Whither White Identity Politics? (Part 2)

David Brooks

In Part 1 of this series of posts I talked about how New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks recently took "white identity politics" to task for coming between today's Republicans and their party's erstwhile "universalist" principles which were conservative yet colorblind. Brooks himself comes out of that sort of conservative universalism, so he is understandably afraid for the future of his party.

I'm a liberal Democrat, so my fear is more for the future of our country. It boggles my mind how an America which had made such great strides in the fight for racial justice, during my 70-year-and-counting lifetime, has now had such a profound racial relapse — witness the recent martyrdom of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville in a counter-protest against white supremacists who were themselves protesting the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee.

Jean Jaurès

In my own mind I frame this all in a context that will take me a while to explain. The context has to do with a project I am working on with my friend Bob. Bob plans to teach, with some help from me, an Osher Lifelong Learning Institute course on the life of a great Frenchman who was assassinated just over 100 years ago. Jean Jaurès (1859-1914) was a member of the National Assembly in France's Third Republic. He was a great orator, historian, philosopher, newspaper founder-editor, and anti-militarist. On the eve of World War I — specifically, on July 31, 1914 — a nationalist who feared Jaurés might be able to restrain France from entering a looming war with Germany shot him dead in a Paris café.

Jaurès was a leader among France's (and Europe's) socialists of his day. Though born into a bourgeois family in decline, and thus not of the proletariat or working class, Jaurés became the champion of the workers who toiled for too little pay in coal mines and factories. He insistently supported their right to unionize and strike for better wages and working conditions. His anti-militarism was born in part of his realization that many, many of France's proletarian class would die in a nationalist war with Germany.

Now, fast forward to the America of today. The No. 1 nonfiction/general bestseller is currently Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by J.D. Vance. The people Vance describes, and himself comes from, are families who earlier moved from Appalachia's coal country to places like Middletown, Ohio, to get jobs. In both places they were/are working-class, i.e., of the proletariat. Today, many of these people are out of work, but they once had decent-paying jobs in places like automobile factories.

Their current situation, though, is dire. Vance describes their situation as mainly one of cultural disintegration. It's a lot worse than just not having jobs any more. There are numerous symptoms of social dysfunction: family dissolution, alcoholism, drug dependency, etc. Wikipedia says Vance "feels that economic insecurity plays a much lesser role" in their misfortunes than the social rot does.

Maybe so. But a lot might improve for these erstwhile Appalachian members of America's "proletariat" if they had a champion from the political left, à la Jean Jaurès, who could fight for better economic conditions on their behalf.

In America today, many of our working-class citizens who saw Donald Trump as their champion became the decisive factor in giving him enough Rust Belt electoral votes to put him in the White House in the 2016 election. This shouldn't have happened. But there was no Jaurès to act as a working-class champion from the political left.

Hillary Clinton did not do and say the things that might have made her their champion. Bernie Sanders came closer than Clinton in his rhetoric and policy proposals, but Bernie did not capture the imaginations of the white working class. Other Democrats, such as Elizabeth Warren, are offering policies that would benefit this group of left-behind people, but her image does not resonate with them the way that Jaurès' image resonated with the workers of France. So it was left to Trump, a supreme charlatan, to do all the resonating.

Why don't the subjects of "Hillbilly Elegy" find a true champion on the left? I think a fundamental reason is that in the minds of many Rust Belt voters, white identity politics outweigh the economic policies offered by Clinton, Sanders, Warren, et al. — policy proposals that might boost these Americans' chances of gaining better jobs and richer lives.

In short, in America today race "trumps" class as a decider of elections. Even the great Jean Jaurès might not have been able to overcome that ugly truth, were he to be living in America today.

Whither White Identity Politics? (Part 1)

David Brooks

"A greater percentage of congressional Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act than Democrats," writes New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks in a recent piece. Surprised? I am. I was in my late teens in 1964, and I should have known that.

Brooks opines that the G.O.P. of today would never have supported the 1964 act that, per Wikipedia, "outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It prohibited unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools, employment, and public accommodations."

What's changed? The G.O.P., writes Brooks, has "become more of a white party in recent years ... the Republican Party has changed since 2005. It has become the vehicle for white identity politics."

Brooks says:

Recent surveys suggest that roughly 47 percent of Republicans are what you might call conservative universalists and maybe 40 percent are what you might call conservative white identitarians. White universalists believe in conservative principles and think they apply to all people and their white identity is not particularly salient to them. White identitarians are conservative, but their white identity is quite important to them, sometimes even more important than their conservatism.

It's a huge step in the wrong direction, not just for Republicans but for the country as a whole. Brooks:

... white identity politics as it plays out in the political arena is completely noxious. Donald Trump is the maestro here. He established his political identity through birtherism, he won the Republican nomination on the Muslim ban, he campaigned on the Mexican wall, he governed by being neutral on Charlottesville and pardoning the racialist Joe Arpaio.

