It Is Still All About Race: TheTruth About GOP Wins

I'm exhausted after a frenzied day at work and many of the polls don't look good if one supports progressive values and looks forward to the days when overt racism, Gilded Age style greed, and deference to religious extremists are relegated to the past.  Adding to the aggravation is the closeness of the Virginia U.S. Senate race which I hope will still shift to Mark Warner.  That said, a piece in Salon sums up what some are too hesitant to say about the 2014 midterm elections:  the main motivations pushing Republican successes are the same old poisonous influences that have haunted America for far, far too long.  Namely, racism first and foremost followed by religious extremism.  Since parts of North Carolina fall within the Hampton Roads TV viewing area, one had to endure numerous political ads attacking Democrats for "not opposing gay marriage" and constant efforts to tie Democrats to America's black president.  Here are some article highlights:

In 1964, there were five black members of the House of Representatives — barely over 1 percent — compared to the 11 percent of the population who were black. But the American people were evenly split, 30 to 31 percent, on whether blacks should have more or less influence, with 28 percent saying things were “about right” as they stood. What’s more, those opposed to government social spending programs were three times more likely to say blacks should have less influence compared to those supporting social spending.

“I’ll be very, very honest with you. The South has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans,” she [Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu] told NBC News in an interview. “It’s been a difficult time for the president to present himself in a very positive light as a leader.”

This is hardly earth-shattering news from the state that brought us Plessy v. Ferguson in the 1890s, and the deeply racialized devastation of Katrina less a decade ago, after which even President Bush admitted that “deep, persistent poverty” in the area “has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America.” Speaking of Katrina, according to a PPP poll last year, the good people of Louisiana “were evenly split on who was most responsible for the poor Hurricane Katrina response: George W. Bush or Obama, 28/29.” Given that Obama was a first-year senator at the time of Katrina, it’s not hard to see what Landrieu was driving at.

[P]redictably, fourth-tier 2016 GOP presidential wannabe Bobby Jindal, Louisiana’s governor, instantly made an ass of himself, calling her comments “remarkably divisive,” which takes a lot of chutzpah, coming from a racial panderer who just three years ago pledged he would sign a “birther” bill if it reached his desk.

Birtherism, you see, has become the GOP’s more widespread manifestation of racial codespeak in the Obama era. Although Obama deftly quieted the elite media trolls with the release of his long-form birth certificate just after Donald Trump had ridden birther hysteria to the top of the GOP primary field in April 2011, the GOP base was never really dissuaded. In fact, nine months later, in January 2012, a YouGov poll found that more Republicans than ever questioned Obama’s citizenship.

You’re not supposed to call it “racism,” because racism means KKK mobs in hoods, and police siccing snarling dogs on young children, and we’re not like that anymore — see, we’ve got armored vehicles and sound cannons now!

But 40 years of data from the General Social Survey — the gold standard of American public opinion research — say otherwise.  They tell us that Southern whites overwhelmingly blame blacks for their lower economic status, ignoring or denying the role played by discrimination, past and present, in all its various forms, and that the balance of Southern white attitudes has barely changed at all in 40 years. 

A 2011 study from Tufts (press release/full study) found that whites as a whole see racism as a zero-sum game, such that decreases in discrimination against blacks over the decades are reflected in increases in discrimination against whites, so that now whites are more discriminated against than blacks.  This perception is not simply mistaken, it’s downright delusional, flying in the face of mountains of objective data.

[W]e find that there has been only a modest overall change in attitudes since the 1970s, but that this change is significantly concentrated in the Democratic Party, with relatively minor changes in the Republican Party,  . . . 

What all the above boils down to is that blaming blacks for being poor remains broadly popular in America today, and that taking note of continued discrimination is not. A modest majority of Democrats outside the white South disagree, and this creates a political fault line that Republicans have repeatedly exploited across the decades, with no end in sight.  When conservatives get too crude — as was the case with Cliven Bundy, for example — this threatens to upset the apple cart, and appearances must quickly get restored. But it’s the crudity, not the underlying attitude of blaming blacks, that has fallen out of favor. This would hardly surprise a Southern gentleman of this or any other century.  It’s just the way things are supposed to be. Always have been. Why ever change?