Why we can't have nice things

Fox News has a conversation about Race in America:

Republicans hold a hearing about women's reproductive health:

White House Press Corp criticizes the Obama administration for lack of diversity:

Nuff said...

What we can learn from LBJ

We are right to honor President Lyndon Johnson on this 50th anniversary of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Its also fitting that we honor him for working so hard to pass the Voting Rights Act, launching things like Medicare/Medicaid and initiating the Great Society. That is a powerful progressive legacy. Perhaps its true, as Adam Serwer implies, that it took a racist white southerner to do all that in the 1960's.

But before we go wishing for a return to that kind of leadership - as some have done recently - lets also remember that the same heavy hand that accomplished all of that is the one who was driven out of seeking re-election by chants of "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"

The same man who muscled legislation through Congress by doing things like giving Sen. Richard Ruseell "the treatment"...

...is the one who lied to Congress about the Gulf of Tonkin in order to escalate the war in Vietnam.

An argument can be made that this is the kind of power that must be wielded in order to bring about the progressive change we witnessed in the 1960's. That is a discussion worth having. But we cannot afford to do that without taking into account the "dark side" of that kind of power. President Lyndon Johnson is a perfect example of that. He used the power of dominance for tremendous good and unconscionable evil. I would suggest that its very likely you don't get one without the other.

A coup in the GWB White House?

You won't find many liberals/Democrats who want to talk about this. We tend to be much more interested in vilifying the Bush administration than understanding what went on. But for a while now we've been seeing evidence that the George HW Bush realists implemented a coup inside the George W Bush White House sometime in 2006. I'm not going to try to guess at their motives or tactics, but it came right on the heels of the midterm election. The most public event that signaled the coup was the "resignation" of Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense.

And now, from the leaked report of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation into the detention and interrogation practices (ie, torture) of the Bush administration, comes this:

The CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program ended by 2006 due to legal and oversight concerns, unauthorized press disclosures and reduced cooperation from other nations.

Its also true that by January 2007, the Bush administration stopped the NSA's warrantless surveillance program and started going to the FISA Court for approval.

Cheney/Rumsfeld/et al had their field day from 2001-2006. Then something changed. I'd love to hear more about the back story on that. But regardless, at some point even the Republican realists recognized that those folks had gone off the deep end.

When people suggest that President Obama is continuing some policies of the Bush administration, a correction is in order. That might apply to the policies of the post-coup Bush White House of 2007-2008. But definitely not its prior incarnation.

The Brothers and The Boss

The same guy who knocked it out of the park with this video is at it again.


Ask yourself who you know that needs to see this one. Then go share it.

What happens when the illusory "them" becomes one of "mine?"

As a lover of the big picture, I particularly enjoyed the latest report from Pew Research on the big demographic changes underway in the U.S. As a side note, its interesting that they published this one in a way that caters to an online (rather than paper-based) audience. Sign of the times?

The big trends they focus on are the browning of the younger generation just as the predominantly white boomer generation enters their "golden years." For a few years now, pundits who have noted these trends have been forecasting an imminent battle between the two. For example, back in 2010, Ron Brownstein wrote: The Gray and the Brown: The Generational Mismatch. Perhaps the doomsayers predicting a great clash are right.

But there's one portion of the Pew Report that might wreck a bit of havoc on those predictions.

Here’s an interesting question: By 2050, will our racial categories still make much sense? These days our old labels are having trouble keeping up with our new weddings. A half century ago racial intermarriage was illegal in a third of the states and a gasp-inducing taboo just about everywhere else. Today, nearly one-in-six newlyweds marry across racial or ethnic lines.

This strikes me as the fulfillment of every racist's nightmare come true. While I can't claim to understand the mindset, the underlying fear seems to have always been: "my daughter might date/marry one." And it was the prospect of little brown babies resulting from that kind of union that instilled panic.

Some of us who have grown up during this transition have seen father/mothers, grandparents, extended family and friends have to struggle as this trend became a reality with their own loved ones. It doesn't end the racial dynamics, but it does transform them in interesting ways. All of the sudden it might be their grandchild who is racially profiled or "stopped and frisked." And just imagine what happens when one of them is the victim of race-based fear leading to a "stand your ground" moment.

Meanwhile, the children of these unions are growing up with one of their own occupying the White House. Don't think they haven't noticed.

As a biracial American, for the first time in my adult life I'm really proud of my country. Even though the "national conversation on race" is turning out to be like trying to use an iPhone to call someone on a CB radio, my people are coming to light in the public consciousness in a way that we never have before. This is our moment. I hear that CNN's next big series will be called "Beige in America." 

These young people are going to change the nature of the conversation about race in this country. There are an awful lot of white (and black, ie Cornell West) people that are still wedded to the old frames and aren't going to like that much. But eventually the "Beige in America" are going to have their say about it all.

So I'd like to go back to the question the Pew report asked: "By 2050, will our racial categories still make sense?" First of all, the truth is that those categories have NEVER made sense.  They've always been an illusion. What white America might be about to learn is what happens when the illusory "them" is one of "mine."

The children of 1969

Today in his speech on the LBJ civil rights legacy, President Obama said this:

In a time when cynicism is too often passed off as wisdom, it's perhaps easy to conclude that there are limits to change, that we are trapped by our own history, and politics is a fool's errand, and we'd be better off if we rolled back big chunks of LBJ's legacy, or at least if we don't put too much of our hope, invest too much of our hope in our government.

