Race, generational politics, and the Democrats great opportunity

The whitening of the Republican Party, and the great white Boomer estate sale

In the June 7th 2012 online edition of the New York Times, columnist Charles Blow broke down the findings of the recent Pew Research Center American Values survey along racial lines.

Blow points to 3 important findings:

First, since 2000, while the percentage of GOP supporters that are white has remained steady (87%), the percentage of Democrats who are white has fallen from 64% to 55%.  Interestingly, the racial breakdown of 'independents' has also changed -- from 79% white in 2000, to 67% white in 2012.  

Blow's conclusion:  "if current trends persist, in a few years the Democratic Party will be a majority minority party."   

Second, whites, blacks and Latinos often have very different views about poverty, opportunity and the role of government.  

Blow's conclusion:  because the Democrats are increasingly diverse racially (blacks, Latinos), while the Republicans are not, these racially divergent views are going to profoundly affect the national debate in this election year.

Third, swing voters (those who are undecided, who lean towards a candidate, or who say that they could change their mind) are overwhelmingly and disproportionately white (nearly 3/4).  Pew found that these voters lean more towards Obama on issues like civil liberties and the role of labor unions, but are closer to Romney on the social safety net, immigration, and affirmative action.  

Blow's conclusion here is implied rather than stated, but the implication is pretty clear:  Obama will lose if the focus of the 2012 campaign is on these 'racially charged issues.'  The deeper implication is that the GOP would benefit from a campaign that is focused on these things.

I don't have any major quibbles with Blow's analysis, though some of the data he cites really pushes one towards a more radical conclusion, one which he didn't hint at, even obliquely:  

As the Democratic Party slowly begins to reflect the demographic changes underway in the country (in its constituencies, if not yet in its positions), the Republican Party is increasingly becoming the Defense of White Privilege Party, and its short-term electoral interests are leading it even further in that direction.   

Of course, behind the curtain an awful lot of what Republican policymakers actually do has much more to do with the protection of capital (particularly financial capital) than the protection of white privilege per se -- but the nudges, winks and dog whistles, particularly for the Tea Party folks, are often racially inflected.  

And if the GOP's defense of the current structure of American wealth (and its defunding of those institutions which might offer wider access to it or challenge it) isn't at the same time a defense of a certain kind of white privilege, what is it?  If those who have climbed the ladder are overwhelmingly white, and you pull the ladder up behind you, what (who) have you defended?  There is no reason to think that because the Party houses within it a supposedly cosmopolitan financial elite and an aging coalition of economically and racially insecure whites, that these differences will somehow temper the racial nature of its appeal.  For most of the history of our country, corporate and financial interests have been entirely comfortable and compatible with a white supremacist politics.

Almost every major policy position the Republican Party now takes will work to the benefit of white voters, and to the detriment of citizens of color.  Attacks on public employee unions and Paul Ryan's call for massive cuts in non-defense spending has (and will) disproportionately affect black and Hispanic workers.  Likewise with pay freezes for public workers, and pension and health insurance cutbacks.  All of this constitutes an assault on a black middle class that has already seen billions of dollars of its wealth stripped away by sub-prime lending and the collapse of the housing market -- with these things, in turn, enabled by financial deregulation and the refusal to meaningfully address housing discrimination and residential segregation.  

Democrats may try to take some comfort in the belief the GOP's coalition of cosmopolitan financial capital and economically and racially insecure whites will inevitably blow apart, as the latter gradually begins to see what is truly 'the matter with Kansas.'  This comfort, however, is misplaced -- at least in the short-term.  What holds this coalition together at the moment is a unifying hostility to the nature and reach of the modern American state.  Financial elites largely maintain the same position on this issue that they have since they wormed their way into the Republican Party in the 1860s and 1870s:  government should be small and weak, except when it aids in the accumulation of capital, and protects it against internal and external competition.  Insecure whites, particularly those who increasingly affiliate themselves with the Tea Party, believe that the young, the lazy and the dark are parasitically living off of the hard work of whites -- aided by President Obama.  

Of course, the GOP hostility to government (and labor) as a counterweight to concentrated economic power and the inherent vicissitudes of life in a market society directly challenges the civil and social rights that have enabled whatever progress toward racial justice we've achieved in the past half-century.  A government with such a diminished reach inevitably comforts the comfortable, and afflicts the afflicted.  That it will afflict a large number of white Americans too -- particularly the young -- is clear.  The future of the country will depend upon whether these white Americans will answer the GOP's racial siren song, or make common cause with their fellow citizens who represent the nation's demographic future.  

While at first blush all of this seems to be about fiscal conservatism, it really isn't.  You can't balance budgets or grow the economy (or govern effectively and justly) with massive tax cuts, and greatly diminished public investments in infrastructure, institutions, and people.  Not only is the GOP no longer the party of Teddy Roosevelt; it isn't even the party of its Whiggish predecessor Henry Clay.  

But more revealing is the nature of the rhetoric on the Right:  we have witnessed the revival of the racially-tinged language of "government dependency," courtesy of the Tea Party.   

