The Value Theory of Labor

What is the value of a person's labor?  This is the question at the heart of the debate over the minimum wage, a debate re-ignited by President Obama’s call to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 an hour.  Such a question may sound like an economic question, but it is in fact a political question.  Common sense says wages should be determined by the market; that is, the employer and the employee in question should negotiate a mutually agreeable wage based upon their particular interests.  But it is society as whole that determines what is common sense in such matters.  Economic decisions cannot be so cleanly removed from the moral and social assumptions that condition them.  And liberals and conservatives, of course, bring with them quite different assumptions, based upon quite different understandings of the nature of capitalist economic activity.  Both sides reference studies, pro and con, on the economic effects of raising the minimum wage, but that argument misses the deeper issues.  When we argue over the minimum wage we are really arguing over which moral understanding of capitalism should inform government policy.  That’s why liberals and conservatives cherry-pick the economic studies that buttress their respective positions.  We don’t practice economics, we choose economics, and for that we are all responsible.

Liberals believe that, ideally, economic activity should satisfy three considerations: economics, justice, and social stability.  First, it should pay economic actors (workers, employers, investors) their market value.  Second, it should benefit them enough to live decently; it should keep them out of poverty.  Work is itself a moral good, not merely an economic one.  Steady work makes a person more responsible and orderly and productive, and justice demands that its rewards should reflect that moral worth.  Every honest job imparts dignity, but meager wages insult that dignity.  Third, work which satisfies the second consideration will make society stronger.  A just economy makes a stable society.  A well-cared-for worker contributes socially; he plans for the future and raises his children to also be responsible and productive.  That is, a well-paid worker is a happy worker and a happy worker is a good citizen.  Obviously, though, in the real world it happens all too frequently that the second and third considerations are not satisfied.  It is a stark injustice for a person to be paid only $290 for 40 long hours of flipping burgers or mopping floors.  And if there were no minimum wage at all, he might make much less.  Honest work deserves more.  It earns more.

Of course, conservatives care just as deeply as liberals about economics, justice and social stability.  But we can clearly see the major difference between liberal and conservative views: To a conservative, a just wage is the market wage, there can be no discrepancy.  That is, there are no moral or social considerations that demand a worker be paid more than the market pays him.  The unfettered market delivers justice all by itself; it rewards virtue and punishes sin.  If a stock broker makes $300,000 a year and a cashier makes only $15,000 it’s because the stock broker is determined, hard-working and self-disciplined and the cashier is lax, lazy and self-indulgent.  Their wages represent their respective moral worth.  Any independent moral judgments or attempts to interfere in capitalism – such as mandating a minimum wage – only undermine the wonderful moral enforcement mechanism that is the free market.  Indeed, to even question the results of the free market is to undermine that moral enforcement.  This explains conservative temper in the face of liberal criticism of economic outcomes.  If you tell that cashier that his labor deserves more than $15,000 then you’ve removed his incentive to become as determined, hard-working and self-disciplined as the stock broker.  You’ve weakened him morally.  You’ve filled him with resentment and envy.  He’s now less of citizen, less self-reliant, more likely to become a ward of the state.  This is the crucial point: to a conservative, labor loses its social value if its moral value is not explicitly equated with its economic value.

Now, this conservative identification of economic and moral value is sometimes mistaken for amorality.  It may look as if conservatives applaud capitalism’s ruthless pursuit of profit, as if they’re refusing to make moral judgments about its materialism, destructiveness and chaos.  And that would be uncharacteristic, given the stern, black-and-white judgments conservatives typically make on other matters, such as drugs, crime, and sex and procreation (especially on sex and procreation!).  Indeed such moralism seems essential to conservatism.  But conservatives have not freed capitalism of moral judgments; instead they perceive capitalist outcomes in and of themselves as proper moral judgments.  Their Puritan moralism doesn’t overlook capitalism, it pervades it, it absorbs it.  Moralism is the way they understand capitalism; it’s the way they incorporate it into conservative ideology; it’s the way they profess capitalism while remaining conservatives.  But the result is that the workings of capitalism become sanctified, they come to define morality rather than the other way around.  Moralism becomes the servant of capitalism, God the servant of Mammon.  And, as we saw, capitalism becomes immune to criticism.  When was the last time you heard a conservative decry labor exploitation or growth in inequality?  Liberals are able to see capitalism as sometimes ruthless, destructive and chaotic; their ideology allows them to make such independent moral and social judgments.  They understand that capitalism is as imperfect as any human institution, that it takes as well as gives, that along with its enormous benefits comes the occasional loss.  On this issue, the conservative position is a caricature of the liberal one.

But conservatives also fear the instrument that liberals propose for making economics more just: the state.  But it’s not that they fear the loss of freedom that accompanies state intervention in the economy; more precisely, it’s not only that (fears of tyranny figure heavy in conservative lore).  What they really fear is losing the moral enforcement that only a free market can provide.  Reliance upon help from the state breeds dependence and dependence breeds irresponsibility.  Conservatives would oppose the minimum wage even if they were utterly convinced it reduced poverty, because poverty reduced by government rather than by individual effort has lost its moral force.  Poverty becomes merely an economic condition, rather than a moral one, and there would have to be unhappy consequences.  Here we see a central premise of conservative thought: policies based on false moral foundations cannot possibly have good practical results.  The moral structure of the universe has practical implications; good intentions and well-researched technocracy cannot override that structure.  Liberals, on the other hand, are more pragmatic.  Most liberals, if honestly convinced that the minimum wage harmed working people more than it helped, would abandon it and go searching for economic justice by other means.  Quite probably, some liberals would still want to keep it to send the message that society frowns upon unjust wages, but that’s not simply the left-wing version of conservative anti-pragmatism.  Conservatives don’t oppose the minimum wage because it sends the wrong message; they oppose it because morally faulty policy simply cannot work (thank God!).  To a conservative, moralism is the highest pragmatism.

But it’s ironic that the highly moralized conservative defense of capitalism fatally compromises that very morality.  When one’s morals cannot allow genuine criticism of economic reality then those morals have lost their independence, they’ve been co-opted.  Morals so subordinated to a human institution can make no credible claim to objectivity.  By defending all capitalist activity as an expression of God’s will, modern conservatism has made morality into the public relations firm for capitalist amorality, for its materialism and consumerism and thoughtless acquisition.  This is morality in the service of relativism.  It’s almost as if conservatives had become libertarians.  Conservatives and libertarians, of course, both support the free market and are thought to differ only in their views of social issues (e.g. the legality of marijuana use).  But the libertarian view of capitalism is essentially amoral; the highest good is freedom from forcible coercion and what people do with that freedom is not a libertarian concern.  This means that, unlike liberals and conservatives, libertarians want wages to represent only economic value, nothing more.  Non-economic considerations like justice and social stability simply don’t apply.  Conservatives defend the free market because it is just, libertarians defend it because it is free.

