Obama And The Emerging Tradition Of Emotive, Non-Rational Liberalism

Lately I’ve been trying to get a handle on what is widely said to be our enduring, endemic, pervasive racism, but a racism so “underground, hidden, subtle” that it is visible only to highly trained social scientists (such as the one discussed here) who, to skeptics, resemble nothing so much as dowsers claiming to have near-magical powers to find underground water with forked sticks.

Summarizing the findings regarding “racial resentments” in recent literature of political psychology, John Judis of The New Republic writes that

racism remains deeply embedded within the psyche of the American electorate–so deep that many voters may not even be aware of their own feelings on the subject….

Political psychologists devised new tests to uncover these sentiments….

The answers [to questions inserted into the American National Election Studies] revealed a degree of racial resentment that wasn’t apparent from more explicit questions about racial bias. In 1986, for instance, 59 percent of respondents agreed that blacks were not trying hard enough (only 27 percent disagreed), while 67 percent thought blacks should work “their way up … without any special favors.” Psychologists David Sears and Donald Kinder, as well as others, found that this racial resentment was the single most important factor–more important than even conservative ideology or political partisanship–in explaining strong opposition to a host of government programs that either directly or indirectly benefited minorities. Of course, that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be principled conservative opposition to government-guaranteed equal employment or urban aid. But, according to the political psychologists, racial resentment played the largest role in fueling public skepticism.

Now here comes another one, Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz, who points to “a more subtle form of prejudice” he describes as our symbolic racism.

Racial attitudes have changed dramatically in the United States over the past several decades, of course, and overtly racist beliefs are much less prevalent among white Americans of all classes today. But a more subtle form of prejudice, which social scientists sometimes call symbolic racism, is still out there — especially among working-class whites.

Symbolic racism means believing that African American poverty and other problems are largely the result of lack of ambition and effort, rather than white racism and discrimination. Who holds symbolically racist beliefs? A relatively large portion of white voters in general and white working-class voters in particular, according to the 2004 American National Election Study, the best data available on this topic. A few answers underscore how widespread these attitudes are:

• Almost 60 percent of white voters agreed with the statement that “blacks should try harder to succeed.” A startling 43 percent of white college graduates nodded at this one, along with 71 percent of whites with no college education.

• Fully 49 percent of white voters disagreed with the statement that “history makes it more difficult for blacks to succeed.” Forty percent of white college graduates disagreed with it, along with 58 percent of whites with no college education.

So, believing with Jesse Jackson and Bill Cosby that “blacks should try harder to succeed” makes one a symbolic racist? Would a belief, say, that “affirmative action makes it easier for blacks to succeed” also make one a symbolic racist? For that matter, would believing that blacks should be treated just like whites and Asians — no better and no worse — also make one a symbolic racist? Or just a plain, run of the mill, overt racist? Clearly one or the other since, according to Judis’s report, a belief that “blacks should work ‘their way up … without any special favors’” is evidence of “racial resentment.”

All of this talk of subconscious, non-rational, gut-level racism calls to mind the work of another Emory social scientist, Drew Westen, whose book, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, was discussed here. (What is it with Emory’s infatuation with emotions over thought?) As I wrote there, quoting an article in the Los Angeles Times,

Westen writes that it doesn’t make sense to argue an issue using facts and figures and to count on voters — particularly the swing voters who decide national elections — to make choices based on sophisticated understandings of policy differences or procedures. He says Democratic candidates must learn to do what Republicans have understood for many years — they must appeal to emotions….

Actually, maybe they (or at least one) have (has) learned, although not in a way these political dowsers would approve. According to the lefty blogs and the Obama tankers in the mainstream press, Hillary has been “channeling George Wallace,” as Joe Conason so artfully put it, by appealing to these subterranean racist sentiments.

As everyone knows by now, Hillary commented that

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.

According to Conason,

There is indeed a pattern emerging — and it is a pattern that must dismay everyone who admires the Clintons and has defended them against the charge that they are exploiting racial divisions.