I reject such thinking, not just because Medicare and Medicaid have lifted millions from suffering, not just because the poverty rate in this nation would be far worse without food stamps and Head Start and all the Great Society programs that survive to this day. I reject such cynicism because I have lived out the promise of LBJ's efforts, because Michelle has lived out the legacy of those efforts, because my daughters have lived out the legacy of those efforts, because I and millions of my generation were in a position to take the baton that he handed to us.

Because of the civil rights movement, because of the laws President Johnson signed, new doors of opportunity and education swung open for everybody, not all at once, but they swung open. Not just blacks and whites, but also women and Latinos and Asians and Native Americans and gay Americans and Americans with a disability.

They swung open for you and they swung open for me. And that's why I'm standing here today, because of those efforts, because of that legacy. And that means we've got a debt to pay. That means we can't afford to be cynical.

That inspired me to re-post part of something that I wrote over at Daily Kos back in 2009. 

_______________

Sorry DFH if you opened this one up expecting that this diary would be about you...its not.

There was, however, something that happened that year that seems to be a big contributor to the myriad of discussions we are having these days about race. What might that be? Helen Cooper, writing in the NYT this week, gave us a clue. As she points out, 1969 was...

the year that America’s most prestigious universities began aggressively recruiting blacks and Latinos to their nearly all-white campuses.

Just like the passage of Title IX in 1972 has been seen by many as the groundbreaker that led to things like the US Women's Soccer Team winning the 1999 World Cup, the affirmative action of Ivy League schools has given us many of the new power elite in this country today. And these folks are shaking up the status quo. Here are just a few examples.

• Barack Obama - President of the United States and graduate of Columbia and Harvard Law School
• Michelle Obama - First Lady of the United States and graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School
• Eric Holder - United States Attorney General and graduate of Columbia and Columbia Law School
• Sonya Sotomayor - Nominee to the Supreme Court and graduate of Princeton and Yale Law School
• Deval Patrick - Governor of Massachusetts and graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law School
• Cory Booker - Mayor of Newark, NJ and graduate of Stanford (and Oxford) and Yale Law School
• Van Jones - White House Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation and graduate of Yale Law School

These are just the few obvious ones that I thought of from the political arena.

We might react to all of this by decrying the hold that these elite institution have on the power base of this country. That would certainly be a worthy discussion. But Cooper, in her article, explains some interesting ways that this shift is impacting our politics.

But the children of 1969 dwell in a complex world. They retain an ethnic identity that includes its own complement of cultural, historical and psychological issues and considerations. This emerged at Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings. And it emerged again last week, when Mr. Obama joked in the White House East Room that if he ran afoul of the police, “I’d get shot.” In saying this, he seemed to draw on the fears of black men across the United States, including those within the new power elite.

What Mr. Obama seemed to be demonstrating was what Mr. Lemann of Columbia calls a “double consciousness” that allows the children of 1969 to flow more easily between the world which their skin color bequeathed them and the world which their college degree opened up for them...

On Friday Mr. Obama said he hoped Mr. Gates’s incident might become a “teachable moment.” It is a daunting task for the children of 1969: finding out whether the double consciousness they honed in the Ivy League can actually get this country to listen — and react — to race in a different way.

So what we've been seeing lately is the former white male power base in this country being infiltrated by people with a "double consciousness" and the resulting fireworks. I'd suggest that the journey we started by electing our first Black POTUS is just beginning and that the clash between these two worlds will only intensify.

A politics that's "almost awesome in its evilness"

For those of you who are actually interested in a thoughtful discussion about Obamacare, I'd suggest you listen to this conversation between Harold Pollack and Jonathan Gruber (or you can read the transcript at the link).


At the end, this exchange is critical:

Harold: One of the things that’s really striking to me is there’s a politics of impunity towards poor people, particularly non-white poor people that is almost a feature rather than a bug in the internal politics in some of these states, not to cover people under Medicaid, even if it’s financially very advantageous to do so. I think there’s a really important principle to defeat this politically, not just because Medicaid is important for people, but because it’s such a toxic political perspective that has to be … It has to be shown that that approach to politics doesn’t work because otherwise, we will really be stuck with some very unjust policies that will be pursued with complete impunity in some of these places.

Jon: That’s a great way to put it. There’s larger principles at stake here. When these states are turning – not just turning down covering the poor people – but turning down the federal stimulus that would come with that.

Harold: Yeah.

Jon: So the price they are willing … They are not just not interested in covering poor people, they are willing to sacrifice billions of dollars of injections into their economy in order to punish poor people. It really is just almost awesome in its evilness.

(Emphasis mine)

If we were to listen to Jonathan Chait, we'd need to give these Republican governors/legislatures the benefit of the doubt that their rejection of Medicaid was based on sound ideological beliefs about doing the right thing for (particularly non-white) poor people. But as Pollack and Gruber are pointing out - its not just bad for poor people, its bad for their state's economies. Yet they're willing to forgo that for a politics that punishes poor people. I am reminded of the price many states are willing to pay to maintain the prison industrial complex even though less expensive alternatives have proven themselves to be more effective.

When the price of maintaining hatred hits Republicans in the pocketbook and they're still willing to pay it - we've gone way beyond the simplistic ideological explanations they so often use to obscure it. We've actually entered a territory that is "almost awesome in its evilness." I think Pollack and Gruber are right to point that out.