Modern liberals, on the other hand, perceive that all too often it is neither. They evaluate capitalism based upon independent moral ends; those ends to be achieved through pragmatic and prudential means.  Modern liberal pragmatism arises from that most conservative insight, that human frailty precludes perfect and definitive solutions. And the sources of modern liberal moralism are found in the animating principles of classical liberalism: humanitarianism, freedom from arbitrary power, individual control over one’s labor and one’s life.  Libertarianism springs from the same classical liberal ground, but its amoral embrace of the free market is just as corrupting as conservatism’s hyper-moral embrace.  Libertarian support of capitalism, based upon an explicit moral theory of laissez-faire, is less hypocritical and confused than conservative support, based as it is upon the conflation of objective morality with the workings of an all-too-worldly institution.  But neither ideology is capable of addressing the moral and social downsides of modern capitalist life.  It has fallen to liberalism to be the conscience of capitalism.  In the spirit rather than the letter of classical liberalism, modern liberals endeavor to protect the individual from the coercion of any institution which seeks to exploit him.  And in the spirit rather than the letter of classical conservatism, they’re willing to use the state – tamed by democratic accountability – to effect that protection.  Independent and humanitarian morality made effective through tentative and pragmatic policy, the prudent in the service of the good, surely that combination represents the best way to protect economics, justice and social stability.

The Party of Raging Irresponsibility

Waiting for the monsters

A monster is haunting the Republican Party, the horrible monster of debt.  The recent history of Republican irresponsibility and irrationality on budgetary matters is deplorable, and most of it is wrapped up in fear and obsession over the large and increasing federal debt.  In the Republican nightmare, the debt monster devours our fortune and our future; it bleeds our economic strength; it threatens our children and our seniors, it even threatens our freedom.  But, strangely, the party furiously resists tax increases, even though such increases help control the debt.  It demands that President Obama make huge cuts to government spending in order to help reduce the debt, while it vigorously protests Obamacare cuts to Medicare.  And it demands that Obama, not Republicans themselves, specify which additional spending to cut!  It agonizes that debt has grown beyond our ability to pay and that a severe debt crisis is imminent, but its response is to threaten to hold down the current debt ceiling, which would place the United States in financial default and lead directly to the very kind of debt crisis they claim they wish to avoid.  Such a crisis would also vastly increase borrowing costs, leading to even bigger deficits and debt.  (And, incidentally, it would devastate the world economy.)  The party worries that tax increases and huge deficits generate “uncertainty” among investors and bond-holders, but it seems unconcerned that threatening government shutdown and default might themselves cause considerable uncertainty.  And it argues every point – even when that point blatantly contradicts the previous point – with the most passionate urgency.  When it comes to budgetary issues, the Republican Party has become the party of raging incoherence.  The degree and intensity of Republican nonsense and foolishness over the debt raises the genuine question: Is the Republican Party, in its present incarnation, capable of responsible governance?

It’s obvious that Republicans and conservatives are cynically using debt worry as an alibi for proceeding with their pre-existing project of underfunding and weakening the welfare state.  That’s why their abject horror over the debt demands dramatic spending cuts but abhors any tax increases.  If debt was their truest concern they would demand both spending cuts and tax increases, especially since taxes are at their lowest point (measured as a percentage of GDP) since the 1950’s, due largely to George W. Bush’s irresponsible tax cuts.  It’s equally obvious that much of their (let’s call it) inconsistency is simple pandering and demagoguery.  It’s easy to score cheap political points by attacking and misrepresenting Obama’s cuts to Medicare.  It doesn’t hurt, of course, that seniors are a dependably Republican constituency.  And the debt panic is suspiciously recent. Many Obama-era deficit saints were Bush-era deficit sinners.  All the current Congressional Republican leaders – Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell – collaborated on George W. Bush’s long-term assaults on the budget: his huge tax cuts, his two unfunded wars and a his huge, unfunded expansion of Medicare.  It’s amazing the fiscal and moral Republican purification that a Democratic administration can bring.

It appears that many of the newer conservative members of Congress, particularly those on the Tea Party right, do honestly fear and hate the debt monster.  (Though, once again, steadfast contemporary conservative support for George W. Bush and his fiscal irresponsibility does bring into question the sincerity of that fear and hate.) But these same farther right reaches of the Republican Party are command central for present-day debt madness.  In fact, there seems to be a definite correlation between fear of the debt and the inability to coherently address it.  Apparently, the closer you study the monster the more he befuddles your mind.  And the larger and more evil he appears.  Before the rise of communism, right-wing Americans were convinced that the nexus of evil in this world was the Vatican.  After 1917 that nexus moved to the Kremlin.  For a while after 9/11 it seems to have moved to Mecca or Teheran, though hopes that it would be buried beneath the rubble of Baghdad seem to have been disappointed.  Now it is incarnated in the American social insurance state, safely ensconced in the west wing of the White House, well kept and fed by Barack Hussein Obama and his minions, while its bastard child, the voracious debt monster, roams the land, wreaking devastation and terrorizing good folk.

And conservative paranoia is intimately connected to conservative moralism.  If it’s dangerous for a family or a small business to be in debt, it must be dangerous for a government, too.  But it’s not just dangerous, it’s downright immoral.  We are stealing from our children!  We are profligate!  We are squandering our moral inheritance!  But, as Paul Krugman has said, “Economics is not a morality play.”  Government can borrow money (presently it can do so at extremely low rates) to stimulate the economy, it can print money, it can easily tolerate ongoing debt, it need not pay back its debt, it can address aggregate issues – like unemployment and decrepit infrastructure – that do not avail of moralistic solutions.  Let us accept that blinkered moralism and Puritan apocalypticism are not sound bases for fiscal policy.  Neither are cynicism, pandering and demagoguery; but these are unavoidable elements of democratic politics.  Simpleminded moralism and apocalyptic paranoia, on the other hand, seem to be unavoidable elements of American conservative politics specifically, particularly among the staunchest members of its populist base.  Indeed, the moralism seems essential.  Consider that during recent times of high unemployment, even when there was 1 job for every 5 unemployed workers, leading conservatives resolutely argued against extending unemployment benefits because doing so would reward and encourage indolence.  The paucity of jobs did not excuse anyone from taking all the responsibility for his or her economic situation.  Economic facts simply could not contend with the need for moral enforcement.

All these dark confusions obscure the truth about the debt, which though it is a real problem, is neither a deadly nor an insurmountable one (see Neil Irwin’s great summary).  The next twenty years will bring real budgetary challenges, mostly caused by rising medical costs and the retirement of the baby boomers; some relatively minor adjustments to social insurance programs may be needed, but nothing like the radical transformations such as those proposed by Paul Ryan’s Medicare voucher-ization plan.  Indeed, even though the current baseline predicts large deficits for years to come, the debt (as a percentage of GDP) seems to be stabilizing for the foreseeable future.  And contrary to conservative mythology, there has not been an Obama-directed spending surge.  And once the economy is back to full capacity, tax revenues will increase, while spending designed to ameliorate and cushion against recession – automatic stabilizers such as unemployment insurance and increased Medicaid – will discontinue.  In the mean time, investors are gobbling up US Treasury bonds – even 10 and 20 year bonds – at ridiculously low interest rates.  The world is practically begging us to take its money.  Absent self-inflicted wounds, such as forcing a debt crisis by failing to raise the debt ceiling, no debt crisis is imminent.  We are not turning into Greece, hysterics aside.