New York Times OpEdist Bob Herbert echoed Conason.

There is, indeed. There was a name for it when the Republicans were using that kind of lousy rhetoric to good effect: it was called the Southern strategy, although it was hardly limited to the South. Now the Clintons, in their desperation to find some way — any way — back to the White House, have leapt aboard that sorry train.

He can’t win! Don’t you understand? He’s black! He’s black!

The Clintons have been trying to embed that gruesomely destructive message in the brains of white voters and superdelegates for the longest time. It’s a grotesque insult to African-Americans, who have given so much support to both Bill and Hillary over the years

Herbert continued:

I don’t know if Senator Obama can win the White House. No one knows. But to deliberately convey the idea that most white people — or most working-class white people — are unwilling to give an African-American candidate a fair hearing in a presidential election is a slur against whites.

If it is a slur, it’s a slur that has become increasingly prominent and popular in social science today.

Not for the first time (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, etc.), one of the more predictably splenetic outbursts came from the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson. “As a statement of fact, that’s debatable at best. As a rationale for why Democratic Party superdelegates should pick her over Obama,” he writes,

it’s a slap in the face to the party’s most loyal constituency — African Americans — and a repudiation of principles the party claims to stand for. Here’s what she’s really saying to party leaders: There’s no way that white people are going to vote for the black guy. Come November, you’ll be sorry.

How silly of me. I thought the Democratic Party believed in a colorblind America.

This isn’t silly. It’s audacious, unadulterated balderdash. Robinson knows perfectly well that the Democratic Party has not believed in — nor has it supported any policies, judges, or principles based on or advocating — “a colorblind America” since about 1965, and neither has he.

As I have commented more than once, virtually all of the discussion of the Democratic primaries has been couched in a very unsubtle version of demographic determinism. Democratic voters have been routinely described as being more or less of one mind (if that) on most major public policy issues; they have differed only in their demographic identities, splitting along lines of race, gender, age, etc.

But when Hillary notes, quoting an AP article, that her coalition is broader than Obama’s, she’s denounced as the second coming of George Wallace who “violated the rhetorical rules” (Conason, linked above). If she’s guilty of appealing to the baser instincts of Democratic voters, isn’t this exactly the behavior that one would expect to flow from all the advice to “frame” the debate (see here, here, here, and here) by appealing to the emotions of the electorate?

And speaking of rhetorical rules, Joan Walsh of Salon nervously asks, “[c]an Democrats learn to talk about race.” Like a prissy school-marm telling her charges to sit still, shape up, and fly right, she petulantly informs Democrats to watch their mouth:

Everybody’s going to have to be more careful in the next few months, in the way they talk about race, while also talking about it. A lot. I don’t know how we figure that one out, but we have to.

It’s almost enough to make one pity the poor, conflicted Democrats. They so love to talk, especially about race, but they just don’t know how. The traditional American idiom of fairness, i.e., treating everyone “without regard” to race, creed, or color, has become a foreign language, spoken only by ideological aliens (Republicans and conservatives).

I think the underlying problem here is that Democrats, apt and eager acolytes of their social science gurus, believe that everything important is, well, underlying — that emotion, attitude, prejudice, unconscious racism trump and even run roughshod over conscious thought, rationality, evidence, principles, moral beliefs, etc. And to their credit, they are perfectly bi-partisan in their disdain for the rationality of American voters: Republicans and small-towners bitterly cling to God and Guns because of economic disappointment; white, blue-collar Democrats similarly vote against their own interests out of “racial resentments.”

In many respects there’s nothing new in the Democrats’ subordination of rationality and thought to feeling and emotion. Remember all the talk, not so long ago, about the Democrats as the “Mommy Party” (warm, compassionate, healing, inclusive, generous) and the Republicans as the “Daddy Party” (strict, demanding, competitive, stingy, just-the-facts rule enforcement)? And let us not forget all the hoo-hah over Thomas Frank’s dismissal of the crazy Kansans that was such a popular rage among Democrats and that was just discussed here.

