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My Life Briefly Summarized

This is true:

When white people go away to college, they tend to study what are knowns as the Arts.  This includes actual Art, English, History, Classics, and Philosophy.  These can of course be broken down further into Film, Womyn’s Studies (yes the spelling is correct), Communications, Gender Studies, and so forth.  It is important to note that a high percentage of white people also get degrees in Political Science, which is pretty much like arts, and only seems to have the word “science” in it to make white people feel better about themselves.

...

White people can also take that degree and go to graduate school (future post) and eventually become a professor or adjunct professor where they will still require parental support.

From: Stuff White People Like, #47.

A Southern Man Don't Need Him Around, Anyhow

Ed Kilgore responds to Tom Schaller's latest Salon article thusly:

So who, exactly, is Schaller arguing with? Apparently, with "centrist Democrats [who] continue to urge the party to find new ways to lure white male voters back into the fold. Bill Galston, former domestic policy advisor to Bill Clinton and one of Washington's sharpest analysts, is a proponent of a Democratic reinvestment in white male voters."

Schaller then takes a brief look at a six-year-old article by Galston (a co-editor here at TDS) from Blueprint Magazine analyzing the collapse of Democratic support among white male voters in elections through 2000, mainly in order to turn Galston's numbers on their head. But he doesn't seem to have noticed that Galston's main point was to suggest a conflict between progressive moral commitments and major gains among white male voters that simply couldn't be wished away. Here's the money quote from Galston's piece:

In sum, the most realistic strategic objective is to diminish the intensity of white male opposition to the national Democratic Party while retaining the support of key minority groups and bolstering suburban gains, especially among white women. To execute this strategy, embracing moderate positions on cultural issues based on mainstream values is a necessity. But for today's Democratic Party, neither cultural conservatism nor an anti-government stance is an option. If that is what it takes to regain full competitiveness among white men, the price is too high.

As in much of Schaller's writing about Democrats and the South, he seems eager to suggest that anyone interested in cutting disastrous Democratic losing margins in certain segments of the electorate is arguing for "pandering," the abandonment of Democratic constituencies, or a "turn to the right" on key issues. The only choices on the table are to lust after Bubba or spurn him.

A few points: The part of Galston's article Kilgore quotes argues that, for Democrats, "embracing moderate positions on cultural issues based on mainstream values is a necessity." That's actually a pretty vapidly cliche and meaningless statement, and quite possibly even bad advice. Whatever "mainstream values" are, Galston seems to grab them out of thin air rather than finding the nuances of the public's views on culture war type issues. It's stale strategy Democrats need to outgrow, and I can't imagine any other reason to stick to it than in a poor attempt at reaching conservative white men -- which goes to prove, rather than challenge, Schaller's point.

But one of Kilgore's Schaller critiques is more apt: The guy does have a tendency to rely on straw men -- or, at least, on Mudcat Saunders, as if Mudcat is representative of a mass movement in Democratic strategizing. It's pretty clear they both actively dislike each other, which hardly leads to the most cogent exchange of ideas.

The Right's Diversity Problem

Responding to Schaller's article, Stanley Kurtz exemplifies why the Republican Party is becoming little more than the party of white backlash -- and will become increasingly irrelevant until someone decides to change course:

First the Democrats alienated many white men by supporting discriminatory preferential treatment policies. When these men refused to accept this discrimination, many of them left the Democratic Party. This, in turn, enraged many Democrats, who began to think "invidiously" about white men. So it would appear that racial discrimination in law and policy breeds racial discrimination in culture. If the Democrats lose a large chunk of the "NASCAR Dad" vote in the upcoming elections, it might have something to do with the fact that the Dems richly deserve to lose it.

They'll of course get roughly the same percentage as they always get, but the point Schaller made -- which Kurtz and others on the right are so reluctant to acknowledge -- is that the number of these "NASCAR Dads" is steadily declining. Losing that is hardly as bad as losing the trust of everyone in the country that doesn't look like you.

Southern White Guys

Tom Schaller notes:

In 1952, according to calculations performed by Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz for Salon, white males were nearly half the American electorate. Thanks to the recent growth in the Latino population, however, the white male share is now dropping about a percentage point a year, accelerating a decline that began with the increased enfranchisement of African-Americans in the civil rights era. In next year's election, white males may account for fewer than one out of three voters. Bubba is no longer a kingmaker.

