Tuesday, January 16, 2018

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.

11 comments:


  1. I agree with Ms. Garcia's remarks here, and share her dimming regard for "The Gray Lady" aka The New York Times overall.
    With apologies for interjecting a tangent away from the important specifics of this piece (others please attend and contribute to that), I find remarkably noteworthy the readers' posted comments to various NYTimes articles, compared to those on every other similar site; e.g., Washington Post, Boston Globe, Minneapolis StarTribune, just to name three.
    In fact, I know of no other commercial, main stream media site that has posted comments worth reading at all, let alone warranting response accordingly.
    This means much to me because it was by following readers' comments to the NYTimes that alerted me initially to Ms. Garcia.
    Now, the relatively recent restrictions placed on comments by the NYTimes have severely curtailed my perusal of those, and effectively eliminated my contributing to them.
    That I do lament, and not just because their editors chose to recommend a few of mine.
    Therefore, it has become all the more important to follow what's happening there via these insightful and impassioned Sardonicky posts.
    So, Karen Garcia, kudos and affection for all your keen, courageous, and conscientious attention to all that matters on the civic cultural stage in our political world.



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  2. Thank you, Erik.

    Re the Times: it's emblematic of the gross decline in journalistic standards since the election of Trump. They make no pretense of their motives, no pretense at objectivity. Maybe if they'd treated Obama, Bush and Clinton with the same kind of adversarial intensity, rather than simply valuing "access" to the powerful and acting as stenographers, the country wouldn't be in the mess it's in now. So like you, I am grateful that they still have a relatively uncensored reader comments section, which I think displays more independent viewpoints on the news pages while still a bit of an echo chamber on the op-eds.

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  3. "Privately, he calls Libya a sh-- show, in part, because it’s subsequently become an ISIS haven."

    - Jeffery Goldberg, Atlantic Editor on Obama, 2016

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  4. Karen, please consider submitting comments to NYT news articles rather than to Op-Eds. When news aggregators pick up a NYT piece to link to, it's not Op-Eds, it's news. The comments to those articles are read and passed along. I know because I've read references to them elsewhere.

    When the Drudge Report, which gets over a billion hits a month, links to the NYT, it's for a news article, not an Op-Ed piece. He delivers tons of eyeballs to the NYT and those eyes also read and discuss and pass along comments. Your astute, well crafted and well sourced, not to mention frequently humorous comments belong there. Otherwise, your talents are wasted in the peanut gallery echo chamber of the Op-Ed section. You have a purpose, Karen. You also have a Verified check mark which means you're never at the bottom of the barrel. People do read beyond the first bunch of comments so don't be discouraged if you're not at the top of the heap where you clearly belong!

    When those NYT new articles get tons of recommends and comments, it's because some other source probably linked to it and brought more readers in. Recently I saw the Drudge Report leave a link up to an anti #MeTwo article in the NYT and let it stay up for days. You can bet he brought a ton of his (mostly right wing they say) readers, mostly males (probably), to comment and rate comments to that article (I didn't read the article or the comments for my own sanity). One doesn't have to be a paid subscriber to register to comment and vote. Rest assured that great comments get passed along by various means.

    Many people, including myself, now wait to see a reference to a NYT article elsewhere before we'll visit the NYT. It doesn't help that the NYT has limited free access to to 5 articles/month, down from 10 which used to be 20 which used to be unlimited. They've also brought on board some dubious journalists, their op-ed people are hardly worth reading, and their op-ed fan club uniformly lack originality. But the news comments are often read and the great ones quoted all over the world. You can make a difference.

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  5. Jamie,

    Obama used profanities as much as any of them, but he ran a very tight "off the record" ship and got his agenda across to friendly columnists (especially David Brooks and Tom Friedman) in a self-protective and anonymous manner. Trump is more unabashed. So when he said "shit-hole countries" he probably assumed that "Dickie" Durbin would honor the unspoken pact of the good old boys never talking out of school.

    Comrade P,

    My Times commenting career is hit or miss - and mostly miss lately, since in the interest of my own mental health I only click onto the site a couple of times a day. When I do write a comment on a news story, it often gets in at around #50 or even #100 if I am especially late in "weighing in." For one thing, the moderators print comments a lot more quickly on the news pages, especially for stories which seem tailor-made to elicit maximum anti-Trump outrage. The magical Green Check is magical only when the usual stalwart Greenies appear all by their lonesomes on the op-eds; sometimes only a dozen of these "verified" comments will stand competition-free for hours, or even overnight.

    Also... when I'm researching or writing a blog post I am unavoidably late catching up on the latest breaking NYT news, such as Trump chasing a porn star around in his tightie whities, or Steve Bannon being subpoenaed. My first reaction is, what the hell has this crap got to do with me and hundreds of millions of other people gasping for air in their own shitty hell-holes?

    Actually, come to think of it, I should just cut and paste that last sentence onto any Times story and then watch my Mister Green Check go wherever it is that rude comments go to die! I am thinking along the lines of the Memory Hole in Orwell's 1984.

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  6. Don't give up, Karen. You could whip out anything and it would still be better than most of the other comments. If you post your comment here, we'll go to NYT and vote it up. We just have to scroll down until we see your quill pen to find it.

