The Atlantic - Latest Comments in Race Is A Factor But...

Re: Race Is A Factor But...

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Re: Race Is A Factor But...

freeufc — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:12:10 -0000

1860 or 1960 - LOL

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Re: Race Is A Factor But...

hillary1 — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:01:00 -0000

not the factor but a factor

While there may be other factors at play, it is the defining factor.

Re: Race Is A Factor But...

BreakerBaker — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 08:21:17 -0000

Absolutely. I was really trying to avoid implying that I thought the 'motivations' were equally unjustified. I've never liked John Edwards. I have to admit to some schadenfreude when the whole thing fell apart for him. It's easy to say now, but he's somebody who I think the Republicans had pegged from the start: a sleazy, vain, unprincipled, empty suit of a personal injury lawyer. Sarah Palin in a sportscoat.

I don't think any motivation for an attack on him is equivalent to being impacted by Obama's race. That being said, prior to the affair being public knowledge, one of the memes about him was that he was effete. In the parallel universe where he became president and never had a baby with another woman while his wife is receiving chemo, I can still see...forget it. That guy sucks. I don't even want to finish my point.

Re: Race Is A Factor But...

Mike Burns — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:31:14 -0000

Southern conservatives have evolved but not by much. They have moved away from the ugliness of Strom Thurmond and George Wallace but not far enough to stop telling watermelon jokes. But does that mean they have evolved their thinking or just their presentation? Maybe 40 years ago, Joe Wilson would have added a third word at the end of his outburst like "boy" or something much worse.

The culture of racism and segregation is still with the southern conservatives. Maybe Joe Wilson doesn't consider himself a racist. Maybe he would never actively discriminate himself. We really don't know. But he lives in a state and belongs to a party that is dominated by conservative white males and that has to shape his perceptions.

Mike Burns

http://www.disorderlyreport.com/

Re: Race Is A Factor But...

Jon — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:18:07 -0000

Re: . If Obama had not won so convincingly, you can be certain there would have been total madness over whether the election was stolen.

Which explains the Birther nonsense. There's no way to doubt that Obama won the election fairly, so they have to doubt that he's qualified to be president instead.

Re: Race Is A Factor But...

Carrington — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:11:15 -0000

Vietnam.

It's worth remembering that the Democrats also got themselves into a losing war during the 1960s. I tend to think this issue trumped race as the source of the '60s kulturkampf.

Johnson never had the chance or the money to buy the silence of the white working class. Nixon made hay of that omission.

Re: Race Is A Factor But...

Southerner — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:47:05 -0000

I think your post is very insightful. I'd like to call your attention to a related point.

In an earlier exchange here about TNC's Civil War tourism last month, I noted that in The Mind of the South, author W.J. Cash said that poor whites in the antebellum South based much of their sense of pride and self-worth on the fact that, although they didn't have much, at least they were white and free and therefore weren't on the lowest rung of the social ladder.

When slavery was ended, they were knocked off their next-to-the-lowest rung, and they were furious. That fury was part of the reason for the rise of the KKK during Reconstruction

I think the fury from some that is being directed against President Obama is closely related to this Reconstruction mindset. In the postwar South, that anger coalesced into the Klan. It looks like the boiling anger about Obama is coalescing into something equally as hateful and violent.

Re: Race Is A Factor But...

funkasmellic — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:10:49 -0000

But that idea is itself quite smug, not to mention reductionist and cynical. So there's no good time to support the party that best represents your interests or ideological point of view, then? Come on, it's a bit more complicated than that.

Being a "devotee" is not the same thing as being a rabid fanatic. Enthusiasm in politics is a good thing, as far as I'm concerned, because we need a lot more of it right now, particularly from liberals and progressives. And more to the point: Most of us don't have the luxury of standing atop an elite perch, staring down on the process of democracy chortling about how silly it all is.

Re: Race Is A Factor But...

outback — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:46:17 -0000

Since Joe Wilson is a white male southerner, his outburst must be driven by racism.

