The New Republic is one of the more sensible Democratic-leaning publications (of course, it doesn’t have a lot of competition), and Noam Scheiber, a senior editor, is generally a sensible, moderate writer. Thus it is doubly disappointing that his article on the early rounds of the John Roberts nomination debate, “Racial Justice,” is so conventionally liberal, and thus off target.
Scheiber is absolutely correct when he writes that, “[t]o the extent that Roberts’s nomination has been defined in the early going, it is civil rights issues that have defined it,” but I think he gets the definition wrong. “Roberts,” he writes, “comes across as nothing if not conservative in the thousands of pages of documents he wrote as a Reagan-era legal adviser,” but, he continues, revealing how conventionally liberal even sensible liberalism is these days,
A careful reading of the memos doesn’t evoke the mind of a racist. It evokes a principled, if rock-ribbed, conservatism–someone devoted to the belief that government does more harm than good when it relies on ambitious means to defend civil rights.
The unacknowledged, revealing assumption here is that “to defend civil rights” one must favor (or at the very least, one must have favored) race-based busing and racial preferences, the very things Roberts, the “rock-ribbed” conservative, opposed.
There’s more in the same vein.
Roberts favored a highly restrictive interpretation of the Voting Rights Act. He concluded that Congress had the authority to pass so-called court-stripping legislation in order to prevent courts from imposing busing as a remedy for segregation. He took a dim view of a Justice Department decision granting restitution to people discouraged from applying to jobs for reasons related to race. He argued against an affirmative action program on the grounds that it led to the hiring of unqualified candidates.
In the early ’80s, Roberts’s positions on these issues were not only popular among conservatives, they were central to what it meant to be a Reaganite, both politically and ideologically.
According to Scheiber, these are not so much principled positions as psychological problems, “resentments” produced by ;”a reaction to the perceived liberal excesses of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly on matters of civil rights.” Republicans won, it follows, because of
the resentment that blue-collar, white Democrats harbored toward welfare, busing, and affirmative action.
But, Scheiber is happy to report, times have changed.
Bill Clinton helped defuse race as a political issue across the Northeast and Midwest when he signed welfare reform in 1996.
What hasn’t changed, though, is the disdain liberals — even sensible liberals like Scheiber, writing in sensible publications like The New Republic — express towards those who still believe what liberals used to believe about civil rights, namely that racial assignments and racial preferences are wrong.
Scheiber argues, for example, that “conservative elites still harbor these resentments,” as though only “resentments” and not principles could lead people to oppose the Democrats’ current equation of civil rights with remedies based on racial preferences, and that, thanks to Bill Clinton’s brilliance, only “elites” are now subject to those “resentments.”
This is a conclusion that flies in the face of virtually all polling data on attitudes toward racial preferences, as well as all results at actual polling places — California when it voted for Proposition 209 and Washington when it voted for I-200. If only “conservative elites” were currently subject to these “resentments,” after all, there would not be such palpable liberal fear of what will happen in Michigan if MCRI gets on the ballot.
To say that the “elites” are the only ones against race preferences is ridiculous. At least among the Republican elites, the vast majority are in favor of race preferences (i.e., President Bush, Sandra Day O’Connor, David Souter, most of the Republicans in the US Senate, the Michigan Republican party, big business, etc) , as they either publicly support race preferences or either refuse to use their power to get rid of them.
Republican VOTERS on the other hand, are overwhelmingly against rece preferences (see the polls and the AZ and CA proposition votes). Noam Scheiber has to be either the most ignorant magazine editor in the USA, or the most dishonest. Either way, the “New Republic” now has as much credibility, IMO, as Dan Rather or the NYTimes, which is , essentially, none.
Will writes:
>>>Republican VOTERS on the other hand, are overwhelmingly against rece preferences (see the polls and the AZ and CA proposition votes).”
What is the racial demographic of Republican voters? If I was to “profile” them at subway stations or airports, who would I look for as the most likely Republican voter? The answer to those questions would clarify voting trends, IMHO.
–Cobra
Cobra,
If you profiled Democratic voters in the same way, you’d find that they were predominantly white as well.
I miss your point. After a few hundred guesses at party affiliation, you’d realize that your “predictions” based solely on race would be wildly at variance with the real statistical percentages of Republicans and Democrats.
Chet
Oh, Cobra, let me criticize Will here too.
Its not just Republican voters that support ending preferences, even with studies using the deceptive phrase “affirmative action” in the question simultaneously with our language. 55% of union members favor ending them, with large undecided, 47% of self-declared Democrats (a plurality of Dems, with large undecideds), and 40% of African Americans (compared to 47 against, with smaller undecideds).
“Elite Democrats” have lined up almost universally (still, 4 legislators broke ranks last year on a vote about U-M preferences, causing literal fisticuffs within the Dem caucus) – elite Republicans are now (at least) taking an officially neutral position on the issue. For MCRI, our support cuts across so many partisan demographics that, although we can’t conceive of why a candidate would support this, its not our concern.