But there’s one more noteworthy component to the overwrought Republican debt terror: abject irresponsibility.  That is the deeper meaning behind the fight over the debt ceiling.  The Republican House has effectively just abandoned the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip by voting to suspend it until May 19, (a move some conservatives perceive as tantamount to abandoning conservative principles altogether!).  But for weeks past, just as in the summer of 2011, conservatives had threatened to not increase the debt ceiling, and their justifications reeked of irresponsibility.  Imagine the following scenario:

The Republican House and the Democratic Senate and President agree that for the current fiscal year the government should spend 3.8 trillion dollars and raise 2.9 trillion dollars in taxes.  The deficit – the missing 900 billion dollars – must be raised by the Treasury Department by borrowing from private investors.  But that deficit, that 900 billion, that new debt, will become part of the federal government’s ongoing debt, which is already at 16.3 trillion dollars, bringing the new total debt to 17.2 trillion.  But then imagine there is an obscure law, called the debt ceiling, which limits the total the government can borrow and which is currently set to 16.4 trillion.  And further imagine that the Republican House – the same Republican House that agreed to the 3.8 trillion in spending and 2.9 trillion in revenue! – threatens not to raise that debt ceiling unless the Democratic President agrees to spend substantially less than 3.8 trillion.

Well you don’t have to imagine that farcical fiscal scenario, it actually happened!  If that is not irresponsibility, then what is?  Obviously Republicans thought 3.8 trillion was too much, even when they voted for it.  It turns out they thought it was so dangerously excessive that they were willing to threaten the country with a default on its debt in order to force Obama to spend less this year and for years to come.  If they had made good on their threat not to raise the ceiling, they would have forced Obama to break one of two laws, either by not spending all the money the budget mandates (money he is legally obligated to spend) or by borrowing more money than the debt ceiling legally allows.  Is it irresponsible to pass two incompatible laws?  Without sufficient funds the Treasury Department would fail to pay all its bills, including redeeming existing debt and paying interest on that debt.  The U.S. government would default; it would become a deadbeat.  Not because no one wanted to lend it money, not because it simply ran out of options, but because part of the government – the only part controlled by Republicans – refused to abide by the implications of its own decisions and its own laws.  Republicans are terrified that we’re about to face a debt crisis, and there is a real danger of that actually happening, but only because of Republicans.  Behold the party of raging absurdity.

The consequences of the Republicans turning Uncle Sam into a deadbeat are too painful to imagine.  All over the country and the world investors, financial institutions and governments would be less willing to lend the government money.  Paul Krugman:

Failure to raise the debt limit – which would, among other things, disrupt payments on existing debt – could convince investors that the United States is no longer a serious, responsible country, with nasty consequences. Furthermore, nobody knows what a U.S. default would do to the world financial system, which is built on the presumption that U.S. government debt is the ultimate safe asset.

A default would also greatly increase our borrowing costs; that is, in order to lure more money from investors the government would be required to pay higher rates of interest.  Conservatives counter that limiting the government to spending only what it takes in would not necessarily lead to a default, since the Treasury could still pay debt costs and cut other spending.  But that’s probably not true, as Matt Yglesias explains: “At first blush it seems logical that the government could perhaps respond by simply choosing which bills to pay and which not to pay, but there’s no legal authority to do this either, and Treasury’s computers aren’t set up to do it.”  Instead, Treasury would probably simply pay every bill in the order it received them, which would almost certainly lead to a default.  There is no guarantee that on any given day the amount of revenue received would be enough to pay that day’s debt costs.  Some Republicans, like Senator Pat Toomey and the editors of National Review magazine, wanted to give the administration the very legal authority Yglesias mentions – i.e. the authority to pick and choose which bills to pay – as long as it always paid for the debt first and thereby avoided default.  But if Treasury could jump through hoops and prioritize debt payments – either on Congress’ authority or its own – it would still fail to pay a large proportion of the bills it is legally obligated to pay, i.e. the spending authorized by Congress.  This would, says Eric Posner, “also create a crisis – most people and institutions won’t want to do business with the government, or work for it, because they won’t trust it to do what it promises. This is a mess and a bad way to run a country.”  Would America be less of a deadbeat if we paid our debt bills but failed to pay defense contractors, government employees or Medicare providers?

And if maintaining the current debt ceiling would fail to cause a debt default then it loses much of its force as a bargaining chip; it becomes, in effect, merely a government shutdown.  (I say “merely”, because, per Krugman, even though a shutdown would mean big trouble, its destructiveness would pale in compared to a default.)  Some conservatives protest that not raising the debt ceiling focuses the national attention on the debt, even if there is no danger of a default.  But does anyone believe the nation would fail to notice a government shutdown?  Why then would Republicans resist a debt ceiling raise and not just bargain hard during normal budget negotiations?  Both require Republican acquiescence.  There is a difference and it’s a revealing difference: failure to raise the debt ceiling forces the president to unilaterally choose which spending to cut.  This is the key irresponsibility.  Failure to raise the debt ceiling would hand legislative budgetary responsibility from the legislative to the executive branch.  The Constitution envisions members of Congress haggling back and forth until they agree to specific spending; it does not imagine Congress handing a block grant to the President and saying, “Spend as you please.”  But the party of smaller government is also the party of older, white people, that is, people who really like receiving Social Security checks and having Medicare pay for their medical care.  Republicans do want to cut spending – and in the abstract so do their constituencies – but they don’t want the blame for what will certainly be terribly unpopular cuts.  And this is the deeper problem: their constituency is just as irresponsible as they are.  During the fiscal cliff negotiations last December, Republicans demanded that Obama propose deep spending cuts but they refused to specify what those cuts should be!  They’re just not willing to take responsibility for their policies, but they are willing to wiggle through a loophole in the Constitutional separation of powers – that’s what they’ve made of the debt ceiling – to avoid that responsibility.

There are even some conservatives who would actually welcome a default, who would refuse to raise the debt ceiling even though they concede such a refusal would cause a default, because the final result would be to shrink government.  As reported by Rachel Bade, “The fallout from a debt ceiling breach is the lesser of two evils, they say – the greater threat being Obama’s proposal to increase the debt ceiling without corresponding cuts and reforms.”  And as Megan McCardle put it during the debt ceiling crisis of 2011, “there is a sizeable faction on the right, and worse, in the GOP caucus, that is willing to default rather than make any deal at all.”  At least these people don’t offer up lame alibis about the debt ceiling not forcing a default.  At least they have the courage of their insanity.  As Ed Kilgore put it in 2011:

the debt limit issue has been elevated among conservative activists to the level of religious frenzy and absolutism. . .
Indeed lurking just beneath the surface of much of the conservative hard line on the debt limit is an ironclad conviction that all sorts of economic havoc, including a much deeper recession, might be preferable to the continuation of twentieth-century “welfare state” policies.

