This column is a joke. Waldmann has a point about folks like Beck and Limbaugh making some outrageous statements. But them Waldmann loses his argument.
"But when you come to that town hall and shout 'I want my America back!' through tears, you aren't talking about health care at all."
Waldmann is making an assumption that this is a racist statement. Its not.
"Some have reacted to policies they oppose by reviving a neo-Confederate claim that states don't have to abide by laws passed by the federal government if they don't like them. These are the "tenthers," who believe that the tenth amendment makes virtually everything the federal government does unconstitutional, from Medicare to building interstate highways to regulating airlines. So long as the wrong man's in the White House, that is."
Tricky, tricky. Waldmann makes an argument here with a slight of hand. He associates "tenthers" with the Confederacy. Since most people associate the Confederacy with racism, Waldmann is able to make the claim tenther=racist. This is incorrect. Though the Confederacy was racist. Its reason for seccession and John C. Calhoun's calls for nullification were rooted in the desire for state's rights. Even if Waldmann wants to make the historical arguent of associating tenthers with racists, it doesn't work based on historical fact. Few historians worth their salt, if any, still argue the Civil War was about slavery.
"It goes on. When George W. Bush... ...And members of Congress decide that shouting out insults during presidential addresses is now within the bounds of decorum."
There is nothing explicitly racist in this paragraph. The fears can be equally attributed to a fear of socialism. (Whether that is a realistic fear is another issue).
Waldmann virtually admits its not about racism:
"In 2009, being in the political minority isn't just a drag -- it's cause to discard your commitment to the system as we've known it."
The anger expressed toward Obama isn't necessarily racist in nature. Its highly likely that the anger toward Obama has more to do with that fact that this country has come to identify itself along Republican and Democratic lines. Whatever the other party does it auotmatically bad. In other words, party loyalty is driving the scorn, not racism.
That concludes my refutation of Waldmann's article. but I have a few randomn thoughts that I think further show the attacks on Obama are not driven primarily by racism:
Birthers are not necessarily racists. They are often party loyalists. Are they really any different than the people back in 2000 who claimed to high heaven Bush wasn't "their President"? Are the birthers really any less wacky than the 9-11 truthers?
Are Democrats really an less racist with voices like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton?
Obama carried the state of North Carolina. Maybe NC isn't Mississippi, but its still part of the South. If Southern Republicans were so racist, then how did Obama carry the state?
One more thought: The American reaction to Obamacare hasn't been appreciably different that the one to Hillarycare 15 years ago. Americans certainly weren't driven by racism then, so why would things be any different now?
Its reason for seccession and John C. Calhoun's calls for nullification were rooted in the desire for state's rights.
The same John C. Calhoun who argued for slavery as a good, rather than a least-of-all-evils scenario? Sorry, that is really unpersuasive.
"States' rights," like human rights, isn't a concept that exists in a vacuum. When Department of State officials talk about other countries' "human rights" violations, they mean, depending on the country, that dictators shouldn't imprison or kill political dissidents, that women who want to should be able to be educated, that killing someone because they belong to a different ethnic group or religion is a really bad thing. There aren't many people who get passionate about "rights" without specific examples of violations to motivate them.
In a slightly different arena, Rotary International doesn't get people motivated to help with polio eradication efforts by arguing abstractly that polio is a disease, disease is bad, and we should eliminate it if we can. It circulates photographs of children who have been crippled by polio, and children in polio-infested areas who are healthy because they received a polio vaccine in polio-infested areas. (Brief plug: they're down to a couple thousand new cases per year in four different countries. They're doing awesome work.) It's not the abstract principle so much as the facts on the ground that motivate people to action.
In the context of the Civil War, the states' rights issue boils down to the question of "The states' rights to do what, exactly?" Why was emancipation the breaking point? Owning slaves is pretty much the only explanation on the table, unless you want to argue that there were enough people who believed on principle that treating an entire category of people as subhuman was less of an evil than the federal government telling them not to. This is possible, I suppose, though I'll defer to Streak and his professional knowledge of U.S. history. I'm buggered if I can see how this "principle" portrays politically active Civil War-era Southerners in a better light than the usual explanation that they were people who were looking after their economic self-interest (as all populations tend to, more or less).
