[Peace-discuss] Why the Democrats are as they are

[Jenifer Cartwright]

Hey check out the Demos report card on civil rights in the latest Crisis Magazine (NAACP publication). With one or two exceptions Demos get straight As, Repubs get straight Fs. May not matter to some of those who post to this list, but it definitely matters to ME!!
 --Jenifer

--- On Wed, 6/18/08, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:

From: C. G. Estabrook <galliher at uiuc.edu>
Subject: [Peace-discuss] Why the Democrats are as they are
To: "Peace-discuss" <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
Date: Wednesday, June 18, 2008, 11:20 AM

Some Democrats are more equal than others:
	Race and gender distract from class in US primaries

Class is the great unmentionable in the Obama-Clinton campaigns. US
progressives 
want to diversify the elite across colour, gender and ethnic background, while 
accepting ever greater inequalities of wealth between the elite and the rest of

the nation.

By Walter Benn Michaels

There have been two defining moments related to race in the Obama campaign, and

more generally in United States progressive politics. The first was in January 
on the night of the Illinois senator’s victory in South Carolina when, in 
response to comments by Bill Clinton about the size of the black vote, the
Obama 
crowd started chanting: “Race doesn’t matter.”

“There we stood,” said the novelist and Obama activist Ayelet Waldman,
“in the 
heart of the old South, where Confederate flags still fly next to statues of 
Governor Benjamin Tillman, who famously bragged about keeping black people from

the polls (‘We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of
it’), 
chanting race doesn’t matter, race doesn’t matter. White people and black 
people. Latinos and Asians, united in our rejection of politics as usual.
United 
in our belief that America can be a different place. United. Not divided”
(1).

The second moment was in March when, in response to the controversial sermons
of 
his former pastor, the Rev Jeremiah Wright, Obama gave his “more perfect
union” 
speech, declaring: “Race is an issue this nation cannot afford to ignore
right 
now” and inaugurating what many commentators described as a supposedly 
much-needed “national conversation on race”.

I say supposedly because Americans love to talk about race and have been doing 
so for centuries, even if today the thing we love most to say is that
“Americans 
don’t like to talk about race”. What we aren’t so good at talking about
is 
class, as Obama himself inadvertently demonstrated when he tried to talk about 
class on 6 April at a closed-door San Francisco fundraiser (“Bittergate”).
He 
tried to explain the frustrations of some small-town Pennsylvanians: “It’s
not 
surprising that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to

people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade
sentiment.”

’Change we can believe in’
There seems to be an obvious contradiction here. First, the chant of race 
doesn’t matter; then the speech about why race does matter. But after
reflection 
the contradiction fades, since the need for the speech, the history of American

racism, is what prompted the promise of the chant: the idea that electing a 
black man would be a major step toward overcoming that history. Which, of 
course, it would.

It is the promise of overcoming the long history of racial division, the
promise 
of solving in the 21st century what W E B Du Bois (2) described as the 
overwhelming problem of the 20th century, the problem of the colour line, that 
gives the Obama campaign its significance. The “change we can believe in”
is not 
ideological, it’s cultural (Obama and Clinton are ideologically almost 
identical; if people had wanted ideological change, we’d be talking about
John 
Edwards). And at the heart of that cultural change is the fact that it cannot
be 
proclaimed. It must be embodied, and only a black person can embody it. We can 
elect white people who say that race shouldn’t matter, but only the election
of 
a black person can establish that it really doesn’t.

So the Obama campaign is and has always been all about race, and especially 
about anti-racism as progressive politics. Whether or not he ultimately wins, 
and especially if he doesn’t, we are still being shown the “progressive”
wing of 
the Democratic Party leading Americans toward an increasingly open and equal 
society, for African-Americans and also for Asians and Latinos and women and
gays.

But the problem with this picture – a problem that is also a crucial part of
its 
attraction – is that it is false. There has been extraordinary, albeit 
incomplete, progress in fighting racism, but the picture is false because that 
progress has not made American society more open or equal. In fundamental 
respects it is less open and equal today than it was in the days of Jim Crow 
when racism was not only prevalent but was state-sponsored.

The hallmark of a neo-liberal political economy is rising sensitivity about 
differences of identity – cultural, ethnic, sometimes religious – and
rising 
tolerance for differences of wealth and income. Readers who are familiar with 
the jargon of economic inequality will have an immediate sense of what it means

to say that equality in America has declined when I tell you that in 1947, at 
the height of Jim Crow and the segregationist laws in the South, the US Gini 
coefficient was .376 and that by 2006, it had risen to .464. Since on the Gini 
scale 0 represents absolute equality (everyone makes the same income as
everyone 
else) and 1 represents absolute inequality (one person makes everything), this 
is significant.

Back then, the US was in the same league as the countries of western Europe, 
albeit a little more unequal than them; today we’re up there with Mexico and 
China (3). In 1947, the top 20% of the US population made 43% of all the money 
the nation earned. In 2006, after years of struggle against racism, sexism and 
heterosexism, the top 20% make 50.5%. The rich are richer (4).

