Tolerance, Acceptance and Approval

Recently the CEO of Mozilla Corporation, Brendan Eich, was pushed out of his job because of his failure to support same-sex marriage.  It was discovered that in 2008 he donated $1000 to the campaign for California’s heavily contested Proposition 8, an amendment to the state constitution prohibiting gay marriage.  He had never shown any animus toward gay subordinates and he earnestly promised as CEO that he would protect the equality of all employees.  But what doomed him at Mozilla was the persistence of his opposition to same-sex marriage; while much of the country has become more friendly toward the idea, Eich has not.  After a week of boycotts and protests, the board of directors nudged Eich out the door.

Many liberals see Eich’s semi-firing as something to celebrate, as a victory for gay rights.  A bigot has been punished, sending a salutary warning to bigots everywhere.  But many observers – mostly conservatives but some liberals as well— see this incident as a worrisome bit of McCarthyism, as possibly the herald of a new age of liberal witch-hunting in which insufficient deference to received leftist truth can damage or end one’s career.  That is, gays are winning the cultural argument, they have achieved some measure of social and economic power and they and their supporters are ruthlessly and carelessly using that power to punish and demonize even the mildest dissenters.  Last year’s heretics have become this year’s Inquisition.

But many of Eich’s supporters speak as if there is no political position one could take that would justify removal.  But this is foolish and everyone knows it.  Every society holds certain views to be self-evidently intolerable, that is, so outrageous or so destructive that anyone professing them must be denied any influence.  Would it be OK to fire a CEO who was a member of the Klan?  Or a blatant anti-Semite?   Or a supporter of al Qaeda?  This sort of social condemnation is one of the inevitable limits of freedom, even in a society with free speech.  No society is possible or sustainable without a short list of unacceptable ideas.  The argument over Eich really amounts to this: Should opposition to same-sex marriage be on that list? 

Conservatives make fun of liberals for claiming to be oh-so-tolerant while stomping on those with un-liberal opinions, but liberals (in effect) counter with the perfectly defensible argument that there’s nothing wrong with being intolerant of intolerance.  If one really believes irrational disapproval of a group undermines that group’s equitable treatment then it’s acceptable to socially punish those perpetuating that inequity.  For a very long time it was widely considered acceptable to fire, deny service to, ostracize, humiliate and even harm gays; in many quarters it still is!  Liberals argue that it’s OK to shame the shamers; not because turnaround is fair play, but because unjustified shaming is so destructive.  That is, intolerance of intolerance is not as objectionable as intolerance of racial or sexual difference, since the latter can’t be justified.  To punish someone for anti-gay actions is defensible in a way that punishing someone for being gay is not.  This is the crucial point: there is no rational basis for anti-gay or anti-gay-marriage sentiment.  Gay love, desire and commitment are morally no more or less than the straight versions.  In a decent world homophobia and opposition to gay marriage would easily and inarguably be on the unacceptable opinion list.  In a thoroughly decent world, of course, they wouldn’t need to be, since in a thoroughly decent world homophobia would be as unknown and as unimaginable as hatred of left-handed people or curling enthusiasts or tulip lovers.

The more sophisticated Eich supporters concede the necessity of the list, but argue that there are good reasons that resistance to gay marriage should not be placed upon it.  Unorthodox conservative Conor Friedersdorf, himself a supporter of gay marriage, makes a strong case here, arguing that not all such resistance arises from animus toward gays.  Many Eich detractors have compared anti-gay-marriage views to anti-mixed-race-marriage views, but Friedersdorf sees a difference:

Opposition to interracial marriage was all but synonymous with a belief in the superiority of one race and the inferiority of another. (In fact, it was inextricably tied to a singularly insidious ideology of white supremacy and black subjugation that has done more damage to America and its people than anything else, and that ranks among the most obscene crimes in history.) Opposition to gay marriage can be rooted in the insidious belief that gays are inferior, but it's also commonly rooted in the much-less-problematic belief that marriage is a procreative institution, not one meant to join couples for love and companionship alone.

But Friedersdorf doesn’t explain why the belief in marriage as a “procreative institution” doesn’t lead to opposition to marriage for the infertile or the elderly.  Are there those who consider childless marriages to be somehow lesser?  If so, even they wouldn’t prohibit such marriages.  Friedersdorf points out that there are many who oppose gay marriage but support civil unions, but racists never suggested anything like civil unions for interracial couples.  But if they had, wouldn’t we have rejected the proposal as still grounded in racism?  Friedersdorf’s point is that opponents of gay marriage are not as morally repugnant as the segregationists who opposed interracial marriage, and that seems quite true.  But even though they’re clearly not bigots in the most hateful sense, their opposition is just as irrational and indefensible.

Some writers argue that since resistance to gay marriage is largely based upon religious dogma it’s not fair to characterize opponents as bigots or to characterize that resistance as irrational, at least not in the usual sense of that word.  But frequently religion is not the source of political belief so much as its alibi.  That was clearly true with many of the religious arguments that Jim Crow-era racists made in support of white supremacy; they used the Bible to buttress cultural and political prejudices they held independently.  But some, including Damon Linker, think that sexual issues are different:

Racism — along with opposition to interracial marriage — received its primary historical validation from ideas, prejudices, and economic circumstances that have nothing directly to do with the message of Judeo-Christian scripture.  The same cannot be said about Judeo-Christianity's normative teaching on sexuality, which is rooted in both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. It is deeply intertwined with the authoritative dogmas and doctrines of churches followed by hundreds of millions of people throughout the world, and has also been repeatedly reaffirmed and elaborated on at great length and with considerable theological sophistication throughout a nearly 2,000-year tradition of thinking that runs right down to the present.