I'm not pretending that the North treated the South equitably after the war, nor am I trying to say all white Southerners are the same. I think those are distinct issues. But I'm puzzled about how anyone could list the causes of secession without including the economic dependence of the Antebellum South's economy on slave labor.
Yeah, my first response was more of the passive aggressive kind, as I was kind of pissed off. Actually, I was rather stunned that LB decided to say that the Civil War wasn't about slavery. Now, if you were to argue that the North didn't fight the war over slavery, or that the North certainly wasn't interested in racial equality, then we would be in agreement. I usually end up telling my students that the North was more anti-South than anti-slavery, though that changed slightly as the 1850s rolled along. But you should read the Southern declarations of secession. They certainly thought it was about slavery.
Now, about the current debate. I have said repeatedly that not all disagreements with Obama center around race. (Btw, great op-ed by John McWhorter (conservative African American) on NPR yesterday.) I am not convinced at all that the birthers are not motivated by race. They see Obama as an "other" as "illegitimately American," and that would be a harder case to make with a white President.
"Are they really any different than the people back in 2000 who claimed to high heaven Bush wasn't "their President"?"
Yeah, I think they are. I disagreed with those liberals who said that, but the Florida election was not terribly convincing. Add to that the election disputes from 2004 and there were some legitimate concerns about voter fraud. Many of those liberals believed, and I agreed with them on this, that Bush had no intention of serving those of us who didn't vote for him, and even some of his supporters claimed that he only had to lead those on his side. I thought he was our President--all of us--but he rarely acted like it and was spectacularly bad at the job. The tenthers seem to have combined this love of Southern history with a claim that they don't have to obey or respect a liberal President. I heard my liberal friends talk of moving to Canada. Conservatives seem to think they simply don't have to respect a liberal president. Not sure you really want to be in that company either.
"Are the birthers really any less wacky than the 9-11 truthers?"
No, they aren't. And just because the 9-11 truthers were not motivated by race AND were ridiculous an wacky, does not follow that the equally ridiculous and wacky birther movement is not somewhat racist.
McWhorter (linked above) argued that it wasn't worth arguing about the racist motivations (or not) of people like Joe Wilson and Glenn Beck. I agree with him to a point. But when you see people like Rush Limbaugh openly urge whites to not only distrust blacks but to blame Obama for it I start to be a little concerned. The crazy left in this country is prone to angry rants on street corners. The angry right in this country shoots people. The racist right (and yes, there are certainly racists on the left as well) also likes to get violent. Playing with this kind of fire, and the Republican party coddling this kind of fire and outrage is unbelievable.
Will we see a grownup Republican stand up and criticize Rush over this last bit? I won't hold my breath. Unfortunately, while the right claims (and sometimes correctly) that the left plays racial politics for political gain, the right also plays politics (southern strategy) for even more cynical and destructive purposes.
Time for the Republicans to stand up and be counted, and to follow William F. Buckley's old charge that the white racists needed to get out. Same for the torture apologists.
Forgive me. I allowed my emotions to get the better of me yesterday. I was frustrated by Waldmann's article which I think basically casts all of the recent opposition to Obama in a racially tinged light.
What I meant in saying that the Civil War wasn't about slavery, was that it wasn't a war about the ideological concept of slavery as such, drawn along the lines of good and evil the way I was taught in 5th grade.
My purpose in saying this was that Waldmann equates modern day tenthers with the Confederacy. Since the Confederacy is seen as racist, Waldmann makes the argument that tenthers have a racist tinge to them. Waldmann is wrong to make that association, and I will not back down from that point.
I tried to argue against his point by oversimplying the cause of the Civil War and shift it exclusively away from slavery to the less racially tinged concept of states rights thereby negating his association of Confederacy with racist, thus breaking his tenther=racist argument. I made that point with a straight face because I do not think the Civil War was predicated exclusively along racist ideologies.