The debt monster and its foul progenitor, the American government, have so unhinged them that actually believe that anything – even economic Armageddon! – is justified to stop it.  They want to destroy America in order to save it.  The ones who want Obama to avoid a default by picking and choosing what to cut are merely evading their responsibility as legislators.  But the ones who want to actually force a default are evading their responsibility as Americans.

But it does appear that cooler heads have prevailed, though there are still holdouts.  It took the entire Washington Republican establishment plus leaders of the business community to convince enough congressional Republicans to abandon the threat of economic annihilation.  But through most of the summer of 2011 and for most of this last January the party, including its leaders and its supporters in the commentariat, vehemently presented the foolish and nonsensical arguments analyzed above.  Any party that can make such arguments and seriously consider such actions is a party which is not capable of properly running the government of the United States. We must hope the American people don’t return them to power before they have mended their ways.  But are they capable of mending their ways any time soon?  Republicans call themselves the party of family values, of traditional morality, but their actions in this matter have been empty of the self-reflection and accountability that are essential to genuine morality.  They crusade righteously onward, so convinced of their own moral purity that they feel justified in any action.  Here we see the most galling aspect of this whole embarrassing episode, and the most discouraging: They have no shame.

But Republicans have one more opportunity to act like grownups.  In order to prevent conservative purists from pulling the debt ceiling trigger, Republican leaders promised to present a budget that balances within ten years.  That would indeed be a responsible proposal (assuming one shared their inflated fear of the debt).  But, alas, it won’t happen, and that’s because it can’t happen, the math just won’t allow it.  As Jonathan Chait so well explains, if you won’t raise taxes and you won’t cut defense and you are politically incapable of cutting Social Security and Medicare you’d have to cut programs for the poor – Medicaid, food stamps, etc. – by something like 90%, which even Republicans would probably shrink from doing.  The last time Republicans presented a putatively balanced budget, Paul Ryan’s budget from 2012, they had to fudge the numbers to make it balance and even then it didn’t actually balance until 2040.  It’s quite likely that this new budget will contain at least as much sleight-of-hand.  Maybe it’s not entirely fair to judge a budget we haven’t seen yet, but (as Chait explains) it strains credulity to imagine they can honestly make something happen by 2023 that they couldn’t make happen by 2040.  Republicans are stuck between the rock of structural irresponsibility and the hard place of mathematical reality.  Even if they could overcome the allure of cynicism, demagoguery, pandering, moralism, paranoia and irresponsibility and made a good faith effort to honestly balance the budget they would still be stopped by the inexorability of simple arithmetic.  Conservative fiscal goals are simply incompatible with American political reality.  And it is conservative failure to honestly address that simple fact that is the real failure of responsibility.

Demographics and Inevitability

Conventional wisdom has congealed around the notion that Obama was re-elected largely because of the demographics.  That is (as revealed in exit polls), Republicans have become the party of old, white, straight men; while Democrats represent what Ron Brownstein has called the “coalition of the ascendant”, i.e. racial minorities, gays, the young, urban professionals, and women; that is, everyone who is something other than old, white, straight and male.  (The chart above is by Tom Scocca of slate.com.)  For decades the demographics have been moving slowly in the Democrats direction, and will continue to do so for some time to come.  Consider that in 1984 whites were 89% of the vote and in 2012 they were 72%.  And at the same time that the voting public has become less old, white, straight and male, the Republican Party has become more and more conservative; that is, it increasingly tailors its policies to the interests and sensibilities of old, white, straight men.  The broad liberal constituency continues to grow while Republicans appeal more and more exclusively to their narrow and shrinking base.  And the recent election seems to have been the tipping point.  With a few breaks, or a better ground game, or a better advertising strategy, or better messaging, or more specificity, Romney might have won the presidency, but he’s very possibly the last Republican who could have won by relying upon that shrinking base.  The demographics just roll slowly on, unstoppable, like a glacier transforming the landscape.

Historically, American partisan alignment has been defined by ethnicity and religion, less so by ideology.  For example, 19^th century Irish Catholic immigrants all joined the Democratic Party for reasons of practicality and solidarity.  But now party affiliation is both ethnic/religious and philosophical.  Before the American welfare state was created by Progressives and New Dealers, working class liberalism opposed a strong central government, because they saw it as a tool of the rich and connected.  That is, the American populist instinct viscerally fears both big business and big government.  But the success of the New Deal created a contradiction within economic populism.  Big government was now the instrument of populism and economic egalitarianism, and a vast majority was quite happy with the results.  But most voters retained their conservative, i.e. anti-government, instincts, even as they happily received all the benefits of big government.  They held fast to the myth of undiluted individual responsibility while they cashed their federally-mandated paychecks and Social Security checks.  Pragmatism overrode ideology; it overrode it all the way to the bank.

This explains the truism that – as Jonathan Chait is so fond of reminding his readers – “the American people are ideological conservatives but operational liberals.”  Put another way, welfare state capitalism works better than the laissez-faire variety.  This explains such strange incongruities as Tea Partiers angrily wielding signs that read, “Keep government out of my Medicare.”  Even government-hating conservatives only hate government in general but love it in the particulars.  But from the 1930’s to the 1960’s white working people voted the pragmatism side of that pragmatism-vs.-ideology dialectic; since the 1960’s they vote the ideology.  What happened?  Well, what major social development occurred in the 1960’s?  Yes, that’s right, the end of racial segregation.  Racial minorities had been excluded from the material and social benefits of the welfare state until the 1960’s, and during that time white belief in anti-government ideology was not particularly troubling.  But whites could not abide a welfare state that also benefitted blacks, Hispanics, etc.  Their racial prejudice overpowered their pragmatism and they swung over to their ideology.  Blind fear made them choose instinct over interest. With a little help from conservative intellectuals (like Bill Buckley) and politicians (like Ronald Reagan) shrewd enough to exploit white populism, they began to vote for scaling back the welfare/regulatory state.  It suddenly made sense to oppose a government that ladled out goodies to Cadillac-driving welfare queens.

This is why ideology, not pragmatism or compromise, has come to dominate American politics.  When white working people – the dominant demographic in the 1960’s – began voting for conservative Republicans it spelled the end of the New Deal.  White anti-government ideological instincts became the dominant theme of American politics.  The white working class abandoned liberalism and liberals rejected the white working class in return.  This Great Rupture has polarized all subsequent political, social and cultural developments.  As that Tea Party sign reminds us, the tension between ideology and practicality remains.  This forces the conservative intelligentsia to dare ever greater heights of hysteria – Obama is a “Kenyan anti-colonialist”, Obamacare is really racial reparations – to ensure that working class whites discount their practical concerns in favor of their ideological instincts.  Thus our era, the era of ideology over pragmatism, is also the era of bitterness and rancor.