That is, Jewish and Christian dogma has much more to say about sex than about race.  Linker states the obvious, that opposition to homosexuality per se is central to traditional monotheism, but he states is as an excuse.  They may be bigots but it’s OK because their God endorses it.  It should be noted that this is a very different argument from Friedersdorf’s claim that many reject gay marriage who don’t reject homosexuality itself.  If someone disputes gay marriage because they’re sincerely convinced that the creator of the universe declares homosexuality repulsive and morally wrong then it’s ridiculous to deny that such a person is anti-gay.  Just because anti-gay belief is central to Judeo-Christian dogma should not make us give that belief a pass.  Maybe it should make them question that part of their dogma.

Religious conservative Peter Wehner argues that many religious objectors to same-sex marriage wrestle earnestly with the moral confusions raised:

Let me speak from a perspective within my own faith community. Based on conversations and having written and taught classes on the subject of Christianity and homosexuality, my sense is that many evangelical Christians are working through how to approach the issues of their faith and the gay rights movement with a good deal of care and integrity. They are attempting to be faithful to Scripture in a way that is characterized by grace rather than stridency. Even as they continue to oppose same-sex marriage, they are asking whether their own attitudes have been distorted by their own cultural and political assumptions and that the focus on homosexuality is, as I’ve put it elsewhere, wildly disproportionate to what one finds in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Particularly among younger evangelicals, there’s a palpable discomfort with the approach taken by prominent figures over the last few decades – people like (but not exclusive to) Franklin Graham, James Dobson, Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell. They are not the spokesmen they want to represent them or their faith.

Wehner is asking, in effect, for a little understanding of the difficult position in which many religious opponents find themselves.  They find the crude gay-bashing of some religious right leaders – Graham, Dobson, Robertson, Falwell – to be deeply offensive.  But at the same time the centrality of their religion’s sexual teachings makes them uncomfortable with things like gay marriage.  Are such people bigots?  Should their discomfort with gay marriage bar them from positions of power and influence?  How about the ones who support civil unions, should their attempts at conciliation illicit any from liberals in return?

Consider that even gays have had an ambivalent attitude toward gay marriage.  Before gays petitioned for marriage they asked merely to be left alone, they asked to be tolerated.  And for years, many straight Americans responded with what we can fairly call libertarian homophobia.  They looked down on gays, but allowed them their repugnant pursuit of happiness as long as it occurred behind closed doors, in their own neighborhoods, etc.  After a time and with the growing awareness of perfectly respectable gay individuals in their midst, that tolerance turned to something like acceptance, including the belief, for instance, that no one should be fired or denied housing simply for being gay.  Acceptance also ushered in the era of civil unions, which gave gay relationships the same legal rights and responsibilities as marriage, but without the name and the social status it implies. 

Strange as it may now seem, many gays initially resisted the notion of gay marriage (some still do).  They saw themselves as cultural separatists, licensed by their disparaged sexual desires to be rebels against silly bourgeois institutions like monogamy and marriage.  Conservatives like to remind us that marriage is a traditional institution with a venerable conservative pedigree.  Its goal is social stability; that is, it redirects the sexual urge into socially constructive channels, it tames sex.  And many gays were quite happy to see their urges remain un-channeled and untamed.  But the present-day fight for marriage equality seeks neither to ignore marriage nor to remake it; crucially, it seeks admission to the institution without wishing to change it.  It sees gay desire and gay life as no threat to anyone, not even middle class convention.  Gay couples can live in split-level suburban homes and drive their children to soccer practice in gas-guzzling SUV’s as wantonly and thoughtlessly as any heterosexual couple.  It turns out that Cam and Mitchell are just Ozzie and Harriet with different parts.  The 50’s absorbed the 60’s.  It fits perfectly that a transplanted Tory like Andrew Sullivan was the earliest prominent exponent of gay marriage.  It’s liberal to perceive that homosexuality is morally equal to heterosexuality, but it’s conservative to perceive that a traditional institution should express and nurture that equality.  Gay marriage isn’t the great uprising of sexual corruption and social destruction that it seems in the darkest conservatives fears; it’s not the end of traditional society, merely the accommodation of gay life to it.

But it’s an accommodation that forces the issue of approval.  Friedersdorf is right that marriage is a special case, but not because of its procreative function, because of its social function.  It may seem strange to be so vehement over a word, but the fight over the word “marriage” is so important because it conveys approval in a way “civil union” does not.  Marriage is crucially a social institution, a relationship that the entirety of society endorses, celebrates and blesses.  The push for gay marriage means gay equality can no longer be an issue of individual choice, one that I support and you oppose.  There’s always the right to disagree, of course, but society as a whole is being forced to choose one way or the other.  Society will either bless gay love and commitment the same as straight love and commitment, or it will it not.  There is no third option.

Now we see what’s at stake.  Gay marriage supporters are asking religious opponents to approve – not merely tolerate or accept – something that contradicts their fundamental views on the nature of morality and society.  Think about that.  That’s asking a lot.  That doesn’t mean that gays don’t deserve that approval; they do.  And it doesn’t mean there are defensible reasons for opposing gay marriage; there aren’t.  All arguments opposing gay marriage boil down to the inferiority of gay love, and are therefore fundamentally false.  But even though we can’t call that opposition defensible we might consider it understandable.  It’s not easy to remove one’s cultural prejudices – or even be aware of them! – and we could be a little more forgiving of those who find it so difficult to do so.  We all carry the weight of history, we are all unwilling products of our upbringings, and none of us is remotely free of prejudice or irrationality.  That doesn’t absolve anyone of the responsibility to examine and justify their beliefs, but it should make us a little less eager to punish dissent.  And we can be a little patient with religious objectors especially, particularly those of the good-faith variety that Wehner highlights, not because religion justifies their bigotry, but because it helps explain it. 