Blow notes that a remarkable 90% (!) of Romney's supporters are white (87% of Republicans are), and that white independents also move into the Romney camp when the focus is on social programs and immigration, which he describes as 'racially charged issues.'  

There is no inherent reason why the discussion of social programs during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression should be 'racial' in nature, particularly since the vast majority of poor Americans are white, and whites are by far the greatest beneficiaries of the welfare state.  Immigration isn't inherently a 'racially charged' issue either; it is a demographic issue, perhaps, but the push and pull factors that shape the flow of immigration are largely economic.

The deeper question is this:  what makes the social safety net and immigration 'racially charged' issues?  Perhaps this is obvious, but it needs to be stated:  it is white Americans who make these subjects 'racial.'  Not blacks, not Latinos, not liberals, and not Democrats.  Whites.

It is well known that by the middle of this century, 'whites' (as Americans have come to define them since World War II) will no longer constitute a majority of the population of the United States.  In many places, this has either already happened, or soon will.  On the eve of the financial crash, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that non-Hispanic whites would become a minority in the country in 2042, eight years earlier than had previously been estimated.

The collision of the Great Recession with demographic change has lent our already-polarized national politics a discomforting flavor of racial apocalypse, diverting many Americans -- and most of the Republican Party -- away from the inequalities that truly matter, and toward a paranoid defense of the favored racial quarter.  We can see this in our daily lives, as American metropolitan areas re-segregate by race, while economic segregation metastasizes across the national landscape.  We can see it in the racialized rhetoric of the Tea Party.  And we can see it in the 'pull-up-the-ladder-of-opportunity' policies that the GOP increasingly recommends.  

White Americans, of course, aren't monolithic.  The Pew Survey makes clear that while a lot of whites seem to be hunkering down in the Republicans' racial redoubt (particularly older whites), those who continue to define themselves as Democrats increasingly share the views of most blacks and Latinos not only on economics, opportunity and the role of government, but also on the issues of immigration, affirmative action and social programs.  The Survey indicates that this is particularly true for younger white voters.  

The percentage of Republicans calling for "tighter immigration controls" has ticked slightly upward over the past twenty year, from 78% to 84%.  There has, however, been a decided downward shift in opinions among Democrats, reflecting both demographic reality and a growing recognition of that reality by their white constituents, regardless of ideology or education.  In 1992 there was basically no partisan gap on the issue; today, only 58% of Democrats think we need a more restrictive immigration policy, down from 74% in 1992.  While independent voters are more favorably disposed toward tighter controls than Democrats are, the trend is largely downward -- reinforcing my point above, about the increasingly racialized GOP.

From the Survey:

In 1992, Republican and Democratic perceptions of the 'threat' immigrants posed to American values differed little; voters in each party were evenly split.  Today, there is a substantial gap:  60% of Republicans believe that immigrants pose such a threat, while just 39% of Democrats do.  Indeed, regardless of ideology or education, Democrats do not perceive immigrants as a threat, though the numbers do vary; the exact opposite is the case among Republicans.  

There also seems to be an age correlation.  While those between 18-29 and 30-49 are (for lack of a better term) 'pro' immigrant, older voters are not.

According to the Survey, Tea Party Republicans and Tea Party-leaning independents both seem to be more likely to be hostile to immigrants and skeptical of the persistence of racial discrimination than do Republicans more generally.  

In other words, the Tea Party is a force for the continuing racialization of the GOP, as much as its most prominent advocates wish to deny it.

The GOP has effectively become the anti-immigrant party, as Thomas Edsall noted recently.  Its constituents will not support candidates perceived as 'pro-immigrant,' as John McCain discovered in 2010.  And within the larger context of economic insecurity -- when employment appears to be a zero-sum game -- immigration has also become an effective wedge issue for the Republicans.  In 2010 and again this year, they are using it to appeal to economically stressed moderate white Democrats, who fear that immigrants are siphoning off jobs, tax dollars and public benefits, and that all of this has been enabled by the self-evidently 'foreign' Barack Obama.  This of course ignores stacks of research indicating that immigrants are vital to the economic health of the country, and to the long-term viability of the very entitlement programs the Republicans say they are depleting.  Indeed, the greatest threat to Social Security and Medicare is posed by the very candidates Tea Party voters support.

The Republican House vote margin among whites in 2010 (62% to 38%) was higher than in any House election since 1968, when exit polling first began.  The GOP is shoving all of its white chips to the center of the table.

For Democrats, there is an optimistic scenario that can be drawn from this.  There is also a dangerous -- even catastrophic -- one that can also be drawn.  The damage inflicted by the latter would extend far beyond partisan imbalances, and do permanent harm to our democracy.

The more positive one, to be blunt, is that the combination of demographic change and the GOPs over-reaction to the demands of financial capital and the coming death-rattle of white Boomer privilege makes the electoral future of the Democratic Party (or some new party that emerges from it) very bright indeed.

Assuming there is anything left to inherit, once the White Baby Boomer Estate Sale has concluded.