Gee, nothing like a little racial stereotyping.

Re: Race Is A Factor But...

Liza — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:59:20 -0000

There is much truth in what you are saying. The racism that I grew up with in the south was against blacks and it raw, brutal, and very exposed. I didn't understand racism outside of that very limited context until I moved to California. I can certainly understand how people can get stuck there, where I was, if they lack curiousity about what is happening outside of their own small world.

Re: Race Is A Factor But...

albatross — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:57:02 -0000

Mr Shrimp:

I think that was true at first--people were mad at Bush for the contested 2000 election, which was basically a tie resolved 5-4 in the Supreme Court. (At least one critical part of the decision was, I think, a party-line vote.)

But the Republicans exploited the post-9/11 fear and rallying around the president with some really nasty political campaigns to get the majority, and absolutely played hardball once they got it. I think that got a lot of Democrats mad, and left them looking forward to payback.

Re: Race Is A Factor But...

Ta-Nehisi Coates — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:55:30 -0000

I take your point on Hillary. I don't on John Edwards. Catching hell because you're black or a woman, is not the same as catching it because you cheated on your cancer-stricken wife.

Re: Race Is A Factor But...

albatross — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:46:02 -0000

Er, I thought most of the pro-life-terrorists'[1] victims were doctors and nurses who performed/assisted with abortions. Those folks are not generally marginal members of society, they're (much like researchers) highly-educated and skilled people who have far more choices in life than most people.

In neither case does that change the fact that it's terrorism, or how we should treat the folks we catch doing it. (Provide them free government healthcare, housing, and food for life.)

[1] I will admit to finding the irony of that phrase really entertaining, in a gallows humor sort of way.

Re: Race Is A Factor But...

Schloss1 — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:44:37 -0000

Forgive me for my imprecision. First I link the Dowd article, then I note a completely different piece from the editor of the New York Times Magazine, then I go back to the Dowd article. Sorry for the confusion.

Re: Race Is A Factor But...

albatross — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:40:42 -0000

Incertus: I think labeling the parties as center right and far right assumes some universal left/right scale, but there isn't one. Because of the nature of winner-take-all elections and such, the two parties cluster approximately around the center of opinion among voters. But there's nothing meaningful about that center--it moves all the time. The centrist position w.r.t. civil rights for blacks and gays in 1950 is, today, very far to the right of the Republicans. The centrist position of torture in 1980 is, today, rather left-ish.

(One caveat is that left and right doesn't really capture a lot of politics.)

Re: Race Is A Factor But...

Scott A — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:07:44 -0000

Your co-blogger on the left of the masthead coined the phrase "devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant, devotees of the party out of power are insane". Sometimes it is just that simple.

Re: Race Is A Factor But...

ralphdibny — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:58:20 -0000

The modern Republican party was constructed as a protest against the civil rights movement, in order to take advantage of the schism between Southern Democrats and the New Democratic coalition of northern liberal, labor union, and African-American voters. That was the "Southern Strategy." Right-wing craziness has ALWAYS played on racist fears--it is the ideological structure upon which the party was built. So whether individual right-wing loonies are racists misses the point. Even if they are not individually racist (Best friends are black, etc.) their ideology is built upon racist logic. This is why history matters. Our ideologies can only exist within existing structures, and the existing structure for Republican governance flows from the central belief that the civil rights movement, and the laws which resulted from it, was a communist, unconstitutional power grab.

Re: Race Is A Factor But...

sporcupine — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:49:33 -0000

Under Clinton, the nutcases blew up a federal office building, including a day care center.

I'd say the frenzy isn't new, and I'd also say race adds at least 20 percent to the scale of the frenzy.

I'm counting on state and federal law enforcement having upped their efforts at least 40 percent to compensate.

Even so, I'm assuming that as a country, we're going to lose some lives to this garbage.

To which, I think the right response isn't fear or anger, but very calmly repeating:

Freedom isn't free.

These colors don't run.