"Bubba" being Steve Jarding and Mudcat Saunders' term for the white working-class, who they think can join with black Southerners to create a Democratic majority in the region (Schaller's, um, somewhat skeptical and also kind of hates Mudcat). Also interestingly, Schaller discusses John Edwards not as a Southern candidate, but rather as a regionally and racially non-specific one:

At first blush, Edwards, the Southern populist nonpareil, seems ideally situated to corner the market on working-class, white male voters. But aside from his homegrown accent, Edwards displays none of the affectations or semiotics that might once have signaled his intent to woo them. There are no Lamar Alexander-style flannel shirts; there is no sponsorship, à la Florida Sen. Bob Graham four years ago, of a NASCAR racing team. Instead, Edwards -- whose father worked in a textile mill -- hammers the issue of economic justice largely, if not completely, without overt cultural appeals. If he were a character from Southern literature, the former trial lawyer would be Atticus Finch of "To Kill a Mockingbird," not Henry Drummond of "Inherit the Wind."

Did I mention I'm writing my undergraduate thesis on this sort of thing? I'm a little obsessed with the topic, and Schaller makes two interesting points here. First, of course, is the fact that the portion of the electorate made up of white males is declining -- convenient for liberals, because white males are, for example, the only group of young people not heavily favoring the Democratic Party at the moment. Older white males are even more Republican -- except, of course, for white male union members, who Schaller aptly notes continue to vote Democratic, although not quite overwhelmingly. A more diverse electorate means more Democratic votes, and Democrats would be smart to pay attention to changing demographics.

The Edwards thing I'm less certain about. Edwards is making a regional appeal. That Southern accent is one a person can lose (I should know), and while it's true Edwards' main focus is on economic justice defined rather generally, it's clear it comes from his experience seeing particularly Southern poverty (rural poverty in particular). Atticus Finch is still a Southern archetype, even if it's a less offensive one than Henry Drummond.

The Straight White People's Party (An Addendum)

Fact of the Day: More people watched the Spanish-language Univision debate than watched the debates on channels like ABC or CNN.

The Straight White People's Party

It seems to me a sign of considerable vulnerability that the Republicans all refused to debate in front of a gay audience and all but McCain refused to debate for Univision. The signal that the GOP is uninterested in anyone not white is not exactly the way to build a majority party.-Andrew Sullivan

This seems about right. In a nation where the non-white portion of the population is steadily increasing -- and where gay people angry about not having equal rights are becoming a major political force -- it's pretty remarkable that one of the parties in a two-party system seems entirely uninterested in acknowledging it. If this continues, the GOP will become nothing but the party of white backlash. That might have been enough to keep the Democrats in power a few generations ago, but we live in a different, much more multicultural society today. Frankly it no longer suffices.

The Kids Are All White

I second Jason Zengerle and Dana Goldstein: Justin Elliott's new Campus Progress article on diversity and college newspapers is pretty good stuff. He writes:

It is a persisting state of affairs: College papers are the province of mostly well-off white and Asian students. African Americans and Latinos are underrepresented compared to the student body or absent altogether. Incidents like the one at K-State—every paper has its own stories of editorial blunders and community protest—occur with a regularity that should no longer be surprising.

Why do these editorial mistakes follow from the lack of diversity on staff? Because in campus journalism, where there are few press releases, word of mouth is everything. Thus when the campus paper is run by students from a certain demographic, coverage tends to mirror the concerns and perspectives of that demographic.

Later, he highlights the class-based realities of journalism that contribute to this:

Davisson thinks getting students from low-income families in the door is the easy part. The real challenge is making it possible for these students to rise within the organization. “Right now the system doesn’t make that very easy,” Davisson says, noting that Spectator editors have had to resign in recent years for financial reasons.