I should have done the easier thing and simply said, you can be a tenther without being a racist.
Streak, I gather that you are a historian based on your and Leighton's comments. I apologize for insulting you.
Yeah, and it dawned on me after I wrote my comment this morning that you would not necessarily know my profession. It used to be in my profile, but I removed it some time back. It isn't something you would necessarily know, so there was no reason for me to take personal insult. Thanks for the nice note, however.
I don't disagree that people can be a "tenther" and not racist, and can even see your point about Waldman connecting the two. But I am not convinced that racism is as absent from many of these discussions as you suggest.
McWhorter suggests that it is not terribly useful to obsess on the motives of some of these people. And to a degree, I can see that. I am afraid, I guess, of the deep rage that seems to be percolating under the right. As I have pointed out to many of my friends, I didn't necessarily distrust Bush immediately. I didn't care for him, and didn't see him as a deep thinker or thoughtful leader, but I didn't automatically discount what he said or assume he was lying to me. That took time and actual experience with the disconnect between his words and actions. But the right has jumped the shark almost immediately, and sees Obama as a deep threat to the American system--almost without any grounds at all.
I understand concerns about the "public option" and even the stimulus package (which appears to have done a decent job, btw). But neither represent the threat to our republic that these Town Hallers suggest. So why the rage?
Here's a clarification that may (or may not) be useful. There are a lot of culture war foot soldiers on the left who use "racist" to mean "I'm not going to listen to anything he/she has to say." The usage is kind of like the dittohead use of "traitor" during the Bush years to describe critics of the President (though "racist" doesn't have connotations of prosecution and execution).
But there's also a way to use "racist" as a rebuttable charge, in a way that actually communicates something. I use it to describe people who may not have any personal animosity toward specific non-white people, but who for no other reason are suspicious of people of a certain race being in positions of responsibility or authority. I think it's possible to disagree with Obama's policies and take a tone like Brad Delong does, who longs for the return of a sensible bipartisan center. Racists (and extreme partisans) who disagree with Obama's policies don't just disagree--they're absolutely furious that he dares to enact the policies he does.
I haven't thought much about how useful it is to be really careful about analyzing the motivations of agitators like Joe Wilson. But I agree with Streak that the anger and the rage of the right is a growing problem that we need to talk about in some way. Whether exploring charges of racism is the most effective way, I'm not sure. I do know that I would like to be able to talk to my whole family again. I could talk to everyone during the Bush years, even though it was strained--many of them are devoted Fox News viewers. But I'm not enraged about health care reform, so I can't talk to a good many of them at all. It's not even the position I take. It's that I'm not angry. I don't know what happened, but I know it's bad.
Anyway, sorry for the digression. I've got to head in to work.
I agree that it is impossible to separate slavery from the 10nt Amendment issues at that time and one can also make a compelling argument that state's rights were the major force behind resistance to desegregation.
That being said, it is too bad that this clouds any discussion on the 10th amendment (and the 9th Amendment, to some degree). For one thing, the State (and states) does not have rights. They have powers and duties. In the case of the federal government, those powers and duties are enumerated in the Constitution. States also have powers that are dictated by their own constitutions, common law, and tradition. Throughout the history of this country, the balance has shifted a great deal from limiting the Federal Government, to many people believing that there is no limit to the power it should have.
In some cases, this hasn't been a bad thing and the resulting Federal legislation has corrected some serious wrongs. In other cases, such as Terry Schiavo, it has just resulted in bullying. Federal drug laws are also a good example. Some states passed measures to decriminalize certain drugs or to allow for medical use, but the Federal Government has said nope and has thrown people in prison and has used no-knock warrants to terrorize suspects.
I guess my point is that it is unfortunate that state's rights has so much baggage, as the Left has some legitimate claims to abuse from the Federal Government. This shouldn't be a partisan issue.
8 comments:
This column is a joke. Waldmann has a point about folks like Beck and Limbaugh making some outrageous statements. But them Waldmann loses his argument.