That intimate connection between Christianity and anti-gay feeling in a country as religious as ours is the greatest obstacle still facing the struggle for gay equality.  Gays understand the great power homophobia still commands and they fear its intractability.  Intolerance of anti-gay-marriage dissent is a manifestation not only of growing gay social, political and economic strength, but of gay vulnerability as well.  Gays now have some power, but without security.  They fear backlash and they fear reaction.  It’s that fear – plus justified righteousness and good old-fashioned vengefulness – that makes them strike where they can at hapless holdouts like Brendan Eich.

But generosity would suit the cause of gay equality more than crusading vindictiveness.  We are in the middle of an evolution, a process.  That process has brought us from a time only twenty years ago when gay marriage was seen as an impossibility to its near triumph today.  The pace of that evolution demonstrates the openness of the American people to such a clear and simple call for justice.  The end of that process will be a society in which rejection of gay marriage will be treated as social anathema, as the foolish and unjustifiable prejudice which it is.  But pluralism and prudence demand that our list of unacceptable opinions be kept as short as possible; it must include only those ideas that are the most objectionable and most destructive.  This is crucial to the kind of society we will be; only a scrupulously limited list is compatible with freedom of thought and expression.  It’s terribly dangerous to add to it too readily; that would stultify discourse and deaden our intellectual and social life, and possibly even lead to something like the left-wing McCarthyism envisioned in conservative nightmares.  That we’ve come so far so fast makes it more understandable that a large dissenting minority still exists.  Human minds can evolve only so fast.  And pushing too far, too fast can create just the sort of backlash that gays and gay supporters fear.  That practical concern, plus faith in the open society, plus charity toward our common human frailty, should keep opposition to same-sex marriage off the list, for now.  We shouldn’t try to force it before its time.  When a critical mass has been persuaded by reason, not subdued by threats, it will happen of its own accord.

The Whitest Guilt

Who is to blame for the ongoing social dysfunction – poverty, illegitimacy, drug abuse, violence – in much of the African-American community?  More reliably than almost any other issue, your answer reveals you as a liberal or a conservative.  The standard liberal understanding is that the persistence of white racism traps blacks in bad jobs, terrible neighborhoods, constricted lives.  There are more sophisticated liberal explanations that involve the loss in recent decades of urban industrial jobs as well as the legacy of centuries of slavery, deliberate segregation and debilitating social and economic oppression.  Conservatives, on the other hand, attribute black social dysfunction to black cultural pathology, that is, to attitudes and norms prevalent in the black community that discourage behavior broadly associated with success, e.g. family stability, educational attainment, steady work, self-control.  The sophisticated liberal explanations lay some blame at the feet of African-American culture, but what characterizes the conservative explanations is the focus on cultural explanations to the exclusion of anything else.  To conservatives, blacks alone are to blame for their plight.

Paul Ryan, conservative Republican congressman from Wisconsin and the 2012 GOP Vice Presidential nominee, recently got in trouble for expressing just that view.  Here’s what he said on March 12^th on conservative Bill Bennett’s “Morning in America” radio show:

We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.

The immediate, forceful reaction from many quarters on the left was that Ryan was trafficking in surreptitious racism.  That is, he was referring in coded language to the black community particularly, characterizing African-Americans as work-averse and attributing that aversion to moral failure.  That is, blacks are poor because they’re lazy.  The very next day Ryan shifted into full politician damage-control mode, labeling his comments “inarticulate”, meeting with African-American political leaders, denying he had meant blacks in particular, and (sounding suspiciously like a liberal) blaming the troubles of the poor on “society as a whole.”

Seriously?  Can anyone doubt he was criticizing African-American culture?  Ryan’s radio comments are the sort of thing conservatives always say when addressing the troubles of poor blacks.  Some have pointed out Newt Gingrich’s similar remarks made while running for president in 2012:

Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day; they have no habit of “I do this and you give me cash,” unless it's illegal.

Is it possible Gingrich wasn’t talking about blacks?  No, that’s exactly who he was talking about!  Ryan’s remarks may not have been as artless as Gingrich’s, but his point was the same: African-American culture does not sufficiently inculcate an ethic of work and self-sufficiency.  It’s not exactly calling them lazy, but it comes dangerously close to that ancient and appalling racist libel.

But it’s not the same.  There’s nothing necessarily racist about assessing a culture as deficient in some particular.  Some cultures are clearly better at some things – consider the Italian attitude of slowing down and enjoying life – and not so good at other things – consider the lax Italian attitude toward bribery.  Each culture arises from a unique, complex and contingent set of circumstances and each has its strengths and weaknesses.  Cultures are like unhappy families, each imperfect in its own way.  To be racist one has to believe an ethnic group is inherently inferior, that it has some genetically-determined quality that unavoidably causes it to fall behind.  If Ryan meant to imply this about African-Americans then he was indeed expressing racism, and if he meant to subtly signal such notions to receptive whites he was indeed employing racist dog whistles.  But is there any reason to think so?  Ryan did himself no favor by citing, in his original comments, Charles Murray of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, a writer infamous for claiming that African-American social problems result from their genetically-determined inferior intelligence.  Yes, that’s right.  Ryan says he meant nothing racist – that he wasn’t even referring to blacks particularly! – while citing an explicitly racist writer.  This is inarticulateness of the highest order!