    I love your idea. If you don't do it, then the rest of us should all start submitting the comment "What the hell has this crap got to do with me and hundreds of millions of other people gasping for air in our own shitty hell-holes?" Count me in! At the very least, the moderators will get the message and who knows, they might even pass it along to their bosses. I'm always up for some fun and mischief.

    All this 'cool the race talk' - and poverty, empire, and capitalism talk- but heat up the war and national security talk is driving me crazy. How is it that 55 House Dems and 19 Senate Dems just voted to give that madman Nazi-Stalinist-Putin tool-Trump the power to spy on all Americans without any safeguards and in complete violation of the 4th Amendment? They must be working for Putin or Putin is forcing them with kompromat, right?

    Trump supposedly colluded with Russia to steal the election and is batsh*t crazy and should be impeached, but they willingly gave him power to accumulate valuable kompromat against all of them and us too. It only makes sense if they really believe that the Deep State is actually in control and needs more blanket power. It's still dangerous and unconstitutional though. Why would do such a thing? Either they've gottn their marching orders from their oligarch owner/donors or they've been completely brainwashed by the Deep State propaganda, or both.

    How can so many of us acknowledge that we're no longer a democracy yet believe we have a chance to change things using the electoral process controlled by two corporate entities who run the show on behalf of ruling class oligarch donors? Because of corporate Party propaganda. Obviously some form of Hopium is necessary to get through all this madness. Choose wisely, friends.

    I admit I'm self-medicating to compensate for all this madness - I'm meditating up to 3 times a day, my drug of choice.

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  7. I indeed forwarded this to both a rabbi (who went to NYU) and to a true expat who deems the U.S. "crazy" - he worked in Atlanta for over 30 years. Your pieces are great and it's nice to understand that someone else keeps her eyes open. I know a "true believer" who lives in Pearl River who imagines that NYC is the center of the universe and it's from her that I learned that one can't change anybody. They are just what they are.

    I was a musician in one of my careers (played professionally at the KenCen in DC) and then became a cubie type in my mid-30s. I'm nearly 70 now. Worked in telecom and endoscopy after I resigned from the KC. I program and understand a great deal about Google and Apple and Twitter and Facebook. They are ALL tremedous violations of privacy and have always been. I am personally sick of hearing about FB that "... it allows me to keep track of my family" and I figure that if Hollywood types and the POTUS and others can use Twitter and that it's "the thing" that I can do it, too. I don't.

    Goolge has likely done a number on you. I couldn't see the "comment" thingy on your post about censorship. I'm quite sure they do it by MAC address (which is hard coded on the chips in your computer and phone and you can't change it) and I'm always wondering why the litte kids (of both genders) don't all have morals and white hats. Why are there so many scammers with black hats? Money! Follow the money!

    Mark Stein
    Boston area

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  8. I'm not a fan of Leonhardt based on his other writings, but as far as those three paragraphs go, its a start. It is my personal belief that "conversations on race" are a dead end. What sort of redress do you end up with? How do you prove a harmful policy is racially motivated? As I remember, Hillary used the term "systemic racism". I do not believe that she ever used the term "systemic inequality".
    I think a good example of how libertarian/neoliberal ideas have infected puportedly liberal institutions is in the article about the tax bill and low income housing tax credits. I've noticed in NYT articles on housing they keep pushing the idea that more construction (and the removal of zoning regulations) is somehow going to magically make hosing more affordable. The logic of capitalism requires a profit so do you think finance capitalism will be investing in real estate when supply brings the prices down enough? I assume they will find another vehicle to park their money in. The only way to ensure housing for all is for the government to build and to housing. How do we even start talking about that when so many have bought into this idea of government housing being a repository of pathological behaviors. And vouchers aren't going to cut it either.
    Don't even get me started on the idea of low income housing tax credits being a "successful" program. In my city, the idea of affordable is often really stretched when they are used and I have seen buildings when the 15 year time is up convert to market rate-- which i am sure happens elsewhere.

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  9. @KAREN

    NATASHA IS SITTING ON TOP OF THE COMMENT BOX OF YOUR LATEST POST.

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  10. @ "Clueless":

    Thanks, I hadn't realized that there was a problem with commenting on my "censorship" post until you alerted me. It was all Natasha's fault. So I banned her. Better to allow reader comments than have some Russian cartoon spy jamming up the sensitive Google works, right?

    @Kat

    In NYC, Mayor di Blasio is deliberately provoking the billionaires by housing homeless people in a hotel directly right across the street from their most famous high-rise. They're using their doormen to convey their displeasure to the tabloids, in a variation of the cowardly ploy of using the working class to wage war against the so-called permanent underclass.

    Real estate in NYC is a place for the wealthy, and wealthy foreigners, to launder their money. Throughout the country, private equity has bought up much of the foreclosed housing stock, and artificially inflated prices (and rents) in the process. Housing is viewed as a commodity rather than as a basic human right, a place of shelter.

    I wrote a piece a couple of years ago about two NYC cops (working class) getting shot in front of a public housing project, which they were patrolling as part of an "anti-terror" training program. Poor people are actually viewed as terrorists by the paranoid rich, who are the true "free-riders" in a hypercapitalistic system which is pathological to the core.

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  11. @Comrade,

    Thanks, our Natasha alerts crossed in the mail, so to speak. All fixed now. I think. I hope.

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