"But when you come to that town hall and shout 'I want my America back!' through tears, you aren't talking about health care at all."
Waldmann is making an assumption that this is a racist statement. Its not.
"Some have reacted to policies they oppose by reviving a neo-Confederate claim that states don't have to abide by laws passed by the federal government if they don't like them. These are the "tenthers," who believe that the tenth amendment makes virtually everything the federal government does unconstitutional, from Medicare to building interstate highways to regulating airlines. So long as the wrong man's in the White House, that is."
Tricky, tricky. Waldmann makes an argument here with a slight of hand. He associates "tenthers" with the Confederacy. Since most people associate the Confederacy with racism, Waldmann is able to make the claim tenther=racist. This is incorrect. Though the Confederacy was racist. Its reason for seccession and John C. Calhoun's calls for nullification were rooted in the desire for state's rights. Even if Waldmann wants to make the historical arguent of associating tenthers with racists, it doesn't work based on historical fact. Few historians worth their salt, if any, still argue the Civil War was about slavery.
"It goes on. When George W. Bush... ...And members of Congress decide that shouting out insults during presidential addresses is now within the bounds of decorum."
There is nothing explicitly racist in this paragraph. The fears can be equally attributed to a fear of socialism. (Whether that is a realistic fear is another issue).
Waldmann virtually admits its not about racism:
"In 2009, being in the political minority isn't just a drag -- it's cause to discard your commitment to the system as we've known it."
The anger expressed toward Obama isn't necessarily racist in nature. Its highly likely that the anger toward Obama has more to do with that fact that this country has come to identify itself along Republican and Democratic lines. Whatever the other party does it auotmatically bad. In other words, party loyalty is driving the scorn, not racism.
That concludes my refutation of Waldmann's article. but I have a few randomn thoughts that I think further show the attacks on Obama are not driven primarily by racism:
Birthers are not necessarily racists. They are often party loyalists. Are they really any different than the people back in 2000 who claimed to high heaven Bush wasn't "their President"? Are the birthers really any less wacky than the 9-11 truthers?
Are Democrats really an less racist with voices like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton?
Obama carried the state of North Carolina. Maybe NC isn't Mississippi, but its still part of the South. If Southern Republicans were so racist, then how did Obama carry the state?
One more thought: The American reaction to Obamacare hasn't been appreciably different that the one to Hillarycare 15 years ago. Americans certainly weren't driven by racism then, so why would things be any different now?
Wow. I must not be a historian worth his salt. And I must not understand the profession or the historiography at all.
I give. White southerners are not racist at all.
Its reason for seccession and John C. Calhoun's calls for nullification were rooted in the desire for state's rights.
The same John C. Calhoun who argued for slavery as a good, rather than a least-of-all-evils scenario? Sorry, that is really unpersuasive.
"States' rights," like human rights, isn't a concept that exists in a vacuum. When Department of State officials talk about other countries' "human rights" violations, they mean, depending on the country, that dictators shouldn't imprison or kill political dissidents, that women who want to should be able to be educated, that killing someone because they belong to a different ethnic group or religion is a really bad thing. There aren't many people who get passionate about "rights" without specific examples of violations to motivate them.
In a slightly different arena, Rotary International doesn't get people motivated to help with polio eradication efforts by arguing abstractly that polio is a disease, disease is bad, and we should eliminate it if we can. It circulates photographs of children who have been crippled by polio, and children in polio-infested areas who are healthy because they received a polio vaccine in polio-infested areas. (Brief plug: they're down to a couple thousand new cases per year in four different countries. They're doing awesome work.) It's not the abstract principle so much as the facts on the ground that motivate people to action.
In the context of the Civil War, the states' rights issue boils down to the question of "The states' rights to do what, exactly?" Why was emancipation the breaking point? Owning slaves is pretty much the only explanation on the table, unless you want to argue that there were enough people who believed on principle that treating an entire category of people as subhuman was less of an evil than the federal government telling them not to. This is possible, I suppose, though I'll defer to Streak and his professional knowledge of U.S. history. I'm buggered if I can see how this "principle" portrays politically active Civil War-era Southerners in a better light than the usual explanation that they were people who were looking after their economic self-interest (as all populations tend to, more or less).