Democrats, in the meantime, have become the party of the young, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, gays and women (particularly unmarried women); that is, all the groups that until relatively recently had to defer to old, white, straight men.  But the liberal re-alignment isn’t based simply in practicality; it is as ideological as the conservative version.  Conservatives may console themselves with the thought that minority votes for Obama were based upon little more than racial solidarity and they may encourage themselves with the hope that Hispanics, for instance, can easily be had with an liberal immigration policy; but they are kidding themselves.  Non-whites, for the most part, simply don't share the anti-government instincts of the white majority; those instincts appear to be an exclusively white cultural artifact.  Michael Brendan Dougherty of the American Conservative:

Recent Hispanic immigrants may be entrepreneurial and have some traditional religious values, but they most definitely do not come from political cultures that make them receptive to the GOP’s message of slashing the social welfare state.

Since whites historically kept racial minorities from assimilating to white society they didn’t absorb white political culture, and multiculturalism has done little to disturb that alienation.  Minorities simply don’t have to agonize over being anti-government while benefitting from big government; they can vote for the welfare state in good conscience.  This is why the post-60’s alignment is so ideological.  To a large extent, you actually can guess someone’s view of the welfare state based upon her race.  Party means tribe means philosophy.  And with the slow demographic shift in favor of the pro-welfare-state constituency the pro-welfare-state party is winning more and more elections.

We appear to be witnessing the demise of the populism that has dominated American politics for two centuries.  A majority is arising whose instincts are more at ease with big government.  This may be the end of American exception from the general trend of Western welfare state social democracy.  We may be becoming Europe after all.  How will the white rump react?  But before you consider that question, remind yourself that whites, particularly old, male whites, still control most of the money and probably will continue to do so even as they become a numerical minority.  Maybe our future is not Denmark, but South Africa.  As polarized as our present politics is, with its ideology-race equivalence, imagine how bad it will get when it becomes starkly ideology-race-class.  A situation in which whites hold all the economic power and non-whites hold all the political power is not a sustainable one.  Maybe our future is not South Africa, but Venezuela.  Obama won, but nightmares abound!  How is it possible that the victory of such a broad, multi-racial, pragmatic, moderate, social-democratic majority could be so ominous?  What will post-populist America look like?

But consider that racial alienation doesn’t explain why the young are part of that new democratic coalition.  They have an entirely different explanation: culture. Younger white Americans have grown up without all that crazy pre-60’s baggage and they can’t fathom why anyone would oppose racial inclusion or equal pay or gay marriage.  They have been bred on the notion of individual expression utterly unconstrained by categories of race, gender or orientation (actually, unconstrained by much of anything).  They are the product of post-60’s liberal individualism, with all the accompanying libertine notions of sexual and social freedom.  The irony is that conservative embrace of individualistic rhetoric has only fed that unconstrained libertinism, as has the modern culture of capitalist marketing.  Liberalism made individualism about personal expression and growth.  Conservatism made it about freedom from government interference.  And capitalism made it about material acquisition.  Each in its own way has helped create that culture of relativism, materialism and atomism that so dominates American youth.  But here’s the rub: that individualism seems to make the young more suspicious of government intervention in the economy.  For example, those under 30 are more in favor of privatizing Social Security and Medicare than their elders.  And though the economic views of younger Americans are not entirely clear (for example, they don’t perceive the government to be as inefficient as older ones do), their openness to laissez-faire economic policies conflicts with the views of racial and ethnic minorities, particularly traditionally Catholic groups whose views on economics are informed by the church’s egalitarian teachings on social justice.  This libertinism-vs.-community contradiction may prove to be as difficult for the new non-white liberal coalition as the pragmatism-vs.-ideology contradiction has been for the old white working class.

This might conceivably present an opening for a future conservative re-alignment.  That is, if the Republican Party (or its successor) becomes more broadly libertarian – promoting both lower tax rates and gay marriage – a large number of the young might, as time goes by, switch over.  But no; but that’s just not gonna happen.  Conservative individualist rhetoric aside, the conservative heart beats to the tune of authority, tradition and hierarchy.  The unpredictable, mercurial, rebellious nature of libertine youth culture could never be reconciled with that conservative propriety.  Also, even if the Republicans became libertarians tomorrow, it would take them twenty years to lose the stink of cultural, racial and sexual philistinism that so repulses today’s liberal youth.  Another conservative option is to become more economically liberal while remaining culturally conservative; but this is also utterly at odds with conservative obeisance to social hierarchy.  And most damning, American conservatism has played too long on white racial fears to accept the new demographic reality.  And such racial fear-mongering precludes the last right-wing hope, that social conservatism might appeal to religious blacks and Hispanics, that racial minorities might be converted to broad conservatism.  Those minorities, lacking the visceral anti-government instincts that have so molded white views, are not susceptible to conservative arguments.  Conservatism is simply incapable of addressing our current crisis.  It can only exacerbate it with strident calls for more unconstrained capitalism, more racial animosity, more fundamentalist unreason.  All conservatism can do is make an embattled rich, white minority more angry, more bitter, more self-righteous in its wealth.  The road of Limbaugh-ism leads only to bleak civil, cultural and economic alienation.

For the time being minorities and the young will not become Republicans.  But, given the new demographic realities, what will working-class whites do?  This is the question that must be answered.  Is it possible to bring them back to welfare-statism by appealing to their naked self-interest?  Probably not, since the last 40 years of ideological indoctrination and purification have made them less susceptible to pragmatic arguments.  American idealism has caused much American foolishness.  No, the only real solution is to make liberalism utterly race-neutral.  The Great Rupture between liberals and working class whites must be healed.  If a new, post-multicultural, post-relativist, community-oriented, morally passionate liberalism could embrace a genuine color-blindness (like that of the early Civil Rights movement) it might make whites feel as welcomed by liberalism as do blacks and the other racial groups.  Such a liberalism – severe in its anti-racism while earnest in its color-blindness – would have real credibility when claiming to speak for working people of all races.  It might appeal to both the pragmatism and the idealism of white working people.  This is neither a populist future nor a multicultural future, it is a united future, one in which our common American commitments to freedom and justice overcome our divisions.

The irony of Obama’s re-election is that it actually makes it harder to reach this united future.  A coalition that wins without the support of white working people is a coalition that is unlikely to try to appeal to those people – particularly if doing so would require it to abandon its diversity fetish.  Since the election there has been much speculation as to whether Republicans will learn to adjust to the new demographic and ideological reality.  My argument is that they can not without abandoning conservatism altogether.  But the more important question is: Will Democrats do the right thing in the face of their newfound demographic dominance?  Can Democrats resist the momentum of the last decades and whole-heartedly accept working class whites back into their coalition?  It’s true that Obama did garner white working class votes in the Midwest – mostly because of his rescue of the auto companies – and Obama himself seems genuinely eager to help struggling people of all races.  But it’s just not clear if his coalition will consistently support the interests and values of white working people.  As the demographics keep moving in their direction, Democrats simply won’t need to do so to keep winning elections.  But they will need to do so to avoid the even more horribly divided future that awaits us.  If liberals can’t heal the great rupture with working class whites they will still inherit America, but it may not be an America worth inheriting.