Beyond the university gate it’s hardly a secret that a career in journalism is more a “noble calling” and less a reasonably paid profession. In this unfortunate trend Patsy Iwasaki of the University of Hawaii, Diversity Committee Chair for College Media Advisers, sees yet another disincentive. “[M]inority students realize that only a few positions in media provide the large financial rewards and job status after graduation. Many students feel the pressure from their parents (especially if they are recent immigrants) to go for the standard fields such as business, law, medicine, engineering, etc.,” she writes in an e-mail. “Becoming a journalist might seem like becoming an actor to many recent immigrant parents.”

Goldstein aptly points out the degree to which this effects the journalistic field past graduation:

Students of color learn to mistrust the school paper, and then even those students of color who would otherwise be interested in journalism decide not to get involved. The effects trickle right up the journalism career ladder, especially in the magazine world, which provides fewer paid internships for college students and lower-paid entry level jobs. The result is heavily white applicant pools for programs like TAP's writing fellowship and The New Republic's reporter-researcher gig.

Again: Take a look.

What Was the Southern Strategy?

This is a bit late, but here's one more comment on the Matthew-Yglesias-on-Paul Krugman-on-the-South thing, this time from Megan McArdle. She writes:

I think Matt is obviously right that the South is not just conservative because they hate blacks . . . although it would be interesting to see how much the experience of Reconstruction altered Southern views of government.

The "Southern strategy" should imply not merely that Republicans started campaigning in the south (that would be logical if they thought they should win there . . . and would Paul Krugman really spurn white racist voters who supported, say, the Democrats on single payer?) It should imply that Republican policy changed to make it more palatable to racists. Is this true?

Um, yes? Is this really even up for debate? When the Democrats started moving away from blatant white supremacy, many Southern white voters were left unsettled. Many kept voting Democratic for quite some time, but by Richard Nixon -- and certainly by Ronald Reagan -- the Republican Party found good ways of getting their votes: Law and order, putting "welfare queens" to work, rambling about states' rights, etc. It was subtle, but it wasn't that different in a lot of ways from the most regressive Democratic rhetoric of yore. Lee Atwater, infamous architect of the above-mentioned Southern strategy, said in a 1990's interview:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me -- because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

And there you go. Anyone who researches southern electoral history comes across this quote all the time. It's famous and shows up in pretty much every single book on the subject. It almost gets old. But it keeps appearing because it's important and one of the single most revealing statements releated to political strategy in the entirety of the 20th century.

Economic Liberalism for Me, But Not for Thee

Matthew Yglesias is right that Paul Krugman is wrong, but Yglesias is also wrong on at least one point himself. He writes:

It's true that the recent political success of the GOP has an enormous amount to do with the party's success in the white south, but I think the evidence strongly suggests that conservative politicians get the votes of white southerners precisely because white southerners like conservative positions on taxes, moral values, and national security. Southern Democratic politicians of the Jim Crow era, after all, mostly took conservative stances on all of these issues. The weird thing about Jim Crow politics is that white southerners with conservative views on taxes, moral values, and national security would vote for Democratic presidential candidates who didn't share their views. They did that as part of a strategy for maintaining white supremacy in the South...Racism is a key part of the story, but it plays a much bigger role in explaining why Adlai Stevenson and John Kennedy won South Carolina than in explaining why Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush won there.

I obviously agree that white southerners today have conservative views on a large array of issues (and that this explains their voting patterns just as much as, if not more than, their conservatism on abortion and gay rights). But I think it's wrong to assume white Democratic voters in the Jim Crow era didn't actually have liberal economic views. Sure, they didn't want their social programs shared with African Americans, but they still wanted their social programs. So yes, white southerners voted for the national Democratic Party because they saw it as a tool for keeping the black man down, but even though that's a really terrible and really important reason, it's more accurate to say it's possibly the most important reason, but not the only one. Jim Crow southerners were just white supremacist economic liberals. Populists, if you will.

White Evangelicals And the Republican Party

Scott Lemieux makes a point that needs to be made more often:

At any rate, the idea that conservative evangelicals are a "moderate" position on abortion away from joining the Democratic Party is dreaming in technicolor. The vast majority of Republican evangelicals support Republican economic policies, whatever language they express that support in.

And likewise for other GOP positions. The idea that white evangelicals are simply being duped by the Republican Party is a pretty unsophisticated rendering of the situation and liberals would do well to move past such an analysis.