softened his claims
as exculpation for Ryan and other conservatives who cite him. But
Murray’s just following a social Darwinist’s rendition of the trajectory
Atwater traced. I suspect both men are wiser to their intentions than
their apologists give them credit for. There are ways to promote
conservative social policies that aren’t remotely racialized — they just
don’t ignite the passions of resentful white people in a politically
meaningful way. If I’m wrong, though, conservatives better hope the
party doesn’t nominate Ryan or any like-minded thinkers in 2016.
A quick point of trivia: I first learned about Atwater’s comments years ago, in
this New York Times column
by Bob Herbert questioning why anybody was surprised to hear GOP
education secretary-cum-talk radio host Bill Bennett say, “I do know
that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that
were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in this
country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible,
ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate
would go down.”
Guess whose program Ryan
was a guest on when he stepped in it last week?
Brian Beutler is Salon's political writer. Email him at bbeutler@salon.com and follow him on Twitter at
.
No comments:
Post a Comment