Who Is More Racist, Republicans or Democrats?

Lately, the debate over who is more racist, the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, has heated up, with accusations flying from both sides. The discussion really got going when Chris Hayes, host of MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes, said of Republicans, “It is undeniably the case that racist Americans are almost entirely in one political coalition and not the other.”

That got the twitter-verse screaming foul. Hayes himself quickly took back his statement citing economist Alex Tabarrok’s research revealing that where racism is concerned, the parties are pretty much in a tie.  Hayes also cited John Sides‘ research that indicates a slightly stronger lean toward racism among Republican’s. But while the lean seems real, it’s not significant.

I side with Tabarrok and Sides. Racism is a problem for both parties. But, I think the issue is more complicated than what’s indicated by their research.

While I agree that the base of each party is equally racist, at least as measured by the narrow metrics of the research, the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans has to do with how each party’s leadership deals with the racism in their ranks. The Republican’s strategy is to organize, amp up, and exploit racist sentiment for political gain. Where racism is concerned, the GOP is about as manipulative as you can get, and given the history of this country and the affect of that history on our culture, that’s saying something.

One can’t put too fine a point on this difference. The Republicans are inciting a racist movement for political gain. Because of that they are, I believe, more dangerous. However, while they are actively breaking new ground and expanding opportunities for racists and racism, they’re no more cynical nor effective at institutionalizing, or at least accommodating, racism than the other side.

The Democrats present themselves as agents of equity while acting in ways that define what is necessary to achieve equity as nothing more than a bunch of empty platitudes. And that’s not the worst of it. Obama has one upped the Republicans when it comes to xenophobia, not through his words but through his actions, ordering a record number of immigrant detentions and deportations.

The Obama administration has also done next to nothing to end the crisis of mass incarceration of black and brown people in the U.S. They have also failed to directly address the disproportionate impact of the recession and the mortgage crisis on communities of color.

When it comes to race, the Republicans have started a racist movement that is pulling them ever further to the right. But the Democrats have passively played along by following them to the right to capture the political space the Republicans’ rightward march is leaving open. In other words, for the sake of political gain, the Democratic Party has, over the last 32 years or more, grown increasingly conservative on race, not to mention many other issues.

The Obama administration’s policy on deportations is one expression of that growing conservatism. His near silence on the issue of race is another.

I get the fact that being a Black president in a racist society makes talking about race poisonous to Obama’s political prospects. He didn’t create that problem. But, if you buy that, then it’s up to us to be the antidote to that poison by stepping up the pressure and making it more politically expedient for him to speak out than to shut up.

Even in this campaign, with coded and not so coded racist messaging a core strategy of the GOP, the Democrats are leaving discussions of racism to their surrogates. And boy are those surrogates buzzing about Republican racism.

But are they doing so in order to end racism? Nope. They’re doing so in order to make political points.

Now that’s cynicism, and it needs to be called out, not just because it’s bad politics, but because it leads to bad policy.

On Obama, Drones, Deportation, Austerity, and the Vote

My last post, about why I voted for Obama-Biden in ’08 and will again, inspired some pretty strong criticism. Since most of the commentary has been off-line, and many points of criticism that deserve air time were raised, I’m taking another stab at this to get more of you in the discussion.

First, I have to admit that it was unfair to equate resistance to voting for the Obama ticket with simple disappointment based in unrealistic expectations.

I know there’s more to the protest against Obama from the left than that – much more. A strategy of countering terror with terror, “secret” drone wars, a record number of deportations, and massive expansion of the national security state, not to mention inaction on mass incarceration, and an austerity agenda are not small matters.

Moreover, the analysis that drives much of the critique from the left is not to be taken lightly. Folks aren’t just disappointed; they are concerned about Obama being, as Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report puts it, “not the lesser of two evils, but the more effective of two evils.”

In some respects, I agree. The combination of Obama’s relative social liberalism and the symbolic significance of his status as the first Black president has the affect of marginalizing critics of the repressive aspects of his agenda, especially among communities of color. And the right’s racist attacks on Obama aren’t helping matters.

And there’s more. Check this Democracy Now! video out for a taste of what’s being debated.

But, I’m still voting for Obama.

I respect that some of you will not. But I don’t believe that Obama is the “more effective of two evils.”

Here’s why.

First of all, I think that assessment may be based in an under-estimation the evil of the agenda of the other side, and just how effective they may become at institutionalizing it.

For instance, there’s that unaccounted for $2.1 trillion increase in defense spending proposed by Romney. That’s a major expansion of the war budget, and given the Ayn Rand inspired vision of the most insurgent faction of the GOP, my guess is that it won’t all be invested in the traditional military. A Romney-Ryan administration could, I believe, redefine what we mean when we say military industrial complex.

Moreover, that Randian vision I referenced takes the notion of elitism and corporate control of everything to all new levels. I’m pessimistic about the prospect that this brand of evil would inspire more effective opposition.

In place of that hopeful vision, I have the memory of hundreds of families I worked with as a social worker. I will never forget a girl whose father punished her for cutting school by putting her hand on a red hot electric stove element. What will become of people like her and her father, who suffered from mental illness but didn’t have the insurance coverage he needed to have it properly treated, if, say, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell were to become the Secretary of Health and Human Services?

And, on that subject of cabinet members, consider another Secretary of the Interior like James Watt, a Reagan appointee, who summed up his use-it-up-before-Jesus-returns approach to forest management with the statement, “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns…” Or, consider Mike Huckabee as Director of Homeland Security.

But beyond all my perhaps alarmist fears, there’s another reason I believe that Obama as president is the lesser of two evils. That’s my sense of where the two political parties and candidates fit within the context of other political factions, trends, and movements.

Among them there’s the right wing.

If you think evangelical and white nationalist rightists have revealed their whole agenda with racist anti-immigrant attacks, and campaigns to eliminate reproductive rights and human rights (like the right to be LGBT), you’re under-estimating them. The white nationalist faction has a far more radical racist agenda than “papers please” legislation. And to many of the religious right, Islam must be eradicated to make the world safe for Christianity, and support for Israel is based in the belief that the end times are triggered when Israel completely consumes Palestine.

Neither faction should be in a position to more directly influence federal policy.

And in terms of social trends, one of the most concerning is the one toward libertarianism among Gen Y. This tendency is the flip side of their broad support for same sex marriage rights, among other anti-authoritarian leanings.

The more powerful the libertarian right, the more likely it is that this tendency will become a dominant one among Gen Y. From positions of greater authority, it’s just plain easier to take exotic ideologies and turn them into common sense.

But there’s more.

There’s another reason I fear the GOP. That’s the disorganized state of the U.S. left which has yet to formulate a popular ideological alternative to either the cultural right’s traditional values nor to mainstream neo-liberalism. Leftists need to build a broader base and develop a popular language of protest, and one that doesn’t sideline race with a purely class based approach to justice. Until we do, I fear that allowing the GOP to take control will polarize the country around issues on which there are still too few on our side.