Gray Lady Wants You To Cool the "Race-talk"

How can you tell when the ruling elites have sunk into a moral cesspit? When the Paper of Record, acting on behalf of the Democratic Party, warns liberal politicians and pundits not to talk about Donald Trump's or anybody else's racism past a certain, self-serving point.

You see, it's not about doing or saying what's right. It's about doing or saying whatever it takes for your political party to win.  Calling out the evil of racism apparently has a sell-by date, especially in a campaign year.

Of course, the New York Times posits it a bit more delicately than that, as it coyly headlines David Leonhardt's column Is All This Talk of Racism Bad for Democrats?

The short answer is "Yes, You Idiot!", but since this is liberalism talking, there are the usual "pragmatic" excuses for ignoring both the historical and contemporary racism in this country. It's all about clawing back power by any means necessary. You see, although the Democrats thought they they could win in 2016 by harping about the Trumpian sexism targeting Hillary Clinton, similar talk of Trumpian racism should be off-limits as we approach the 2018 midterms. Identity politics is largely a matter of the class and status of the identity symbol they're talking about and elevating on any given day.

(As just one recent example of this basic truth, the recently-announced Senate candidacy of transgender whistleblower Chelsea Manning has elicited howls of outrage from corporate Democrats. She is simply not the "right" kind of identity politics symbol for them, because she exposed their war crimes and otherwise embarrassed the ruling elites when she furnished their self-serving correspondence to Wikileaks.)

For his own pragmatic part, meanwhile, Donald Trump certainly wants 2018 to be all about race, the better to whip up the estimated third of the electorate which still supports him. He needs them to continue believing that even the lowest white man is superior to the highest black man, That was, and is, a winning strategy for him. He wants Democrats to continue accusing him of racism.

Therefore, it follows that the Democrats should fight this strategy by ignoring racism itself.  After all, this is the reality-based community, in which facts have a well-known liberal bias.

Of course, racism really sucks, "but" as David Leonhardt worries:

 It's  also important to distinguish between the current moment and the remainder of 2018. Calling out Trump as a racist is the right thing to do in the days immediately following comments like his vulgar denigration of Haitians and others last week. It should not become the centerpiece of the Democrats’ 2018 strategy.

That centerpiece needs to be a principled populism that causes voters — white, black, Latino and Asian — to think about their economic interests. Trump certainly can be a huge part of the strategy. The president is almost always the central issue in a midterm election. The key is how Democrats talk about him.

Emphasizing the ways he’s hurting the middle class and working class has almost no downside. It turns off no substantial group of voters. It can win over swing voters and motivate reliably progressive ones.

Well, at least he had the decency to wait till after the Martin Luther King holiday to publish his cautionary screed.

You might agree with Leonhardt - after all, he sounds reasonable and caring and even class-conscious - but read the subtext. He is not suggesting that the Democratic Party actually push policies that will make people's lives better. He is simply suggesting that the candidates talk a good game and get the voters to just "think about" about their economic interests - by making the mid-term campaigns All About Trump. His tax plan and other assaults on everyday Americans are so horrible, who needs an actual plan of one's own? All that Democrats need are better bullshitting skills as they carefully ignore the "shit hole" rhetoric they are currently in a frenzy of co-opting to death. 

In other words, rather than open up the whole can of worms about the American imperialistic origins of "shit hole countries," the Democrats want to dial it back to the same old "We Suck Less" strategy. As Leonhardt enthuses, ignoring Trump's race-baiting in favor of his economic assaults "turns off no substantial group of voters. It can win over swing voters and motivate reliably progressive ones." 

In other words, those wily Democrats think they can seduce white people into the voting booth by making them worry more about money than they worry about black people, who shall not be mentioned in certain polite bourgeois company. Pander, rinse, repeat, ignore, pander some more. And besides ignoring racism, Dems must studiously avoid all mention of the class war and the politically-manufactured wealth inequality, now at its most extreme level since the last Gilded Age.

Another inside-baseball piece by The Hill's Amie Parnes puts it even more bluntly. The Democrats once again plan to follow the winning 2006 Rahm Emanuel strategy by going after the white suburban voters who propelled Trump to his slim victory one year ago. They will also continue harping on their own witch-hunting, xenophobic agenda of Russia, Russia, Russia:

Emanuel benefited from the political climate of 2006. 

The election was driven by opposition to an unpopular President George W. Bush, who was drowning in headlines about the Iraq war and his handling of Hurricane Katrina. Congressional Republicans—including former House Majority Leader Tom Delay (D-Texas) and Rep. Mark Foley (D-Fla.), were also rocked by scandal in the months leading up to the election.  
Democrats say the political climate is even more poisonous for Republicans now. For one thing, Trump’s White House is shrouded in the Russia investigation. And Republican incumbents “are dropping like flies,” in the words of one Democratic strategist helping to win back the House. 
“They’re imploding,” the Democrat said. “All we need to do is let them unravel while holding firm to our issues.”

 Squelching talk of race and racism under the centrist Democratic bromide "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" also lets them ignore their own right-wing policies of endless war, bombings of dark-skinned people in foreign lands under Obama, deportations of record numbers of dark-skinned people under Obama, the warrantless surveillance of American citizens approved by Obama, the bailouts of Wall Street and corporations at the expense of Main Street under Obama, the privatization of public education and the closings of schools in minority neighborhoods under Obama, as well as the militarized police brutality against black and brown people in these same poor neighborhoods.

The upshot of the Democrats' argument is this: let poor people continue to be victimized under our more beneficent watch while we continue to court our wealthy donors and co-opt the support of the people who must continue to believe they "have nowhere else to go."

Remember, this is not about you and your hard lives. This is all about a preferred slate of oligarchic lackeys gaining back power by pretending to care about you for one magical moment every two, four, or six years.

If they think telling people to shut up about uncomfortable topics is a winning strategy for them as they attempt to control the "narrative," maybe they should rethink their entire careers.