Standing by the Sides of the Tracks

  

“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” – Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson wrote those words in 1783 contemplating the enormity of the injustice of slavery.  Seventy-eight years later Abraham Lincoln assumed the presidency and reaching out to seceding southern compatriots, he struggled mightily against becoming the instrument of God’s justice:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Struggling over race is what Americans do.  The Civil War, the failures of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, the fight over multiculturalism.  We struggle mightily, but, ultimately, race defeats us.  There has been tremendous progress, of course, but race remains the most important political divide in American politics.  Conflict over race defines, distorts and confounds almost every political issue in contemporary American politics.  Consider something as mundane as this year’s election for United States Senator from Massachusetts.  A credible and qualified liberal Democrat, Elizabeth Warren, is finding it improbably difficult to remove Republican Scott Brown from the seat held by liberal lion Teddy Kennedy for 47 years.  The reason Warren is running only neck and neck with Brown is that she’s a Harvard professor who has described herself as a racial minority.  Yes, it’s about race.  The struggle over race lies deep and implacable within the American psyche; it poisons our politics; it elicits not our better angels, but our most bitter demons, even in Massachusetts, even in 2012.  We all still tremble in the shadow of Jefferson’s dark reflection.

Teddy Kennedy never lost an election.  He was first elected United States Senator from Massachusetts in 1962, while his brothers were the President and the Attorney General of the United States, and he was re-elected an amazing eight times.  He was a proud liberal and he fought ferociously for minorities and the disabled, for education and immigration.  But his real passion, the cause for which he worked his entire political life, was universal healthcare.  For Kennedy the American welfare state and the social contract it represented would never be complete until every American could depend on decent and affordable medical care.  But in the summer of 2009, just as President Obama seemed poised to push universal healthcare through Congress, death finally removed Teddy Kennedy from the Senate.  And Kennedy’s dream almost died with him.  It was the subsequent special election in January 2010 that sent Scott Brown to the Senate, ending the Democratic, filibuster-proof, 60-seat majority and forcing Democrats to pass Obamacare through contentious legislative contortion.  The people of Massachusetts – one of the most liberal states but also the home of the original Tea Party – had sent Brown explicitly to kill Obamacare and also because they were frustrated with Washington’s broader dysfunction.  They also wanted the Democratic Party to know that no party or family owned that Senate seat.  All those messages were properly sent and received, and now, almost three years later, any respectable Democratic candidate should have no trouble reclaiming Teddy’s seat.  And Warren, Harvard law professor, champion of community, inspiring convention speaker, and “scourge of Wall Street”, clearly qualifies.  What almost disqualifies her in the eyes of many of her fellow Bay Staters, though, is that she claims to be 1/32 Cherokee.

Obviously, every election has its own issues and complications.  Warren is an academic, not a career politician.  She’s not a gregarious Massachusetts native like Brown.  And she’s a woman.  But some local politicians are convinced that the biggest drag on her campaign is the inability to put the Cherokee issue her behind her.  Here’s the background: Warren was born in Oklahoma in 1949; as a child she heard family stories that her paternal grandparents had not wanted their son to marry Elizabeth’s mother because she was part Cherokee and Delaware.  At age 24 Elizabeth enrolled in the law program at Rutgers University, which she completed in 1976; she taught law at many schools, including Rutgers, the University of Houston, the University of Texas and the University of Pennsylvania; she became an expert on bankruptcy and the finances of middle class families.  In 1984, she described herself as a Cherokee when she contributed to a Native American cookbook.  In 1986 she listed herself as a minority in the Association of American Law Schools Directory of Faculty.  Warren worked temporarily for Harvard in 1992, during which time that university, in complying with federal affirmative action regulations, listed a Native American woman as part of its faculty.  While Warren was back at the University of Pennsylvania from 1993 till 1995, Harvard did not report a Native American woman on its faculty.  In ’95 Warren went back to Harvard to stay.

It’s not clear if Warren’s family lore – which is similarly reported by siblings – is actually true; there is no documentary evidence. And even if it is true that she’s one thirty-second Native American, it seems that those distant native ancestors never properly registered as natives and therefore she can’t officially claim Cherokee membership.  It’s pretty clear that Warren genuinely believes both that she really is part Cherokee and that being part Cherokee has not helped her career.  She claims she never drew attention to being mixed race when applying for her various positions, including the one at Harvard.  She says Harvard recruited her and that her ethnicity never came up during the hiring process and, further, that she never knew that Harvard had used her to defend its commitment to racial diversity.  But even if all that’s true – which would seem to be the case – it doesn’t mean that Harvard didn’t use her supposed racial heritage for its own advantage.  Let’s put that another way: even if Warren didn’t deliberately use race to advance her career it still probably advanced her career.  That doesn’t mean Warren isn’t qualified to teach at Harvard, she clearly is.  And it doesn’t necessarily mean that Harvard felt the need to fulfill a numerical quota.  But it does mean that Harvard benefitted by hiring a woman they could list as a Native American woman.  Therefore – and the logic is inescapable – simply being a Native American woman can help one’s career.

The Brown campaign has acted as if all this is a character issue, as if Warren had known that she wasn’t really a Native American but was pretending to be so to get ahead.  As Brown put it in his first televised debate with Warren, “She claimed that she was a Native American, a person of color, and as you can see, she’s not.”  That’s foolish, of course, since many people of native descent appear utterly white.  The point is that Brown is accusing Warren of cheating, of pretending to be something she is not for unfair advantage.  He’s accusing her of passing.  In the old days one was considered black if one had any black ancestors; just one drop of black blood was thought to pollute an otherwise pure white genetic makeup.  Therefore, there were many who were, by the definitions of the day, genetically black but who looked as white as Rush Limbaugh, some of whom “passed” as white.  It’s hard to blame them for living as white, since life as a white person in those days was so much easier than life as a black person.  But times have changed, haven’t they?  According to Brown, now one passes for non-white.  Brown isn’t really criticizing Warren’s character, he’s criticizing a system that encourages such lapses in character.  She “passed” because Harvard and the entire multicultural and affirmative action regime made it advantageous for her to do so.

Brown tries to cover up by claiming, in effect, that he’s defending the affirmative action system, that he’s upset that a genuine Native American candidate was denied Warren’s spot because Warren gamed the system; he charges that she “took advantage of a status that was only entitled to people of true need.”  But his tender sympathies regarding the plight of minorities do not bear close examination.  His silly debate claim that Warren’s appearance means she couldn’t possibly have native blood does not exactly reveal any depth or sophistication in his understanding of racial issues.  He laughed along on a radio show when right-wing comedian Dennis Miller made a crack about sending a donation to Warren in beads rather than dollars.  And there was the quite shocking racial episode in which members of Brown’s staff heckled a Warren rally with loud Hollywood-style war whooping while miming tomahawk chops.  Yes, they really did.  