"Things," moreover, "will get uglier." And it all may lead to the dissolution of the party of Lincoln. "When you have an intraparty fight about foreign or domestic issues, you think your rivals are wrong. When you have an intraparty fight on race, you think your rivals are disgusting. That’s what’s happening. ... It may someday be possible to reduce the influence of white identity politics, but probably not while Trump is in office. As long as he is in power the G.O.P. is a house viciously divided against itself, and cannot stand."

Next: "Whither White Identity Politics? (Part 2)" ...

David Brooks on what being a "moderate" entails

David Brooks

As I've said before, New York Times columnist is my favorite opinion writer. His recent column "What Moderates Believe" tells why.

By the standards Mr. Brooks lays out in his column, I am most definitely a "moderate." I, like Mr. Brooks, "do not see politics as warfare." I agree that "there is no one and correct answer to the big political questions." I also agree that, "at most, government can create a platform upon which the beautiful things in life can flourish."

Quite syncretistically, or so I think, I often can "hold two or more opposing ideas together in [my] mind at the same time." I prefer "steady incremental reform to sudden revolutionary change." I don't believe in suppressing speakers of the hard truth in the name of maintaining ideological purity. I never "prioritize one identity, one narrative and one comforting distortion." I recognize the limits of (hyper-)partisan debate. And I hope I'm humble enough to admit that "the more the moderate grapples with reality the more she understands how much is beyond our understanding."

So I think this column, like so many written by Mr. Brooks, ought to be taken to heart by the American body politic.

And yet ... I'd like to ask Mr. Brooks to add something like the following:

There are, however, certain absolutes that ought to constrain political discourse. We cannot, for instance, relativize the truth of the equality of all of humankind's races in seeking political amity, and the same is true today of gender equality and sexual equality. Such principles have become enshrined in the American value system over the course of time. Some of these absolutes, such as gay rights and transgender rights, have entered the pantheon of American certainties only quite recently, but this does not mean that any of them ought to be be negotiated away in a search for "steady incremental reform." Remember: President Obama echoed Martin Luther King in saying,“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Once it has achieved the fruits of so bending, I believe we must never bend it back simply to be able to say we are seeking a spirit of political "moderation."

What say you to that, Mr. Brooks?

On Moral Puberty

New York Times
columnist David Brooks

David Brooks of the New York Times is my favorite columnist, in part because he so frequently analyzes current affairs in terms of what is or is not moral. I don't know of any other pundits who are less afraid to use the words "moral" and "morality" in their writing.

In Brooks' recent "Can People Change After Middle Age?" column, he invokes the term "moral puberty." For several days now, I have found myself thinking about what he meant by that.

The column is about two southern men, now in their 60s, both of whom found themselves undergoing a sort of midlife moral conversion. They had been brought up in an atmosphere of racial bigotry, and they'd inherited their white culture's disparagement of African Americans. That changed dramatically after both men felt called to something higher than self-advancement and ethnic hatred, as they duly "transformed their lives for the final lap."

Brooks was struck by how both men have "gone through a sort of moral puberty, as if a switch turned. They’ve lost most of their interest in egoistic calculation and some sort of primal desire for generativity has kicked in."

I feel that I myself — now nearing my 70th birthday — went through a period of "moral puberty" during the troubled time of my "midlife crisis." Prior to age 38 — the time when my mother died, that is — I almost never thought in terms of what's moral and what's not. I was not at all religious in those days, either, but within a few years I found myself "getting churched" for the first time.

Even so, I resisted the call to moral stricture that my particular church imposed. I wanted what was not really on offer, a sort of "Catholic lite" — à la what Robin Williams said once said about the Episcopal Church vis-à-vis the Roman Catholic: "all the sacraments but half the guilt."

Somehow, though, it was not long until my religious path took me from high-church Episcopalianism to becoming an actual member of the Roman Catholic faith. I was by that time living a pretty decent approximation of a "moral life." Yet I still found myself resisting many of problematic tenets of Catholic moral teaching.

I still do, as a matter of fact. But never mind. My point here is that I know it's indeed possible to undergo some sort of life-changing "moral puberty" in midlife.

* * * * *

That this is indeed possible is a reflection of how we as a society live today. In the distant past, humans could be expected to become "moral adults" at the time of actual puberty. Adolescence, if it existed at all, was brief. Before you were out of your teens, you probably would be married and with children of your own. You would be, by that point, fully embarked upon your grown-up life. If you were not a "moral adult" by that time, you never would be.

Over some number of decades, or even centuries, that pattern has evaporated. The number of years between the onset of sexual maturity and the arrival of a truly grown-up life has grown and grown.