I'm not pretending that the North treated the South equitably after the war, nor am I trying to say all white Southerners are the same. I think those are distinct issues. But I'm puzzled about how anyone could list the causes of secession without including the economic dependence of the Antebellum South's economy on slave labor.
Yeah, my first response was more of the passive aggressive kind, as I was kind of pissed off. Actually, I was rather stunned that LB decided to say that the Civil War wasn't about slavery. Now, if you were to argue that the North didn't fight the war over slavery, or that the North certainly wasn't interested in racial equality, then we would be in agreement. I usually end up telling my students that the North was more anti-South than anti-slavery, though that changed slightly as the 1850s rolled along. But you should read the Southern declarations of secession. They certainly thought it was about slavery.
Now, about the current debate. I have said repeatedly that not all disagreements with Obama center around race. (Btw, great op-ed by John McWhorter (conservative African American) on NPR yesterday.) I am not convinced at all that the birthers are not motivated by race. They see Obama as an "other" as "illegitimately American," and that would be a harder case to make with a white President.
"Are they really any different than the people back in 2000 who claimed to high heaven Bush wasn't "their President"?"
Yeah, I think they are. I disagreed with those liberals who said that, but the Florida election was not terribly convincing. Add to that the election disputes from 2004 and there were some legitimate concerns about voter fraud. Many of those liberals believed, and I agreed with them on this, that Bush had no intention of serving those of us who didn't vote for him, and even some of his supporters claimed that he only had to lead those on his side. I thought he was our President--all of us--but he rarely acted like it and was spectacularly bad at the job. The tenthers seem to have combined this love of Southern history with a claim that they don't have to obey or respect a liberal President. I heard my liberal friends talk of moving to Canada. Conservatives seem to think they simply don't have to respect a liberal president. Not sure you really want to be in that company either.
"Are the birthers really any less wacky than the 9-11 truthers?"
No, they aren't. And just because the 9-11 truthers were not motivated by race AND were ridiculous an wacky, does not follow that the equally ridiculous and wacky birther movement is not somewhat racist.
McWhorter (linked above) argued that it wasn't worth arguing about the racist motivations (or not) of people like Joe Wilson and Glenn Beck. I agree with him to a point. But when you see people like Rush Limbaugh openly urge whites to not only distrust blacks but to blame Obama for it I start to be a little concerned. The crazy left in this country is prone to angry rants on street corners. The angry right in this country shoots people. The racist right (and yes, there are certainly racists on the left as well) also likes to get violent. Playing with this kind of fire, and the Republican party coddling this kind of fire and outrage is unbelievable.
Will we see a grownup Republican stand up and criticize Rush over this last bit? I won't hold my breath. Unfortunately, while the right claims (and sometimes correctly) that the left plays racial politics for political gain, the right also plays politics (southern strategy) for even more cynical and destructive purposes.
Time for the Republicans to stand up and be counted, and to follow William F. Buckley's old charge that the white racists needed to get out. Same for the torture apologists.
We shall see.
Forgive me. I allowed my emotions to get the better of me yesterday. I was frustrated by Waldmann's article which I think basically casts all of the recent opposition to Obama in a racially tinged light.
What I meant in saying that the Civil War wasn't about slavery, was that it wasn't a war about the ideological concept of slavery as such, drawn along the lines of good and evil the way I was taught in 5th grade.
My purpose in saying this was that Waldmann equates modern day tenthers with the Confederacy. Since the Confederacy is seen as racist, Waldmann makes the argument that tenthers have a racist tinge to them. Waldmann is wrong to make that association, and I will not back down from that point.