But even though all conservatives attribute black troubles to black culture, not all conservatives attribute black cultural dysfunction to black genes.  Indeed, even Ryan probably didn’t mean that.  And, as noted, many liberals believe black culture does play an important part in black troubles.  Here’s Jonathan Chait:

The argument is that structural conditions shape culture, and culture, in turn, can take on a life of its own independent of the forces that created it. It would be bizarre to imagine that centuries of slavery, followed by systematic terrorism, segregation, discrimination, a legacy wealth gap, and so on did not leave a cultural residue that itself became an impediment to success.

To these more sophisticated liberals, the horrific historical treatment of African-Americans has left a terrible legacy which, through normal cultural transmission, continues even now to debilitate African-American attitudes and norms.  That is, oppression by whites caused the problems of black culture, and once such pathologies took hold they became quite hard to mend.  Non-racist conservative explanations for black social pathology ignore those hundreds of years of oppression and instead revolve around the liberal welfare state.  To conservatives, excessive liberal condemnation of America’s real and imagined sins leads blacks to see themselves as victims deserving compensation in the form of government handouts.  Thus liberals provide both the rationale and the funding for black dependency and sloth.  So liberals blame the present-day troubles of blacks on their historical mistreatment at the hands of the dominant white power structure, as well as the persisting white racism that liberals find all too evident.  That is, traditional American society – the society that liberals fought so hard to improve and that conservatives fought so hard to preserve – is at fault.  Meanwhile, conservatives fault many of those same liberal improvements (while failing, of course, to credit liberalism’s clear successes, such as civil rights laws).  When it comes to the problems of African-Americans, liberals and conservatives, unsurprisingly, blame each other.

Birmingham, Alabama, 1963

But conservatives never seriously address the historical and traditional oppression – cruel, violent, horribly destructive – of blacks by whites.  Conservative analysis of African-American dysfunction begins with the Great Society, as if nothing relevant happened before then.  They seem embarrassed by discussions of slavery and Jim Crow, by the thought that America could have committed such momentous and monstrous crimes.  And this reluctance, this touchiness, is of a piece with conservative hyper-sensitivity to charges of racism.  When liberals accused Ryan of race-hustling, conservatives howled at the injustice.  Every time conservatives talk about racial problems they blame blacks, and every time they’re accused of racism they blame liberals.  They’re desperate to escape any accountability on race!  No rational person believes all of conservatism is tainted by racism, but there is no denying the historical fact that modern American conservatism was founded upon implacable antipathy toward three huge threats to traditional society: international communism, the welfare state and racial integration.  Liberal success in substantially actualizing that third threat has ironically given some cover to the conservative claim that whites no longer hold blacks back.  Conservatives mock liberals for what they call “white guilt”, i.e. the desperate liberal shame over being part of the race that treated blacks so badly for so long.  They believe white guilt enervates liberals by robbing them of the moral authority needed to place blame where it belongs: at the feet of blacks themselves.  But consider the absurd conservative refusal to confront not only present-day racism but even historical racism, particularly conservative complicity in historical racism.  We can only call this preposterous denial the conservative version of white guilt.  While there is some truth to the notion that liberals too readily let African-Americans avoid their responsibilities, it’s conservatives who scramble like madmen to avoid their own.

And the notion of conservative white guilt helps explain another quite strange phenomenon: white fear of oppression by blacks.  To be conservative is to believe that in present-day America whites are more mistreated by blacks than the reverse.  This putative oppression takes many forms: black-on-white crime, liberal taxation to pay for plush welfare benefits for blacks, affirmative action programs that take jobs from deserving whites and give them to undeserving blacks, black intimidation of white voters, black calls for reparations for slavery.  Rush Limbaugh famously referred to Obamacare as “reparations.”  Indeed, it’s black self-pity and resentment that causes our racial troubles.  Whites are now the true victims of racism, mostly at the hands of a “racial grievance industry” run by “race hustlers”, the most infamous being Al Sharpton.  And the most vicious form such vile race hatred takes is the constant liberal accusation of conservative racism.  In this view, Paul Ryan is more of a victim than the poor “inner city” denizens to whom he condescends.  Conservatives are hyper-aware that racism of the old-fashioned kind is now so comprehensively and thoroughly delegitimized that any taint of it instantly undermines any position or policy.  In this view no charges of white racism are ever valid; they’re all transparent attempts to silence or marginalize conservatives and conservative ideas, as bludgeons used to beat down whites fighting for fair treatment.  In the 60’s it was Bull Connor spraying demonstrators with fire hoses, now it’s the Huffington Post spewing defamation of conservative whites.

But the worst white fear, going back at least as far as Reconstruction, is fear of blacks in power.  When Obama first ran for president in 2008 he received more votes in almost every county than had his 2004 Democratic predecessor, John Kerry.  But in a broad swath of the Upland South, stretching from West Virginia through Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas, Obama got a smaller percentage of the vote than Kerry.  We need not wonder why this area bucked the national trend.  When (in another context) voters in this area were asked why they didn’t vote for Obama they expressed fear of “minorities in positions over the white race”.  This is the fear of black revenge.  But revenge for what?  Deep down conservative whites know blacks are right to be so profoundly aggrieved, and so profoundly aggrieved at them.  This is conservative white guilt: if the Negroes get in charge they’ll screw us the way we’ve screwed them.  To such people, all liberals are carpetbaggers and all liberalism is reparations.