Brown’s campaign traffics in crude racial stereotypes but claims to be defending minorities.   What’s going on here?  When asked about the heckling episode, Brown gave this telling response: “It is certainly something that I don't condone.  The real offense is that Warren said she was white and then checked the box saying she is Native American, and then she changed her profile in the law directory once she made her tenure.”  How reassuring that he doesn’t condone the yahoo mockery of racial minorities by his own staffers!  (He did reprimand his staff later.)  But consider that to Brown the real offense is falsely claiming to be a minority.  Who exactly does Brown think Warren’s victims are?  Is he really worried that Warren is passing down, i.e. that she’s pretending to be a member of an oppressed group that in this limited circumstance has a small advantage?  Or is he worried that Warren is passing up, sneaking into the privileged life, as some blacks used to do?  If he really objects to passing down, he would speak up more about the troubles of non-whites, not mock them.  And there doesn’t seem to be any reasonable objection to passing up, since why shouldn’t Warren cheat a system that has cheated her merely because of her race?  He’s trying to have it both ways: It was terrible of her to cheat an immoral system.  Officially he condemns her for stealing the crumbs reserved to poor put-upon minorities, while he signals to his white constituency that the whole system is corrupt and they are its real victims.  What Brown really seems to object to is that Warren plays these convoluted race games at all, that she isn’t satisfied with being white.  For Brown, this is the real character issue.  She offends his white pride. 

There are perfectly reasonable objections to affirmative action.  For one thing, it demands legal definitions for its racial categories, definitions as silly and arbitrary as the one-drop-of-black-blood rule, a rule which to our enlightened sensibilities seems both so evil and so quaint.  If Warren’s great, great, great grandparent was a full-blooded Native American does that mean Warren is really a Native American?  What if it was four greats instead of three?  And do we make any distinction between biology and culture?  Was Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi Italian because his ancestors were Italian?  Would he still have been Italian if he had been spirited away at birth to Ireland and raised as Irish?  No, he was Italian because he spoke Italian, adhered to Italian folkways and identified with Italy, because he was culturally Italian.  Is Warren at all a Cherokee in a cultural sense?  If not, then she really is just as white as Brown says she is, regardless of her genetic makeup.  Her identification as Cherokee becomes little more than sentimental affectation. And has multiculturalism made race less of an issue in American life?  The question answers itself.  Affirmative action was created to undo centuries of injustice and violent suppression.  But it created a new – though comparatively minor – injustice, the denial in some circumstances of equal access to whites.  If being a Native American female makes it a little easier to get a job at Harvard then being neither Native American nor female makes it a little harder.  Affirmative action is not a policy well designed to effect racial reconciliation. 

The quite serious problems of affirmative action, however, don’t remotely counter the fact that simply being a white male in America, even today, has immeasurable benefits.  There may be some deluded souls who don’t find that bleeding obvious, but they’re in such deep denial that nothing could possibly convince them.  Warren was passing down, not up, whatever Brown or his constituents perceive.  But this shows why most conservatives, such as Scott Brown, have no credibility when objecting to multiculturalism: they’re blind to white privilege.  (Liberal blindness, of course, works in reverse.  They find white privilege glaringly obvious while denying the downsides of affirmative action.)  If Brown and many of his supporters really believe Warren is passing up then they must really believe that the class she’s passing into is a more powerful class.  They don’t just deny white privilege, they fear minority privilege.

But Brown’s rather visceral disgust with Warren (and, by implication, all of modern liberalism) consists of more than just white fear.  The other component is populism, the fear that there is a powerful class that discounts and injures the values and interests of the majority.  There is an elite who exploits us regular people.  Populism is the source of all effective and enduring American politics.  And the combination of populism and racial fear is as potent an elixir as American politics can conceive.  Though Warren comes from a genuine working class background and fights for the economic interests of working people, conservatives have branded her a snooty, intellectual, academic elitist.  The Brown campaign makes sure to always call her “Professor Warren” and Brown frequently called her “Professor” during their first debate.  Holly Robichaud of the Boston Herald mocks Warren’s middle-class credentials: “As a Harvard professor married to another Harvard professor, she may find connecting with middle-class voters a tough sell.”  Liberal analyst Simon van Zuylen-Wood writes that Warren’s occupation inspires resentment among both conservatives and “the historically Democratic blue-collar voters whom Scott Brown won over with a barn coat and a pick-up truck in the 2010 special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat.”  Brown’s coat and truck mark him as one of us, as “the king of townie Massachusetts,” as one local commentator put it.  Warren may be fighting for middle class bankruptcy relief against conservative politicians wholly owned by credit card companies, but she lacks a coat and a truck.  She must be against us.  She can’t even name any of the Red Sox!

The white working class has always been populist.  The central theme of American history consists of the white working class fighting back against exploitation by elites, from the Revolution to Presidents Jefferson and Jackson to William Jennings Bryan and the People’s Party to Teddy Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson to FDR.  White working men have always been the heroes of American politics, the good guys.  They were the champions of freedom and equality, if only for white men.  There were two episodes in which white populism failed, and in both case it failed because of racial exclusion.  Those episodes were the Civil War/Reconstruction era and the Civil Rights era.  In both cases, the white working class was asked to expand their notion of freedom and equality to include blacks, and in both cases they refused.  The Confederacy was founded upon the notion of white supremacy, which the Confederates placed above patriotism. During the Reconstruction Era (1865-1877), the post-war period when the southern states were brought back into the Union, the federal government led by the Radical Republicans (today we would call them liberals) tried to integrate blacks as full equals into American society.  But when the North wearied of policing southern racial violence and withdrew its armies, the ex-confederates imposed second-class status – sanctioned by law and custom, enforced by brutal violence, justified by the most egregious bigotry – upon the recently freed slaves, returning them almost to the status of slaves.  The slaves had been freed but Reconstruction had failed.  And the myth arose that the fight for Confederate independence was a “noble Lost Cause”, that the war was a “tragedy”, a terrible misunderstanding among brothers, not a war to emancipate human beings from chattel slavery and white supremacy, not a climax in the war against Africans in America that had been waged for 250 years, not the failure of whites to open up their democracy to its most maligned and mistreated outcasts.  The notion that the Civil War was a tragedy allowed white populists, North and South, to return to their status as the heroes, the good guys of American history.  And blacks and other minorities paid the price for that return.  And so things remained for nearly 100 years. 

During that 100 years, however, populism made great advances – for whites.  There was the establishment of the welfare and regulatory state, first under Woodrow Wilson, then under Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Working people now had federal legal guarantees for working conditions, wages, retirement, etc.  And decades of labor agitation culminated in the passage of the Wagner Act of 1935, which protected the rights of workers to join unions.  Between populism in the form of a welfare state and populism in the form of labor unions, capitalism was tamed, was made to work for everyone.  However, these laws were generally written to keep minorities out; for example, when Social Security was enacted in 1935, it excluded domestic servants and agricultural workers, most of whom were overwhelmingly black.  And many unions explicitly excluded minorities.