When I was in my teens, in the 1960s, it was becoming true that larger swaths of young people were going to college. That was not as true of the pre-Baby Boomer generations. But since the time we first Boomers began to come of age, the percentage of youths going to college has grown steadily larger:

Plus, many of those college attendees go on to graduate school. Then will come several years of getting established in a career, perhaps having to sleep all the while in mom and dad's basement.

We see in the behavior and lifestyle of many of those "post-adolescents" — or "adultescents" — a stance that lies somewhere between being childishly ignorant of moral questions and having become a full-fledged moral adult. If and when "moral puberty" does strike, it's going to make a tremendous difference.

Meanwhile, today's "kids" — some of whom will be going gray by the time their adultescence ends — are unlike kids from an earlier age. All this was just starting to be so when I myself was a kid. My generation, after all, was the first rock 'n' roll generation.

So I think David Brooks has, as is usual with him, put his finger squarely on the pulse of our present-day sociology and has delineated the historically unprecedented way we go about living our lives today. We now spend a huge chunk of our life spans in adolescence or post-adolescence, morally speaking. And we increasingly find little room in our young lives for organized religion, judging by the percentage of youth who define themselves as "nones" on sociological surveys:

When and if "moral puberty" arrives in midlife, we may find ourselves — as did I — in need of a church. But even if that specific change doesn't happen, we will nonetheless tend to find that our interior life has changed dramatically. Our very conception of who we are and how we are best to live our lives is going to be altered. Only then will we finally be "all grown up."

Democrats Want "A Better Deal"

Washington Post writer Paul Kane (@pkcapitol) recently discussed how Democratic leaders are tweaking their electoral strategy with their “A Better Deal” agenda. "A Better Deal" is, I hope, an important development that can be a route back to liberal Democratic power at both the national and state levels.

Yet it seems not to have gained much traction in its first couple of weeks after being introduced. For example, there is, as of August 4, 2017, no Wikipedia entry on it.

The Atlantic's Michelle Cottle calls "A Better Deal" a "kinder, gentler populism" but says Democrats are struggling to sell it.

"A Better Deal" is a platform-in-progress. It has a number of planks, with new planks being added as time goes on. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) introduced the plan in the New York Times on July 24. Among the planks he cited:

1. Policies that will increase people's paychecks. Examples: "creating jobs with a $1 trillion infrastructure plan; increasing workers’ incomes by lifting the minimum wage to $15."
2. Policies to reduce people's everyday expenses. Example: "rules to stop prescription drug price gouging."
3. Providing workers the tools they need to compete in today's economy. Example: "giving employers, particularly small businesses, a large tax credit to train workers for unfilled jobs."

More recently, says Kane, Schumer proposed another plank: "taxes and penalties on corporations that ship jobs overseas." Such policies are obviously designed to, writes Kane, "build an economic identity so that [Democratic] candidates can run next year on something more than just opposition to President Trump."

However, Kane adds, "The pressure point ... is crafting an agenda that balances the needs of energizing anti-Trump liberal activists without driving away centrist voters and Republicans disillusioned with the president and the lack of results coming from the GOP-led Congress."

So true. If the Democrats can't pull independents and centrist Republicans into their column, they can't "take back the night" in 2018 and 2020. Yet the populist planks of "A Better Deal" could alienate a whole slew of supporters on the Democratic left who might see their agendas as falling by the wayside.

A huge question will be how what Cottle calls "the Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders wing" of the party receives the "A Better Deal" plan. She writes, "As for the guts of the plan, many of its proposals carry the imprint of [that] wing: get tough on monopolies, boost the minimum wage to $15; invest $1 trillion in infrastructure; cut the cost of medications, college, and child care."

But I think it's inaccurate to conflate Senator Warren (D-Mass.) with Senator Sanders, and Kane shows why. He says some liberals wanted the drafters of "A Better Deal" to "advocate more generous policies such as the free college proposal from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)." Yet, he says, "That proposal, along with Sanders’s push for a national health-care system for all, were left out of the early agenda items."

Sen. Warren walks through the crowd after unveiling the Democratic party's "A Better Deal" for working Americans with members of the party leadership in Berryville, Virginia, July 24, 2017

As I wrote here, "In order to get faster economic growth, we need to do what Senator ... Warren is calling for: breaking up the market 'behemoths' that are prospering greatly at the expense of ordinary Americans of all races, ethnicities, genders, etc." "A Better Deal" seems poised to undertake just that kind of populist agenda.

Sen. Bernie Sanders

Senator Sanders, on the other hand, was conspicuously absent when the Democrats unveiled "A Better Deal," according to this New York Times story, even though "the imprint of his presidential campaign was unmistakably present."

I voted for Sen. Sanders in the 2016 presidential primary in Maryland, and I like much of what he stands for. Yet today I feel that Sen. Warren may have an even better feel than Sanders for what needs to happen to get America moving again.