Paul Krugman, in a piece on the Ryan controversy, argues that “American conservatism is still, after all these years, largely driven by claims that liberals are taking away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those People.  Indeed, race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics,” such as conservative support for Medicare paired with opposition to Medicaid.  Krugman is right to see white populism lurking behind many domestic conservative policies, particularly white opposition to the welfare state (of course, such opposition has perfectly legitimate non-racial motivations, as well).  But there’s more going on in the racial churn than just white anger over paying taxes for Those People.  There’s white fear of retribution and there’s the stubborn white refusal to face responsibility.  And, importantly, there’s the boiling resentment at liberal attempts to force that responsibility upon them.  No one likes to be reminded of the guilt they’re trying so hard to repress.  This is less about income tax rates and more about the shackle and the poll tax and the lynching noose and the long shadow they cast over white American pride. 

And that illuminates what liberal charges of racism are really after.  Sure, sometimes liberals use those charges to bully, to intimidate, to silence.  “Racist” is for liberals what “socialist” is for conservatives: a clumsy but powerful rhetorical weapon.  And sometimes liberals honestly see racism where none exists; for some liberals it’s always 1965 on the march from Montgomery to Selma.  But deeper down is the earnest liberal wish that conservatives face up to the persistent hard realities of race in America and undertake the hard work of racial expiation as liberals have tried to do. Before the Civil Rights era, liberalism largely ignored the problems of blacks; to maintain the partisan unity that made the New Deal possible the Democratic Party acquiesced to the demands of its southern conservative wing and denied government benefits to blacks. But, starting in the 1960’s, liberals atoned for their racial sins by trying substantively to address these issues.  Indeed, the entire conservative critique of racial liberalism is that it has atoned all too well – and that the atonement is underwritten by those in strenuous dissent.  But that dissident resentment helps perpetuate the antipathy toward African-Americans that keeps them in their collective place.  Why does the party that espouses small government and individual freedom find it so necessary to justify even obvious and genuine expressions of white animosity?  The issue of past and persistent African-American misery is not one issue among many, it is central to the acrimonious and hateful ideological divide that plagues us.  The hard feelings of guilt, resentment and fear it elicits polarize and poison all of our politics.  Liberals react to every remotely insensitive conservative remark as the second coming of Bull Connor. And conservatives react same way to every liberal accusation of racism (even those with clear merit) and thereby harden racial alienation and deepen our ideological polarization.

But let’s stand athwart that vicious cycle and yell Stop!  There are few genuine Bull Connor’s still around.  But there are some (don’t you know any?) and liberals are right to expose them.  But how bleeding obvious is it that liberals must be more fair and circumspect in their accusations, but also that conservatives must respond with more open and honest self-examination.  Even though there are the more sophisticated liberal explanations for African-American troubles, the liberal instinct is to blame only white racism and excuse almost any bad black behavior.  That’s because liberals are so exquisitely aware of the terrible reality of white-on-black oppression – both historically and in its current subtler forms – that blaming black culture at all feels to them like blaming the victim.  And conservatives are working so tirelessly to avoid that same awareness that they cannot blame anyone else.  But liberals need to remember that victims can act badly too.  And they need to understand that racial resentment and racial bigotry may be closely related, but they are not the same.  It may be more gratifying to stomp the latter, but they’d do better to soothe the former.

But here is the crucial question: Can conservatives be made to acknowledge and appreciate the historical and continuing immiseration of African-Americans?  They must, but they almost certainly won’t.  There are so many obstacles that seem so insurmountable: a conservative communications complex invested in pushing racial hot-buttons, the social and economic separation of whites and blacks, the worsening of political polarization and mutual mistrust, and – most importantly – 60 years of smoldering resentment.  But just as African-Americans must acknowledge their own cultural shortcomings and assume the responsibility and hard work needed to overcome them, so must conservatives take responsibility for how their own denial of racial reality contributes to our painful political polarization.  Conservatives may comfort themselves with the thought that African-Americans vote for Democrats in overwhelming numbers because liberals enable their victimhood, but blacks easily perceive conservative racial irresponsibility and resentment.  Thus, as the demographics slowly move America in a more racially diverse direction they also move it in an irrevocably liberal direction.  But the conviction that whites owe blacks nothing – not transfer payments, not preferential treatment, not protection for voting rights, not even understanding – is so central to conservative ideology and psychology that they couldn’t give it up without a radical reworking of their worldview.  Conservative white guilt is at the heart of our ongoing political dysfunction and unhappiness.  Unable to come to terms with the enormity of the moral failure of traditional American culture, unable to concede the persistence of racial mistreatment, unable to accept their own complicity, they consign African-Americans to unequal treatment, themselves to resentful alienation, and all of us to bitter division and strife.

Freedom, Work, Drudgery and Danger

American coal miners

If you won the lottery, would you still work?  No, you’d have the freedom to indulge yourself in worldly pleasures: travelling, socializing, thrill-seeking, etc.  But eventually you would probably find a life of indolence and hedonism unsatisfying, and would long for activity that both engaged your talents and benefitted society.  Without your millions, of course, you would be compelled to work, and the extent that a job gratified your talents would become secondary to the extent that it gratified your need for food and housing.  That is, most people work to survive and only a lucky few find work that’s deeply satisfying.  Does a garbage man find as much satisfaction in his work as an architect?  How about a cafeteria worker or a data entry clerk or a coal miner?  No, most of the work that most people do is drudgery, and most people would happily give it up if not compelled to it by economic necessity.  It’s true that all honest work imparts dignity and there is some satisfaction in simply doing your job well.  And in a society of equal opportunity – something to which our society provides at best a rough approximation – anyone with sufficient talent and determination can become a successful architect or neurosurgeon or musician.  But the great majority of people work not for the satisfaction or the dignity.  They work because survival obligates them to a life of unsatisfying and unforgiving drudgery.  For most people, work is coercion.