Legitimate the elite
So the struggle for racial and sexual equality – the relative success of
which 
has been incarnated in the race and gender politics of the Democratic Party
over 
the past six months – has not produced greater economic equality, but been 
compatible with much greater economic inequality, and with the formation of an 
increasingly elitist society (5). There is a reason for this. The battles 
against racism and sexism have never been to produce a more equal society; or
to 
mitigate, much less eliminate, the difference between the elite and the rest; 
they were meant to diversify and hence legitimate the elite.

This is why policies such as affirmative action in university admissions serve 
such a crucial symbolic purpose for liberals (6). They reassure them that no
one 
has been excluded from places like Harvard and Yale for reasons of prejudice or

discrimination (the legitimating part) while leaving untouched the primary 
mechanism of exclusion: wealth (the increasing-the-gap between the rich and 
everyone else part). You are, as Richard Kahlenberg put it, “25 times as
likely 
to run into a rich student as a poor student” at 146 elite colleges, not
because 
poor students are discriminated against but because they are poor. They have
not 
had the kind of education that makes it plausible for them even to apply to 
elite colleges, much less attend them.

What affirmative action tells us is that the problem is racism and the solution

is to make sure the rich kids come in different colours; this solution looks 
attractive long after graduation, when the battle for diversity continues to be

fought among lawyers, professors and journalists – in fact, any profession
with 
enough status and income to count as elite. The effort is to enforce a model of

social justice in which proportional representation of race and gender counts
as 
success.

If what you want is a more diverse elite, electing a black president is about
as 
good as it gets. Electing a woman president would be a close second. But if you

want to address the inequalities we have, instead of the inequalities we like
to 
think we have (inequalities produced by inherited wealth and poverty); if you 
want a political programme designed to address the inequalities produced not by

racism and sexism, which are only sorting devices, but by neo-liberalism, which

is doing the sorting, neither the black man nor the white woman have much to
offer.

They are two Democrats who can’t even bring themselves to acknowledge
publicly, 
in their last debate in April, that Americans making between $100,000 and 
$200,000 a year hardly qualify as middle class. Clinton committed herself “to

not raising a single tax on middle-class Americans, people making less than 
$250,000 a year” and Obama (who was, as a commentator put it, “a lot
squishier” 
about it) also committed himself to not raising taxes on people making under 
$200,000.

Root of inequality
But only 7% of US households earn more than $150,000; only 18% earn more than 
$100,000; more than 50% earn under $50,000 (7). Once you have Democrats who 
consider people on $200,000 as middle class and in need of tax relief, you
don’t 
need Republicans any more. Clinton and Obama are the emblems of a liberalism 
which has made its peace with a political ethics that will combat racist and 
sexist inequalities, while almost ignoring inequalities that stem not from 
discrimination but from exploitation. The candidates’ death match prominently

features charges of racism and sexism.

In 1967, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and at the beginning

of the effort to make the rights guaranteed by that act a reality, Martin
Luther 
King was already asking “where do we go from here?”

King was a great civil rights leader but he was more than that, and the 
questions he wanted to raise were not, as he pointed out, civil rights 
questions. They were, he told the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 
“questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of
wealth”.

There were then, as there are now, more poor white people than poor black
people 
in the US, and King was acutely aware of that. He was aware that anti-racism
was 
not a solution to economic inequality because racism was not the cause of 
economic inequality, and he realised that any challenge to the actual cause, 
“the capitalistic economy”, would produce “fierce opposition”.

King did not live to lead that challenge and the fierce opposition he expected 
never developed because the challenge never did. Instead, not only the 
anti-racism of the civil rights movement but also the rise of feminism, of gay 
rights and of all the new social movements proved to be entirely compatible
with 
the capitalistic economy King hoped to oppose.

It is possible but unlikely that Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton might some day

take up King’s challenge. Neo-liberalism likes race and gender, and the race
and 
gender candidates seem to like neo-liberalism.

______________________________________________
Walter Benn Michaels is professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and 
author of The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and
Ignore 
Inequality, Metropolitan, New York, 2006

(1) http://my.barackobama.com/page/comm ...

(2) William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963), the black civil rights
leader, 
Pan-Africanist historian and writer who became a naturalised citizen of Ghana
in 
1963.

(3) France is .383, Germany is .283, Sweden is .250.

(4) Social mobility in the US has declined. In a recent study for the Pew 
Foundation, Isabel Sawhill and John E. Morton report that by some measurements 
the US is actually a less mobile society than Canada, France, Germany and most 
Scandinavian countries; http://www.economicmobility.org/ass .... They suggest 
that if you want to pursue the American dream today, you need to learn German 
and move to Berlin.

(5) See Serge Halimi, “US: Republican deficits”, Le Monde diplomatique,
English 
edition, November 2006.

(6) See John D Skrentny, “US: whose land of opportunity?” and Christopher 
Newfield, “Education for sale in the land of the free”, Le Monde
diplomatique, 
English edition, May 2007 and September 2007.

(7) American Census Bureau; http://factfinder.census.gov

<http://mondediplo.com/2008/06/05equality>
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