I pledge allegiance to....the republic for which it stands.

We can take these fools down. I suspect we'll have to prove it. Calmly, firmly, with the minimum force needed to do what must be done.

Re: Race Is A Factor But...

AMT — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:46:08 -0000

What's so ghastly about the rest of the quote? I'm a life long New Yorker so this place (and everything Dowd said about it) is just normal to me. It's everyplace else I look at with varying degrees of suspicion (which is a failing I realize).

Re: Race Is A Factor But...

JimS — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:25:52 -0000

I don't think Olberman and Maher were any less visible or virulent than Beck or Limbaugh. (though I'm a very infrequent television watcher outside of football)

Wilson was wrong (and possibly racially motivated) to yell "you lie", but I don't recall Bush ever saying in a speech that his opponents were flat out lying the way the President did earlier in his speech the other night, which seemed to me over a previously established line in our national discourse.

I agree that was part of the genesis of the anti-Bush anger. Close elections are currently a flaw in our system, because we haven't been willing to admit that at some point in closeness we get beyond the margin of error in our accounting (Florida in'00, Washington State gubernatorial election a couple of years ago, Franken/Coleman last year). i think at some point of closeness you need a new election, because the personal choice of state election officials is not the way to settle a close election.

Re: Race Is A Factor But...

The Ninja Zombie — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:21:28 -0000

Is the difference just the media presence that the Right has, in Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, etc.?

The left has Paul Krugman, Michael Moore, Al Franken and Dan Rather (until he took his Bush hatred a little too far).

I don't see much difference.

Re: Race Is A Factor But...

Sorn — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:20:31 -0000

What was that chinese curse?

"May you live in interesting times"

If we concede, as most reasonable people do, that racism is a factor--not the factor but a factor--in resistance to Obama, then in fact, what we've seen this year is, by the very nature of an Obama presidency, nprecedented. Put simply, we've seen the crazy-tax, of which race is a portion, before. But we've never seen the crazy-tax intensified by race. We have not seen it accompanied by watermelon jokes, by Congressmen referring to him as boy, by clucking heads claiming that the president "has exposed himself as someone with a deep-seated hated of white people." We've never seen the whitey tape, before.

Mr. C,

I don't know how far to take the racism as a motivating factor. certainly it plays a part. It certainly is as you say an intensifying factor. However, I really don't know what to make of it all. It may be that the level of crazy we are seeing is a concerted ploy by the republican party to energize the "base" and make them automatically distrust any democrat. I'm extremely wary looking for a reason in all of this because I think sometimes when people look for causes they see what they want to see.

It may be that what we are seeing in terms of crazy is merely a manifestation of a closed system of information that doesn't allow other points of view any credence. As an example a person who follows a certain mindset can read books, listen to radio, watch t.v. and never encounter a point of view with which they disagree. That has to have a detrimental effect upon a person's ability to reason. Personally it feels more like a cult to me than anything else, and it's really hard to know why cults form unless you were there to begin with.

As always thanks a bunch.

Re: Race Is A Factor But...

The Ninja Zombie — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:11:54 -0000

The internet did exist in the 2000's and Bush rumors were running rampant. Anyone who reads reddit will remember the endless headlines, "We will be at war with Iran by (next holiday)!"

Re: Race Is A Factor But...

The Ninja Zombie — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:09:51 -0000

I don't see how the Republicans pander to anti-abortion types any more than democrats pander to ELF.

Republicans don't embrace anti-abortion *terrorists* any more than Dems embrace ELF. Both parties do embrace more moderate versions of the extremists and push policies which would be supported by the extremists.

By the way, I'm curious, which party is the far right one? Is it the party which expanded the federal budget by $700 billion, or the one that plans to expand it by $1 trillion? Is it the party that made an $800 billion dollar expansion of government medicine, or the party which plans a bigger expansion of government control of medicine? Is it the party that shifted the tax burden from the poor to the rich, or the party that plans to do the same thing to an even greater degree?