I tried to argue against his point by oversimplying the cause of the Civil War and shift it exclusively away from slavery to the less racially tinged concept of states rights thereby negating his association of Confederacy with racist, thus breaking his tenther=racist argument. I made that point with a straight face because I do not think the Civil War was predicated exclusively along racist ideologies.
I should have done the easier thing and simply said, you can be a tenther without being a racist.
Streak, I gather that you are a historian based on your and Leighton's comments. I apologize for insulting you.
Yeah, and it dawned on me after I wrote my comment this morning that you would not necessarily know my profession. It used to be in my profile, but I removed it some time back. It isn't something you would necessarily know, so there was no reason for me to take personal insult. Thanks for the nice note, however.
I don't disagree that people can be a "tenther" and not racist, and can even see your point about Waldman connecting the two. But I am not convinced that racism is as absent from many of these discussions as you suggest.
McWhorter suggests that it is not terribly useful to obsess on the motives of some of these people. And to a degree, I can see that. I am afraid, I guess, of the deep rage that seems to be percolating under the right. As I have pointed out to many of my friends, I didn't necessarily distrust Bush immediately. I didn't care for him, and didn't see him as a deep thinker or thoughtful leader, but I didn't automatically discount what he said or assume he was lying to me. That took time and actual experience with the disconnect between his words and actions. But the right has jumped the shark almost immediately, and sees Obama as a deep threat to the American system--almost without any grounds at all.
I understand concerns about the "public option" and even the stimulus package (which appears to have done a decent job, btw). But neither represent the threat to our republic that these Town Hallers suggest. So why the rage?
Here's a clarification that may (or may not) be useful. There are a lot of culture war foot soldiers on the left who use "racist" to mean "I'm not going to listen to anything he/she has to say." The usage is kind of like the dittohead use of "traitor" during the Bush years to describe critics of the President (though "racist" doesn't have connotations of prosecution and execution).
But there's also a way to use "racist" as a rebuttable charge, in a way that actually communicates something. I use it to describe people who may not have any personal animosity toward specific non-white people, but who for no other reason are suspicious of people of a certain race being in positions of responsibility or authority. I think it's possible to disagree with Obama's policies and take a tone like Brad Delong does, who longs for the return of a sensible bipartisan center. Racists (and extreme partisans) who disagree with Obama's policies don't just disagree--they're absolutely furious that he dares to enact the policies he does.
I haven't thought much about how useful it is to be really careful about analyzing the motivations of agitators like Joe Wilson. But I agree with Streak that the anger and the rage of the right is a growing problem that we need to talk about in some way. Whether exploring charges of racism is the most effective way, I'm not sure. I do know that I would like to be able to talk to my whole family again. I could talk to everyone during the Bush years, even though it was strained--many of them are devoted Fox News viewers. But I'm not enraged about health care reform, so I can't talk to a good many of them at all. It's not even the position I take. It's that I'm not angry. I don't know what happened, but I know it's bad.
Anyway, sorry for the digression. I've got to head in to work.
I agree that it is impossible to separate slavery from the 10nt Amendment issues at that time and one can also make a compelling argument that state's rights were the major force behind resistance to desegregation.
That being said, it is too bad that this clouds any discussion on the 10th amendment (and the 9th Amendment, to some degree). For one thing, the State (and states) does not have rights. They have powers and duties. In the case of the federal government, those powers and duties are enumerated in the Constitution. States also have powers that are dictated by their own constitutions, common law, and tradition. Throughout the history of this country, the balance has shifted a great deal from limiting the Federal Government, to many people believing that there is no limit to the power it should have.
In some cases, this hasn't been a bad thing and the resulting Federal legislation has corrected some serious wrongs. In other cases, such as Terry Schiavo, it has just resulted in bullying. Federal drug laws are also a good example. Some states passed measures to decriminalize certain drugs or to allow for medical use, but the Federal Government has said nope and has thrown people in prison and has used no-knock warrants to terrorize suspects.
I guess my point is that it is unfortunate that state's rights has so much baggage, as the Left has some legitimate claims to abuse from the Federal Government. This shouldn't be a partisan issue.
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