But imagine if some of that coercion could be lifted.  Imagine a person working an unsatisfying job only for the health insurance provided by her employer (that’s how most Americans get health insurance).  Maybe she or someone in her family requires expensive medical treatment, or maybe independent medical insurance is prohibitively expensive.  But now imagine a change in the system allows her to get cheap but good health insurance somewhere else.  Now she can afford to quit her job and give up the modest pay.  Maybe she wants to quit so she can stay home with her young children or her aging parent.  Maybe she wants to go back to college or start her own business.  Maybe she wants to retire a few years early.  Or maybe she wants to keep her job and simply work fewer hours and spend more time with her family.  Maybe she’s just happy knowing that her expanded health care options give her more choices and more opportunities, more control over her own life.  Isn’t it a tiny bit like winning the lottery?  That is, aren’t we imagining she has more freedom?

Well, you don’t have to imagine.  According to a report by the non-partisan and broadly respected Congressional Budget Office (CBO) there are millions of people who will work less or not at all because they can now obtain cheap and dependable health insurance through Obamacare.  As Josh Barro explains, “Broadly, one key goal of health policy should be to let people make work decisions without worrying about how those decisions affect their health insurance.”  That wasn’t the central intent of the health care law, but it sure seems like a positive development.  Well, there are many conservatives who adamantly don’t think so.  Welcome to the latest battle in the Obamacare wars.

At first many conservatives, blinded by Obamacare-hatred into abandoning either understanding or scruples, proclaimed that the CBO is reporting that Obamacare will destroy millions of jobs.  Some Republican politicians eagerly misrepresented the issue for electoral gain.  Even the supposedly liberal mainstream press thoughtlessly parroted stories about “lost” jobs.  There are no lost jobs, of course, only defecting workers, as clarified in this exchange between conservative Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan and CBO director Douglas Elmendorf as the latter appeared before the House Budget Committee:

"Just to understand, it is not that employers are laying people off," Ryan said.

"That is right," Elmendorf said.

There is a huge difference between being fired and quitting, as anyone who has actually held a job knows.  As Elmendorf testified:

The reason we don’t use the term “lost jobs” is there is a critical difference between people who like to work and can’t find a job — or have a job that’s lost for reasons beyond their control — and people who choose not to work. If someone comes up to you and says, “The boss says I’m being laid off because we don’t have enough business to pay,” [then] any other person feels bad about that and we sympathize for them having lost their job. If someone says, “I decided to retire or stay home and spend more time with my family and spend more time doing my hobby,” they don’t feel bad about it — they feel good about it. And we don’t sympathize. We say congratulations.

Exactly!  But some conservatives are so sure that no Obamacare news is good news they simply pretend that the “lost jobs” tale hasn’t been thoroughly debunked and persist in their misrepresentations.  Consider the semantically-challenged David Harsanyi:

“Obamacare is inducing labor demand to shrink!” doesn’t have the quite the same punch as “Obamacare is costing us jobs!” though both are accurate.

No, normal English usage compels us to call the first sentence accurate, the second one inaccurate, and Harsanyi’s point ridiculous.

Some conservatives deny that even though Obamacare will let some people quit their jobs, that won’t constitute an increase in their freedom.  Charles C. W. Cooke writes in the National Review Online that whatever else one can say about taxing one person to subsidize another:

one cannot claim that it makes either man “free” — at least not without twisting the word and the concept that it represents beyond all meaningful recognition.

That’s because the need to scramble for survival does not constitute coercion in any sense:

Does the Obama administration really plan to make the case that negative liberty is but a mirage and that, the state of nature’s “forcing” one to work being akin to actual compulsion, the state must step in everywhere to liberate the citizenry from reality’s harsh claims? One suspects not.

Let’s overlook Cooke’s rather slapdash treatment of the theoretical concepts of negative liberty and the state of nature, and rephrase his position in everyday terms: He seems to be saying that the brutish struggle for existence is an unavoidable reality of even a thoroughly free life; alleviating that brutishness does not increase one’s freedom, only one’s comfort.  Every person, every creature, in every situation, must struggle for sustenance and shelter.  This feels intuitively plausible: it seems a little odd to think of the demands of one’s own biology as coercions.  But this argument overlooks two important points.  First, there’s no reason an increase in comfort can’t yield an increase in freedom.  To the extent that it’s actually possible to moderate the struggle for survival such that one’s biological needs don’t consume one’s resources to the same degree, those needs can be coherently thought of as coercive.  If survival didn’t compel one to spend so much time hunting down wooly mammoths or waiting on tables then one would have more options, more control over one’s life, more freedom.  Second, in modern society both the freedoms and constrictions of economic life are not just natural, but social as well; they manifest the rules we’ve agreed to live by.  There is a difference between the hinter-gatherer chasing down prey on the savannah and the worker who through lack of independent means is forced to sell his labor on the open market.  In the modern world economic survival can be made less or more harsh by (among other things) actions of society or the state.  Marginally liberating individuals by subsidizing their health insurance is not like trying to counteract all of “reality’s harsh claims”; it’s not like trying to repeal old age or gravity; it’s more like a hunter-gatherer discovering a grove of abundantly productive fruit trees.  It’s more like winning a lesser lottery ticket.

But, though Cooke’s logic does not convince, it does illuminate.  Misapprehending capitalism, a social institution, as a purely natural phenomenon – like the struggle for survival – is a widespread conservative fallacy.  Perceiving all political and social issues as amenable to black-and-white moralistic solutions is another.  Put the two together and you have conservative economics.  To Cooke, when the state tries to revise the natural workings of the market it commits both arrogance and immorality.  His conservative colleague, writer Michael Goodwin, likewise considers it a sin, and the abetting of sin: Choosing to work less hours because the government subsidizes your health insurance is shameful, if not downright un-American!

