The white elephant in the room.

Just to show you regulars in the fields that I am not afraid to share the views of others who might have different political views than I do, I am going to do a cut and paste post from The American Conservative tonight. (h/t to Jamelle Bouie for turning me on to this essay.)

"Election Night 2014 was a triumphant night for professional Republicans. They had seemingly beaten back and vanquished the barbarians of whatever was left of the Thing That Had Been Called the Tea Party. They had run smart, slick, sane campaigns in purple states like Colorado. Most importantly, they had expanded their majority in the House of Representatives and won control of the Senate—an outcome that seemed well within their grasp during the previous midterm cycle of 2010.
I clicked off my computer that night, demoralized. The party, despite all appearances, had learned absolutely nothing.

It had won for the wrong reasons: by simply being the out-party in the sixth year of a presidential administration. By resisting any painful or politically inconvenient tradeoffs in the pursuit of conservative priorities like healthcare or entitlement reform.

By being—and this was the clincher—the party of white Americans.

With lower turnout from youth and minorities, and thus a greater proportion of older, white voters, midterm elections had become Republicans’ security blanket: Everything’s fine; no need to change a thing.

I remained convinced in November 2014 that the Republican Party was too rightwing—but on that night, and thereafter, who would listen? (And by “too rightwing,” I hardly mean too conservative. The Cruz-led GOP was not a conservative party marked by realism, restraint, and incremental reform—but rather by strategic radicalism, ethnic revanchism, fiscal retrenchment, and cultural reaction.)

Lordy, I had no idea how convulsively bad things would get.

With a mix of amusement and horror I have watched Donald Trump strut into this ideological vacuum. And in that vacuum Trump found a skeleton key of sorts—a key to GOP coalition-building that has been in plain view for anyone with eyes to see it.

That skeleton key is white backlash. The dirty secret was that the stereotypically “moderate,” pragmatic Northeastern Republican voter has more in common with his white brethren in Alabama than with, say, Michael Bloomberg.

Richard Nixon and Roger Stone knew this. George H.W. Bush may not have known this—but Lee Atwater surely did. John McCain may not have known this—but is there a better other explanation than white backlash for why he outpolled George W. Bush in Appalachia?

Race—more specifically, the maintenance, through public policy and custom, of the cultural and financial predominance of whites—is the great through-line of American politics. Yet race prejudice is not an original sin of the conservative movement. If one locates the movement in utero in the politics of Robert Taft Republicans, conservatism formed as an antistatist recoil from unionism and the regulation of labor markets and industry; deep suspicion of internationalism and foreign entanglements; and stringent anticommunism.

The racial baggage of Southern Jeffersonian conservatism (which I am defining in contradistinction to the midwestern conservatism of Taft, proto-movement lecturer Clarence Manion, the industrialist Walter Kohler, and others) began to seep into the movement at large in the years following World War II.

Historian Kevin M. Kruse, in his  book White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, has documented how, even before suburbanization began in earnest, resistance to desegregation “thoroughly reshaped southern conservatism.” He writes: “Traditional conservative elements, such as hostility to the federal government and faith in free enterprise, underwent fundamental transformations. At the same time, segregationist resistance inspired the creation of new conservative causes, such as tuition vouchers, the tax revolt, and the privatization of public services”—causes that came to be associated with the Sunbelt conservatism of Reagan and Goldwater.

And before LBJ had famously declared the South lost to Democrats because of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Republicans began making inroads in the South in the 1962 congressional midterm elections. In his Goldwater-friendly narrative political history Before the Storm, leftist historian Rick Perlstein captures the right’s inchoate reaction to President Kennedy merely making noise about a civil rights act and, more pointedly, activating federal marshals to ensure the matriculation of a black student at the University of Mississippi.
He wrote:

In Alabama, thirty-seven-year congressional veteran Lister Hill was challenged for the first time in a general election. His Republican opponent, Gadsen oil distributor James Martin, lost by nine-tenths of a percent. In the race for the congressional seat representing Tennessee’s Ninth District, Memphis—which hadn’t seen a GOP candidate since 1936—the Republican came even closer. GOP congressional candidates across the South polled over two million votes in 1962. They had received 606,000 in the last off-year election. The Republicans, for an ever increasing number of Southerners, were carpetbaggers no more.