Chetly,
Again, it’s how the question is phrased. “Racial preferences” has a different connotation than “Affirmative Action”, which emcompasses gender as well. I’ve raised this point many times in describing the MCRI’s tactics in promoting their agenda.
If I was to take a poll asking, “Are you for or against killing people”, I would probably get a very different result than prefacing the statement with examples like abortion, the death penalty and pre-emptive war.
As far is white people and the GOP is concerned, if a slim minority of non-whites vote GOP, it’s simply mathematics to assume who actually supports it. Most people vote in their OWN self-interests.
–Cobra
Cobra, the poll I cited asks the respondent their thoughts after it quotes the Initiative, and then quotes the opposition claim that it would harm affirmative action. I’d consider the poll at least “balanced” to the interests of our opposition, even though I believe the opposition has hijacked a vague word that doesn’t apply or precisely define anything. Their entitled to that as opinion, insofar as they don’t attempt to deny us our own opinions (they have, and I won’t explain, for brevity).
By the way, who would be against such a warm and fuzzy concept as “affirmative action?” I favor it. I consider asking that question in isolation to be as meaningful as “Are you for or against killing people”. If you ask are “Are you for or against killing people IN SELF-DEFENSE”, you’ll get different results.
By the way, I like how you do the “white” v. all others (non-white). “As far is white people and the GOP is concerned, if a slim minority of non-whites vote GOP,…”
Two problems. 1) Your expansion is plain wrong. 45% of Hispanics is hard a “slim” minority, and when you factor in asians and other non-African non-whites, these groups may vote mostly for Republicans (or not in statistically meaningful ways either way). 2) You’ve made this a battle against whites, rather than for helping downtrodden blacks or other groups. Its no longer “positive,” its retributive. Cobra, is this self-loathing of your own “whiteness,” or is it vengefulness against the whites that you perceive have harmed you?
Chetly writes:
>>>Two problems. 1) Your expansion is plain wrong. 45% of Hispanics is hard a “slim” minority, and when you factor in asians and other non-African non-whites, these groups may vote mostly for Republicans (or not in statistically meaningful ways either way).”
Actually, “Hispanic” isn’t a race, so my argument is still valid. There are indeed “white Hispanics”, “black Hispanics”, Hispanic Indians, and even Pacific Island Hispanics. A clear portrait of racial voting patterns among Hispanics can be seen in Miami, where fairer skinned Cuban Americans tend to vote Republican, while darker skinned Dominicans trend Democratic.
–Cobra
Cobra, your ability to further divide people into minute categories continues to surprise me.
AND YOU DIDN’T SAY RACE. YOU SAID WHITES V. NON-WHITES, into which hispanics are generally accepted to not include in the former.
Finally, I missed this:
Cobra:
Again, it’s how the question is phrased. “Racial preferences” has a different connotation than “Affirmative Action”, which emcompasses gender as well. I’ve raised this point many times in describing the MCRI’s tactics in promoting their agenda.
So if we said “race and gender preferences,” would you find that acceptable tactics?
And it is true that most “affirmative action” preferences don’t include gender preferences. There were no gender preferences for Barbara Grutter. That’s just a deceptive selling point the university uses to expand its political base. And women don’t “need” preferences – they are outperforming men on SAT/ACT scores consistently, and admissions without preference exceed their population proportions.
Cobra,
A CNN exit poll from the 2004 election (it was the first thing that came up when I Googled this question, but the numbers seem to match those I’d seen many times before) gave the Bush/Kerry breakdown as
White: 58/41
African-American: 11/88
Latino: 44/53
Asian: 44/56
Other: 40/52
Apart from the African-American vote, we are not talking “slim” minorities for Bush here among non-white people; we’re talking hefty percentages. Latinos and Asians, by this poll anyway, were more likely to vote for Bush than whites were for Kerry.
“Hispanic” is, yes, a cultural and not a racial category. You are keen to make the point now; please remember that the next time you write about the dearth of blacks in major-league baseball. There are a lot of blacks in baseball; it’s just that they tend to come from Latin America. They do not get less physically “black” by having Iberian surnames.
And Cubans, whatever the tint of their skin, have better reasons to mistrust Democrats than affirmative action. They are refugees from one of the few states on the planet in which trying to leave without permission is a capital offense, and they are pardonably tired of hearing about the paradise they’ve left behind. Republicans may be God’s daily demonstration that man is fallen, but at least they don’t fawn over Castro.
I could go in many different directions here, but it would be pointless escalation. We will agree to disagree.
–Cobra
Cobra, I would like very much to hear what you have to say about this, so please feel free to email me at the address on my posts. I don’t want to “agree to disagree” about something this important.