In [the old, pre-liberal] America, work, any work, was honorable while being on the dole was cause for shame. Still is.

That is, liberals are blind to the moral nobility of self-sufficiency; that’s probably why they’re always plotting to ensnare people into government bondage:

This anti-job, pro-dependency tilt is the crux of the nation’s polarization. In essence, it pits those who believe in the sanctity of work against those who believe in penalizing wealth and redistributing its fruits.

Sanctity!  Goodwin beats even Cooke in the competition for most abstractly moralistic understanding of labor in the modern world.  Cooke may believe it’s natural but Goodwin actually believes it’s holy!  Goodwin attempts to describe the essence of our national polarization, but instead he embodies it.  Conservatives issue furious sermons about the naturalness and sanctity of the free market while ignoring its actual results.  Liberals actually perceive capitalism’s “harsh realities” – its coercion, its amorality, its inability to deliver universal healthcare – and hope to moderate them in limited and prudential ways that increase individual comfort and freedom.  Moralistic, dogmatic platitudes vs. pragmatic, prudential solutions.  That’s the real crux of our polarization.  Here it pits the absolutist, pre-ordained certainty that the state can’t possibly make anyone freer against the practical reality that sometimes it does just that.

And there’s all the usual handwringing about the evils of redistribution.  As Repair_Man_Jack of redstate.com puts it:

The freedom to sit on your butt and do nothing at another citizen’s expense is expressly parasitic and malignant.

Well, at least he concedes it’s freedom!  But all social insurance requires redistribution, from Social Security to unemployment insurance to student loans to Medicare and Medicaid.  Every government activity, even the provision of education and highways and the military, includes those who pay who will not benefit and those who benefit who have not paid.  You can’t have anything like universal healthcare without some redistribution; the young, healthy and affluent have to help pay for the old, sick and poor.  And once you subsidize the old, sick and poor they may find less need to hold a job or work so many hours.  To pay for Obamacare you do have to marginally increase someone’s taxes and that does marginally decrease that someone’s freedom.  That is, you’re redistributing not only money, but freedom.  You’re marginally increasing the coercion on the taxed worker so that the Obamacare recipient can work less.  But much of the revenue for Obamacare comes from taxes on the upper economic strata (and much of the rest from hospitals and insurance companies), that is, on those who already have the most freedom.  Even the extravagantly hated individual mandate to buy health insurance is really only a tax on not buying it, and a minor tax at that.  And everyone may someday need government-subsidized healthcare; indeed, every American who lives to 65 qualifies for Medicare, a program even Tea Partiers seem to love.  Why is Obamacare is any less defensible?  If you believe they’re all indefensible and the entire welfare state should be repealed, you’d better be prepared for the quite harsh economic and social conditions that prevailed before its creation.  Would that represent an increase in freedom? The person who worked 14 hours a day in deadly conditions his entire life without hope of retirement might have found some appreciation in the purely abstract freedom of his condition, but it’s doubtful that offset the all-too-real crushing coercions he actually lived under.

But from the perspective of the highly moralized conservative point of view, redistribution is robbing Peter to pay Paul, and it not only cheats Peter, it diminishes Paul.  As Jonathan Chait explains, Obamacare recipients have become the new welfare queens.  To John Podhoretz such recipients risk the loss of self-sufficiency:

This is the classic problem of a government handout: It can become more alluring to those who receive it than the prospect of a life lived without it.

Charles Krauthammer puts it rather less kindly:

In [Obama’s] new opportunity society, you are given the opportunity for idleness while living parasitically off everyone else.

Repair Man Jack gets downright visceral:

So behind all the benevolent language about being free to quit is a call to greater personal dependence instead of responsibility. Why isn’t this relief from responsibility good? It is antipodal to good because it takes a free-minded, productive and independent citizens and turns them into the human equivalent of intestinal parasites. These parasites then degrade and eat out the sustenance of others.

Jack’s fascination with intestine-eating aside, a person who works less or quits their job because of government subsidies is not a parasite.  What have we come to that American workers actually need to be defended against such vile slander?  These are people who have been working or looking for work, not looking for a handout.  Health insurance subsidies do not “turn them into” anything other than healthier, more secure, more autonomous Americans. Are people who retire on Social Security parasites?  What about capable and healthy retirees?  Should Social Security be repealed so they’re forced to get off their lazy butts and go hustle for jobs?  Or consider the G.I. Bill, which provided government-sponsored mortgages, business loans and college tuition for servicemen and women returning from World War II – did it turn them into parasites?  And just because Obamacare allows a person to quit her job doesn’t mean she has stopped working (especially if she is merely working fewer hours).  A person who stays home to take care of her children or her parents or her home is still working and still contributing to society.

But, though government assistance need not transform one into a parasite, you need not be a raving hysteric to appreciate that it might weaken one’s self-sufficiency, it might weaken one’s work ethic; indeed, it might weaken everyone’s.  Andrew Sullivan almost agrees with Goodwin about the crux of our polarization:

It’s struck me that there is an underlying anxiety to several of our current debates on economic and social issues. That anxiety is that the American work ethic – unparalleled in the developed world – is under threat. That’s the real critique of Obamacare

Though it’s not clear he’s on Goodwin’s side of that polarization:

The Protestant work ethic we have, for example, is the imperative for industrious striving, self-advancement and material gain. It is emphatically not about being happy. And at some point, if those two values are not easily compatible, something will give.