We’ve just heard a modern riff on the thought vs. emotion melody when Rev. Wright informed the Detroit NAACP about the “two different ways of learning” of blacks and whites.

European and European-American children have a left brained cognitive object oriented learning style and the entire educational learning system in the United States of America….

Left brain is logical and analytical. Object oriented means the student learns from an object. From the solitude of the cradle with objects being hung over his or her head to help them determine colors and shape to the solitude in a carol in a PhD program stuffed off somewhere in a corner in absolute quietness to absorb from the object. From a block to a book, an object. That is one way of learning, but it is only one way of learning.

African and African-American children have a different way of learning.

They are right brained, subject oriented in their learning style. Right brain that means creative and intuitive. Subject oriented means they learn from a subject, not an object. They learn from a person. Some of you are old enough, I see your hair color, to remember when the NAACP won that tremendous desegregation case back in 1954 and when the schools were desegregated. They were never integrated. When they were desegregated in Philadelphia, several of the white teachers in my school freaked out. Why? Because black kids wouldn’t stay in their place. Over there behind the desk, black kids climbed up all on them.

Because they learn from a subject, not from an object. Tell me a story. They have a different way of learning….

Rev. Wright was widely ridiculed for these and similar remarks, but in their subordination of analytical thought to emotion they were closer to the mainstream of modern liberal epistemology than is commonly supposed.

Let me give just one example — as it happens, from Rev. Wright’s most famous and now recently former acolyte, Barack Obama. Obama, as we’ve seen with his bitter/clinging put-down of small town voters, is no stranger to the idea that people’s behavior is often governed more by their emotions and subconscious concerns than by a clear, thought-out position on the “issues,” but as far as he himself is concerned, he has the image of being almost too thoughtful, rational, articulate, etc., to connect with ordinary people. Thus I think it is quite revealing that even he, former editor of the Harvard Law Review and part-time professor of constitutional law, is on the record saying that he would subordinate head to “heart” in nominating judges and Supreme Court Justices.

As Edward Whelan explained in The Weekly Standard,

In explaining his vote against Roberts, Obama opined that deciding the “truly difficult” cases requires resort to “one’s deepest values, one’s core concerns, one’s broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.” In short, “the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge’s heart.” No clearer prescription for lawless judicial activism is possible. [emphasis added]

Indeed, in setting forth the sort of judges he would appoint, Obama has explicitly declared: “We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old — and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.” So much for the judicial virtue of dispassion. So much for a craft of judging that is distinct from politics.

Obama’s heart-centered judicial philosophy has recently been discussed in two enlightening posts on the Volokh Conspiracy blog (here and here). Read both, and the comments. Here’s a small sample: One commenter asked, “why wouldn’t you want someone “with a good heart” setting down that law?” to which another replied: “When it comes to setting the law, a good brain is vastly more important.” Another asked:

So, I’m curious: when Obama was lecturing in Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago, were I to take a class of his and write on the final exam “Justice X’s opinion in Case Y was correct because Justice X’s heart was in the right place”, would Obama have given me an ‘A’?

And if he didn’t, would his refusal be based on some theoretical ground that would of necessity conflict with his often-stated heartfelt, heart-based philosophy … or because he disagreed with what was in Justice X’s heart?

Again, there’s nothing altogether new here. Pragmatism has long been an important, and often dominant, strain in American liberalism, and its offspring, legal realism and an even more extreme post-modernism (search here for my many discussions of Stanley Fish), also reject fealty to rules and principles in favor of whatever road will lead to one’s preferred result.

Nevertheless, even though this phenomenon is not new, it’s important to recognize that when Obama lets slip his belief that voters often act irrationally, when he emphasizes what’s in a judge’s “heart,” and when Hillary “frames” the argument for her candidacy in a way that strikes many liberals and mainstream pundits (but I repeat myself) as pandering to voters’ emotions and subconscious prejudices, they are not going off half-cocked as idiosyncratic individuals but are rather both reflecting and acting out of what has become the dominant heart and gut over head epistemology of modern liberalism.