But in the 1950’s black Americans fresh from fighting for democracy in Europe and Asia began to fight for it at home.  They demanded political and civil equality, refusing in various peaceful ways to comply with the racist and segregated regime of Jim Crow.  And allied with liberal politicians like Hubert Humphrey they pushed the federal government to enforce equal access to public services and accommodations, like lunch counters, hotels, buses and trains.  Populism had bestowed the good life upon the white working class, and liberals felt that it was time for that good life to be opened up to all Americans.  It was time for another Reconstruction.  But that Second Reconstruction failed as well.  No, that’s not quite fair, it half succeeded.  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 actually ended the Jim Crow legal regime and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 actually enabled blacks to vote.  And blacks and other minorities began the long, hard slog into the mainstream of American economic and social life (a slog that continues).  But race riots in several cities across the country in the same period led to a white backlash.  Whites became increasingly disenchanted with civil rights and with liberal policy in general.  Conservatives courted the votes of white working people with increasing success.  In 1964 Barry Goldwater became the first national candidate to run against the Civil Rights laws with the hope of appealing to white voters.  Goldwater won only his own state of Arizona and five Deep South states (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina), but this “Southern Strategy” was employed by successive conservatives and finally came to fruition with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

The point is that liberals and the white working class became estranged.  Before the 1960’s American liberalism was about the interests of working people.  Pre-Civil-Rights liberalism was white populism.  But when minorities and liberals pushed for racial integration it split the ranks of white working people.  Many were ready to open up the blessings of American society to everyone, but many – most southerners, for example – were not.  This led to the liberals and the white working class to reject each other.  Liberals began to see working people, particularly southern working people, as backward and ignorant; they rejected their folkways and attitudes.  The violent hatred of racial equality shown by white southerners marked them and revealed them as unenlightened and contemptible.  This is the beginning of liberal elitism.  Liberals, in effect, told southern whites that they weren’t the heroes of American democracy anymore; this is what white conservatives really mean when they speak of liberal elitism.  Working class whites had always seen themselves as the heroes; indeed, liberals had been telling them so since the time of Jefferson and Jackson.  They were not about to abandon their populist notions of themselves as the regular people fighting against an arrogant elite.  But the more liberals looked down on southern whites as rednecks and rubes, the more southern whites looked upon liberals as intellectual, sneering snobs.  For 150 years liberals nurtured the populist myth of commoners against the aristocrats and then, circa 1964, they jumped right into the role of the aristocrats.  And conservatives were only too happy to make that case; that, not capitalists, but liberals – with their subversive education, their refined cultural tastes, and their racial sanctimony – were the real elite.  Liberal condescension made it too easy to turn liberal populism into conservative populism.  And this new brand of conservatism found favorable reception among whites in the north as well.  Southern conservatives, in effect, said to white northerners, “You are southerners, too. You are being oppressed by the same snooty liberal elite as us.”  The extent to which white northerners became aligned with conservatism is the extent to which they believed that they had become southerners too.

And it’s true even now.  Now we know what a grass-roots American conservative actually is: one who’s convinced that liberals dismiss his values and think they’re better than him.  A conservative is someone who bitterly resents that he’s no longer treated like the hero of the American story.  This explains conservative passion and it explains conservative rancor.  They’re angry because they know that they are the “real America” – they’ve always known that, even when they voted for liberals. But the rest of America doesn’t seem to recognize it anymore.  White working people and conservatives are actually not racist for the most part, at least not in the old-fashioned let’s-beat-‘em-down sense.  But contemporary white conservatism is based upon the continuing myth of white populism, a myth which now claims that small-town, religious, white folk are still the good guys; that condescending liberals are their elitist enemies who are too eager to disdain them and tax them for the sake of free riders, welfare queens and abortion-lovers.  They don’t vote conservative because they hate blacks, they vote conservative out of resentment, out of a desire to strike back and re-assert their heroism.  White working people hear Professor Elizabeth Warren describe herself as a Native American and all they hear is, “You’re not the good guys.”  Scott Brown wears the right coat and drives the right truck and they hear, “You’re still the good guys.”  That’s all they need to hear.

But, as white working people continue to support conservative populism they perpetuate the failure of the Second Reconstruction.  Their inability to see the horrible wrong and destructiveness of their past racism (and to some extent, continuing racism) hobbles and distorts their populism, and with it hopes for both economic fairness and racial reconciliation.  But liberal condescension is a big stumbling block as well.  The inability to appreciate the healthy side of faith and family marginalizes liberalism.  Liberals cannot consider themselves the party of inclusion while they disdain working class sensibilities.  It is this lack of inclusiveness which lends credibility to conservative charges of liberal intolerance.  And truth be told, liberals and working class conservatives miss each other and need each other.  Liberals have become alienated from American folk devotion and conservatives have become alienated from any higher communal aspirations.  Both groups have become pinched and narrow, clinging to their respective shreds of a once-great populism.  And the triumph over the last few decades of content-free individualism, with its blunt relativism, consumerism and materialism, mocks any sense of the community and solidarity that was once part of American populism.  Such individualism makes no room for heroes.  A liberalism with these barren cultural commitments is a liberalism unable to complete its mission: the inclusion of minorities into a broadly prosperous and harmonious society.  Liberalism must reclaim its heroism.  Conservative malign neglect of racial issues – cynically masked with the rhetoric of color-blindness – just perpetuates material and social inequality.  And the liberal response, affirmative action, is merely a band-aid on those wounds, and an ugly band-aid at that.  But only liberals can be the bridge between minorities and disaffected whites.  Only inclusive liberalism can redeem populism. 

In November 1963, when Teddy Kennedy had only been a Senator for one year, his brother, the president, was shot and killed.  A year after that Teddy’s other brother, Bobby, resigned his post as Attorney General and was elected United States Senator from New York.  Less than four years after that, in June of 1968, Bobby was running for president himself when he was shot and killed.  Bobby’s death marks the death of liberal inclusion.  Robert Kennedy was the last national figure who broadly appealed to both minorities and white working people.  He was the last symbol of that old liberalism, the one that wanted everyone to be the good guys.  Two months before Bobby was killed, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was shot and killed.  Bobby was scheduled to speak in a black neighborhood in Indianapolis that night, but when the news of King’s death reached him he was urged to cancel.  But he didn’t cancel; he spoke to the crowd that had come to greet him and he broke the terrible news to them.  Then, as someone who himself had suffered violent loss he appealed to their better angels:

We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization – black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love . . . What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

After his death, Bobby’s body lay in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, from where, on June 8, 1968 it was delivered by special train to Washington.  Thousands of Americans lined the tracks, saluting, holding American flags, weeping, praying, mourning.  They mourned Bobby and they mourned themselves, and they mourned their lost hopes for reconciliation.  Bobby’s death cleared the way for the triumph of Nixon and the politics of resentment, it ensured the failure of the Second Reconstruction.  We all still suffer the pain of that failure.  We all still stand by the sides of those tracks, mourning our lost hope.  The most terrible wounds are those that divide us, that make us enemies instead of brothers.  Unlike the First Reconstruction, we cannot heal some of those divisions at the cost of aggravating others.  All those divisions must be healed, for God’s justice still awaits.