The Puritan work ethic has, to a great extent, served us well, though it does have the downsides that Sullivan touches upon.  But that work ethic doesn’t seem dead just yet.  There is an ongoing tension in American public life between the pragmatic need to ameliorate the excesses of capitalism and a political folk culture that worships self-sufficiency, and that tension is not about to ease any time soon.  And even if the liberal view of capitalism came to dominate it would not necessarily mean the death of the work ethic.  One of liberalism’s fondest dreams is that working people be fairly rewarded for their labor.  Second-guessing capitalist outcomes looks like an attack on the work ethic only if you believe the harshness of the market is a necessary corrective to the enervating human desire for sponsored comfort.  To conservatives, the unforgiving necessity for hard work is positively beneficial in that it polices a naturally weak and unambitious populace.  But American workers want just what liberals want for them: to work hard and to reap the benefits, one of which might be working fewer hours because of a health insurance subsidy.  Should we really fear that when the workers in question leave their jobs they will so casually fall into inactivity, despondency and sloth?  At base, the fierce conservative attack on the welfare state is about the Puritanical dread of corrupting, lazy irresponsibility.  They’re convinced the freed man won’t feel the need for work, the urge to create and produce and contribute we ascribed to the lottery winner; instead he’ll embrace indolence, hedonism and immorality.  So the workforce must be kept hungry; not because hungry workers will work for less (though the investor class does not object), but because hunger keeps them busy, it keeps them honest.

We see the political forces arrayed against freedom for the American worker:  There is an ideological worldview that sees exemption from wage labor as unnatural and morally debilitating, a culture that equates moral value with economic value and freedom with self-sufficiency.  There is the warped version of the work ethic that’s convinced that inside each worker is a welfare cheat just aching to jump out.  And there is the ferocity of a partisan movement in the grip of these mythologies, righteous in its insistence that moralistic absolutes override the bread-and-butter concerns of people’s actual lives.  And, most fundamentally there are the ideological blinders that prevent the clear apprehension of the coercion that plays such a large part in the lives of working people.  Cooke finds:

a great deal of truth in The Economist’s observation that “a job is an economic transaction between a seller and a buyer of labour, and can be ‘destroyed’ if either seller or buyer walks away.”

It may seem here that Cooke is toying with the pretense of some of his less scrupulous conservative colleagues that the CBO report proves Obamacare is destroying jobs.  But it’s not mendacity that tempts him to support the Economist’s laughable “observation”, it’s the constrictions of his own ideology.  In real life, no job is destroyed when a worker walks away; there is always a line of people eagerly waiting to take his place (especially during a weak recovery).  A job is a thing an employer dispenses; it cannot be destroyed by a seller of labor.  Labor is a buyer’s market; in the real lives of most people, the employer holds the power.  CBO Director Elmendorf reminds us how we pity the man who’s been fired, but congratulate the man who quits.  That’s because the quitting man has acquired the economic power to meet the boss as an equal, as one who is free of the boss’s power.  Such a man has shed one of life’s coercions.

But there is no room in conservative ideology to address that coercion; that’s why conservatives have been so exercised by a provocative tweet from the Huffington Post’s Congressional reporter, Michael McAuliff:

There's an irony in the GOP complaining that ACA lets people quit jobs. I mean, what's wrong with freedom?

Conservatives can’t imagine a subsidy recipient has been freed from a compulsion whose existence they can’t even perceive!  In their worldview it’s not only acceptable, but essential that families mold individuals, schools indoctrinate them, religion restrain them, mores chasten them, and the market allocate them.  But interference from the federal government is the darkest tyranny!  What’s actually wrong with freedom – actual individual freedom – in the conservative mind is that it dis-empowers families, schools, religion, mores and the market.  The freedom that conservatives genuinely value is the unconstrained power of those institutions to exert their traditional moral authority over their charges, to manage them.

To be fair, there is another side to such freedom that conservatives value at least as much: the individual self-sufficiency those institutions are charged with instilling and enforcing.  To a conservative, individual freedom without individual responsibility is no freedom at all.  Overlooking the semantic confusion, liberals value their version of freedom because it allows individuals to pursue their own goals and develop their individual talents and personalities.  Conservatives value their version of freedom because it produces righteous and responsible providers and protectors (yes, it still includes a profoundly male tone).  But it’s a strange sort of freedom that requires ongoing and overpowering direction and enforcement from social institutions like the church and the market.  Once again, it’s not clear how much conservatives trust truly free individuals to make their own choices.  To a liberal, if a subsidy allows an individual to develop herself more, then she simply is more free, regardless of the financial source for the subsidy.  To a conservative she has forgone her freedom, her autonomy, for a gilded cage.

Comprehensive freedom from work is, of course, both impossible and undesirable, while comprehensive freedom from drudgery is merely impossible.  The struggle for existence and the capitalist need for wage labor are, obviously, the most important and most inescapable enemies of freedom from drudgery.  But if we can allow workers to work marginally less and in such a way that it barely affects either the economy or the social fabric, then what is so wrong with that?  At bottom, conservatives reject the notion that such workers are more free because they’ve confused freedom with responsibility.  Freedom seems to be merely their word for the arrangement of interlocking, constraining institutions that punish irresponsibility and thereby enforce morality.  The conservative sensibility, with its overwrought Puritan anxieties, can’t seem to escape the fear that real freedom – freedom to say “No” to the boss or the patriarch or the minister – is dangerous.  That’s because real freedom means the redistribution of power – the power to quit without starving, power over your own time and energy – and that threatens traditional authority and the view of moral order it represents.  That’s what’s wrong with freedom, as far as conservatives are concerned.  But given the overwhelming necessity of work and the coercion it entails, respect for the labor of our fellow Americans should prevent us from begrudging them the small slivers of power and freedom we might provide.  Their respite from drudgery represents a small victory for everyone who labors.  Let’s trust them to enjoy it and cultivate it and profit from it as they will.