White backlash has historically been defined as resistance to civil rights legislation, or any proactive attempt to advance black equality. It is more than that. White backlash was a critical ingredient to the appeal of “law-and-order” politics of Nixon. It accounted for the receptivity of white voters to Reaganite tales of black indolence and “welfare queens.” White backlash is not necessarily, or is not always, the product of personal bigotry. It can be, rather, a species of emotional vertigo. The demographic panic over Latinos and Muslims experienced by many white voters today may be summed in in the title of a Michael Moore screed—Dude, Where’s My Country?

It must be noted that white backlash has not redounded to the benefit only of Republican politicians. Bill Clinton—whose centrist political profile was shaped in part by the legatees of the old Democrats for Nixon campaign—benefitted mightily from white backlash. Hillary Clinton, in 2008, handily won primary contests in states like West Virginia almost entirely as a result of white backlash. Former Sen. Jim Webb ran this year as the candidate of white backlash—and his dismal showing is proof of how little purchase such a campaign has today among the modern Democratic party.

But among Republicans: Just look, and lament, at what Trump has exposed.

I would scarcely doubt evidence showing that the Trump campaign was a controlled experiment in what makes GOP voters tick. The remnants of the Tea Party, the biblically literate Evangelicals, the remaining adherents to the old Reagan coalition: They went for Cruz. The well-heeled suburban “moderates” (staunch conservatives by any reasonable definition—surely not moderate in the sense that New Jersey Sen. Clifford Case would have recognized): They went for Rubio or Kasich.  And they were all stomped by the juggernaut of white backlash that is Trump. What about Trump’s appeal to the victims of deindustrialization and stagnant wages? Please.

The man has led consistently national polls of GOP voters from the moment he entered the race last summer and promised to build a wall to keep out the browns. As the Republican party recovers from the looming disaster that is The Trump-an Show, some will ask if the old coalition can be rebuilt.

I ask: Why would you even want to?" [Source]

I think it's really funny how the chattering class and pundits -----that we are forced to watch night in and night out, always ignore the elephant in the room (pun intended), race.

I am glad that Mr. Galupo recognizes it, and more importantly, that he is willing to write about it in such a public way.

Maybe there is hope for the republican party after all. The first step in curing a problem is recognizing that you even have one

*Pic from first-draft.com

How "toxic white masculinity" hurts America.

     The Field Negro education series continues.

Tonight we will read the words of my friend Chauncey Devega. Chauncey has his own blog  (love the name), but I first caught this piece that he wrote over at Salon online magazine.

"Dear White America,

 

I am your friend. I have written several letters of this type to you before. It pains me to have to do so again. What I am going to share in this letter may be commonsense for many white brothers and sisters. Other White Americans may be surprised. Because our society is so segregated, people of color often do not have many opportunities to talk with white people in a direct way regarding our sincere worries about the problems in your community. I hope that this open letter can be part of a broader conversation in that regard.

When a person suffers from chronic pain they often find ways to compensate for it. Some people self-medicate with drugs or alcohol. Others develop the mental discipline necessary to compartmentalize their physical suffering. Others cocoon themselves in a bubble of denial. Because I am your friend, I am going to be honest with you. White America is suffering from a type of cancer. It is hurting you; it is killing your children; it is damaging families; it hurls shrapnel in many directions, maiming and otherwise bringing an end to the lives of those people who are unfortunate enough to be in its blast radius. If you want the truth, this is it: toxic white masculinity, and the backward right-wing politics which nurture and protect it, are hurting millions of you every year.

I know that is hard to digest. But, because I care about you White America, I am obligated to tell you the truth, even at the risk of your discomfort.

For many of you, the very idea that there is such a thing as toxic white masculinity is both surprising and enraging. Denial and anger are a very normal reaction when an uncomfortable truth is called to account. But it is the truth. Toxic white masculinity is a fear of the world changing to the disadvantage of white men, and where what too many white men take as natural rights are actually going to be exposed as unfair advantages, advantages which were gifted by a lottery of genetics and fortune of birth, as opposed to earned merit.

Toxic white masculinity defaults to violence as a means of maintaining social and political control. It clings to guns as a symbol of “real” male identity. It fears women as equals; it lashes out at non-whites who are somehow “stealing” white men’s jobs and power. Toxic white masculinity sees “liberals,” “progressives,” “social justice,” and “feminism” as enemies — out of a fear that “white masculinity” will somehow be made obsolete or extinct. The dream worlds and paranoid fantasies of angry white men are distractions that look to some type of Other as the preeminent threat to America’s safety and security. The reality is of course, very different.