No, Michelle, he shouldn’t go to private email. First, its not that important, and second, if Cobra had integrity he’d do it publicly, in a respectful way that wasn’t “escalation”. Why “escalation” is even necessary baffles me – there’s never a reason for that in this type of forum, although I remember times where Cobra has, out of the blue simply attacked people’s integrity who weren’t even part of a thread, so its good that he’s starting to resist that temptation.
Ok. I’ll bite.
Michelle writes:
>>>”Hispanic” is, yes, a cultural and not a racial category. You are keen to make the point now; please remember that the next time you write about the dearth of blacks in major-league baseball. There are a lot of blacks in baseball; it’s just that they tend to come from Latin America. They do not get less physically “black” by having Iberian surnames.”
But this is how skin color is obsessed about in America. There have been numerous threads on this blog about the definition of “blackness”, from hypo-descent to Plessy vs. Ferguson. The bottom line usually works out to this equation:
“You’re as “black” as white people think you are, or assume you to be.”
Not many folks batted an eyelash at Lucille Ball’s and Desi Arnez’ inter-ethnic marriage on “I Love Lucy” (maybe because it was filmed in black and white.) By and large, Desi Arnez, despite the heavy accent, didn’t look all that different from the mainstream. He was fair of skin, well dressed and “non-threatening.” Juxtapose this against the ‘shock” of this momentous occassion in race relations on television:
>>>”The first interracial kiss on American network television was in the “Star Trek” episode entitled “Plato’s Stepchildren,” which aired on November 22, 1968, when Captain Kirk (William Shatner) kissed Lieutenant Uhura (Nichelle Nichols). Some stations in the South (U.S.) originally refused to air the episode.”
http://www.usefultrivia.com/tv_trivia/tv_trivia_006a.html
It should be noted that during the course of the “Star Trek” series, Captain Kirk kissed numerous women from various “alien” races, including green-skinned ones, with no official protests from affiliates.
It’s about perception, Michelle, and what the people in charge “perceive” race to be. Now, there are people like Cicero, who may feel that racial and ethnic nomenclature should be easily manipulated to whatever advantage can be attained–at least that’s how some of his posts come across. I know for certain in my case that I will never be mistaken for a white man in person.
How does this apply to politics? Well, even the RNC concedes its race-baiting shenanigans:
>>>”The head of the Republican National Committee issued a sweeping apology to the NAACP yesterday for a decades-old practice of writing off the black vote and using racial polarization to win elections…
…”Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization,” he added. ”I am here as Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2005/07/15/gop_ignored_black_vote_chairman_says/
President Clinton used triangulation on race. While being the most openly comfortable President in history among African American groups and congregations, Clinton also was outspoken about welfare reform, which played on the tactic of the Reagan Administration who tainted the word “welfare” to be defined as “a black women with children living in the ghetto.” (welfare queens) Clinton also suggested Affirmative Action reform (“mend it, don’t end it”.) One famous strategy was the tactical rebuke of black female rapper Sistah Souljah. It was so skillfully done, that it has become a phrase in the political lexicon.
>>>”In United States politics, a Sister Souljah moment is a politician’s public repudiation of an allegedly extremist person, statement, or position perceived to have some association with the politician. Whether sincere or not, such an act of repudiation can appeal to centrist voters, at the cost of alienating some of the politician’s allies.
The term originates in the 1992 presidential candidacy of Bill Clinton. In an interview conducted May 13, 1992, the rapper Sister Souljah was quoted in the Washington Post as saying:
“If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?”
The remark was part of a longer response to the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The quote was later reproduced without its context and widely criticized in the media (see echo chamber).
In June 1992, Clinton responded to the quote, saying:
“If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black’ and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.”
Clinton thereby repudiated the “extremist” position that Souljah’s quote represented.
Clinton’s response was criticized by members and leaders of the Democratic Party’s African-American base, such as Jesse Jackson. However, it also produced the image, in the eyes of “moderate” and “independent” voters — particularly white voters — of a centrist politician who was “tough on crime” and “not influenced by special interests.” Since moderates and independents represent swing votes, whereas the party base will not usually leave for the other party, Clinton’s condemnation probably won him more votes than he lost.”
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:lHjMQ-PZpFEJ:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Souljah_moment+Clinton,+Sister+Souljah&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
The truth about demographics in America is that there are a whole lot more whites than any other single group, and I believe that the Bush/Rove strategy of getting minorities in high cabinet positions would similiarly alay any fears by white centrists that he’s “insensitive to race issues” or “polarizing”, even though his policies have a different result entirely.
Chetly writes:
>>> if Cobra had integrity he’d do it publicly, in a respectful way that wasn’t “escalation”. Why “escalation” is even necessary baffles me – there’s never a reason for that in this type of forum, although I remember times where Cobra has, out of the blue simply attacked people’s integrity who weren’t even part of a thread, so its good that he’s starting to resist that temptation.”
Now, Chetly…I give both praise and criticism when it’s called for. I try to attack positions and arguments, but sometimes, there are people who can’t seperate themselves from their ideology, and they take great offense when challenged. This is unfortunate.
–Cobra