In reality, right-wing domestic terrorists and mass shooters are the number one threat to America’s safety and security since September 11, 2001.

White men are approximately 31 percent of the United States population. And yet, white men are nearly 63 percent of those people who commit mass shootings. Such behavior, among any other group, would be considered pathological and a public health crisis.

Dylann Roof turned his toxic white racist masculinity on a black church in Charleston. And John Houser — a white, right-wing, conservative, Christian fundamentalist, an anti-feminist, woman-hating Nazi sympathizer — directed his rage towards a movie theater in Lafayette last month, where he killed three people and wounded eight others.

Because I am your friend White America, I will share another truth with you: While the mainstream news media will run away from subjects that make you uncomfortable, it is no coincidence that “Trainwreck,” a movie written by a white Jewish feminist comedian, was the target of John Houser’s lethal actions. It was not “mental illness” which made John Houser shoot those people in Lafayette, although such a claim is a common deflection that prevents a serious discussion of white masculinity and mass shootings. One can be “mentally ill” separate and apart from their violent impulses. No, it was extreme right-wing politics and toxic white masculinity that drove Houser to kill.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The killing and abuse of women by men in the United States — the vast majority of it committed within the same “racial” group — is so common that it is rarely deemed to be newsworthy by the mainstream news media. This is a disgusting national embarrassment.
Toxic white masculinity is a complex problem. And you cannot fix it unless you also confront how toxic white masculinity is nurtured and encouraged by your news media and political representatives. While I do not think that you are a victim of your news media and political parties, you have nonetheless been done a disservice by them.

Fox News is your mouthpiece: 92 percent of its prime time viewing audience is white. Fox is the most popular cable news network in the United States. Millions of people watch it on a daily basis. Fox News is part of a propaganda machine that consists of the Internet, radio, and social media. This has created an alternate reality for many White Americans where down is up and up is down, so to speak. Researchers have shown that the right-wing media actually makes its public less knowledgeable about empirical reality and current events than those people who do not watch or listen to it.

The white identity politics, grievance mongering, conspiracies, paranoid thinking, eliminationist rhetoric about liberals and progressives, hostility to women, rage against immigrants, anxiety about those who are not “Christian”, and mainstreaming of white supremacy and white racial resentment, are the fuel for toxic white masculinity. The right-wing media gins up and encourages such sentiments because it is dependent on them for viewers and ad revenue.

The Republican Party, meanwhile, is America’s most prominent white identity organization. Since the end of the civil rights movement, the modern GOP has fused together conservatism and racism as its name brand. In the Age of Obama, the Republican Party has found itself increasingly dysfunctional as its politics are seemingly unable to evolve beyond “hate the black guy in the White House and anything that he proposes,” however reasonable. In many ways — the fetishistic embrace of guns, hostility to women’s rights, Islamophobia, symbolic and overt racism against black people — the policies and talking points of the contemporary Republican Party are toxic white masculinity as a campaign platform. Together with the alternate reality created by the right-wing media, the Republican Party has become so radicalized, breaking many of the standing norms of consensus politics in modern American politics, that it no longer functions as a responsible political organization.

White America, you have been confused, misled, and lied to by your primary political party and media. This is hurting you in many ways.

The American economy is broken. Wealth and income inequality are severe. The psychological wages of being White in America may still exist, but they are not translating into the material wealth they once did in the not so recent past. For example, there are more White Americans on welfare and other types of public aid than any other group. White Americans also receive a disproportionate percentage of public assistance dollars. As Robert Putnam details in his new book ”Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis,” the life opportunities and upward mobility of White America are increasingly imperiled. The abuse of prescription drugs, as well as illegal narcotics such as heroine and methamphetamines, is a severe problem for White America. The sum total of these and other troubles have left white folks – white men especially – less hopeful and feeling more insecure and angry about their future." [More]

Chauncey wrote all that to tell you, my white male friends, that the days of John Wayne are long gone.

It's time that you all got in touch with your sensitive and cerebral side. This might be a bit tough for some of you, but I think you can do it.

*Pic from Salon.com