What's the negative scenario?  That in their effort to 'take their country back' and 'free up' capital to finance that effort, white Republicans will pull the entire structure down around them, diminishing their own future and everyone else's.

Let's start with the scary stuff first, so we can finish on a high note.  

Finland Finland Finland, the country where I quite want to teach

As it turns out, Monty Python was right:  Finland isn't just a great place for snack lunch in the hall...


It really does have it all:  social democracy, smoked fish, and a public school system that American reformers are beginning to notice.  Too bad they are noticing the wrong thing.


As many of you know, Finland is all the rage in education reform circles these days, particularly among those who don't think that teacher unions and school governance are the primary problems facing American public schools.  Finnish school children have done very well on international tests in recent years (far better than the middling U.S.), prompting a wave of visits to Scandinavia by American politicians and educators, and speaking tours by Finns here.  


Most of the discussion has revolved around their model for the professionalization of teachers -- kind of like Denver's experiment on steroids -- and on their lack of emphasis on standardized high-stakes testing and rote learning.  All teachers in Finland must earn masters' degrees from competitive graduate programs, are paid like professionals, and given responsibilities for curriculum and assessment that vastly exceed those of American teachers in the post-NCLB era.  


The curriculum, meanwhile, de-emphasizes competition and tracking, and tends to be much more focused on creative play and vocational preparation than one generally finds in American schools (particularly urban ones).  According to a recent article by Samuel Abrams in The New Republic, Finnish schools provide students with far more recess than their American counterparts -- 75 minutes a day at the elementary level, compared to an average of 27 minutes in the U.S.  They also mandate lots of arts and crafts, and more learning by doing.  


American school reformers seem to see what they want to see in the Finnish success story.  Liberals (if I can use that word in this context) point to their investment in early childhood education and parental leave policies, as well as the teacher autonomy discussed above.  Conservatives point to the ability of Finnish schools to get high achievement out of students despite large class sizes, and regardless of background.  If they can do it, they argue, why can't our teachers?  Of course, the 'blame-the-teachers' mantra is somewhat undermined by the fact that Finnish teachers are unionized at even higher levels than American teachers are, and also have tenure.


It is also undermined by the fact that levels of inequality and child poverty in the U.S. vastly exceed Finland's -- a critical point.


Anu Partanan, a Finnish journalist, published a thoughtful short piece in the Atlantic Monthly in late December 2011 on K-12 education in her country.  The takeaway:  most American observers have really missed (ignored) what's at the core of Finnish school reform -- equity.


Dissatisfied with the quality of Finnish public education at the end of the 1960s, in 1971 a government commission concluded that economic modernization could only take place if schools were improved.  According to Abrams, Finland committed to reducing class size, boosting teacher pay, and requiring much more rigorous training for teachers.  


While the US has focused primarily on 'excellence' since 1980 (based in part on the mistaken assumption that we had veered too far in the direction of equity since the mid-50s), Finland launched a concentrated effort to use public education to counteract inequality.  It did this, based on the belief that equity would lead to excellence, and enable resource-poor Finland to compete in an increasingly globalized and post-industrial economy.  This effort was supported by relevant social policies too.  


Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education's Center for International Mobility and author of the new book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?, told Partanan that the "main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality."  At its core, Sahlberg says, this means that "schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance."


While Partanan may not be an experienced observer of American politics and society, she is almost certainly correct that the way that American 'reformers' are viewing Finland's success -- ignoring the equity goals that are at the heart of it -- demonstrates a kind of willful blindness to what is fundamentally wrong with the opportunity structure in the US, and how it undermines both the quality and distribution of public education.


The money quote:

"It is possible to create equality. And perhaps even more important -- as a challenge to the American way of thinking about education reform -- Finland's experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.

 The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad."

It is unfortunate that so many of the moderates and liberals who formerly served as voices for equality of opportunity in public schools in the U.S. have fairly tripped over themselves -- and others -- to leap onto the bandwagon of 'reform' as its presently understood.

Cynicism, government, and subsidiarity

I cross-posted my piece on "Penny-wise and (Rand) Paul Foolish" on RIFuture.org yesterday.  The article below is a response to a commenter, who raised 2 points:

1.  Given the functioning of our public school system in recent decades, isn't my call for universal public pre-k overly optimistic, if not misinformed

2.  Rather than giving the IRS more authority -- since government does very few things well anyway -- should we just simplify the tax code? 

First, your point and mine with regard to the IRS aren't incompatible.  I'm all for simplifying the federal tax code.  It would cut down on abuse, and make enforcement easier.  Unfortunately, pols from across the political spectrum share the responsibility for having made the code so immensely complicated.  


Suzanne Mettler has a really important article in the latest issue of the Washington Monthly, in which she points out how tax expenditures and credits have essentially substituted for other forms of policy in recent decades.  My sense is that my fellow liberals are particularly guilty of this.  Unable to win the argument politically for a stronger and more expensive social safety net, or more authoritative regulations, tweaking the tax code seems to have become the apparently 'cost-free' way to make policy that liberals, moderates and many conservatives can agree on.  The problem, of course, is that writing the tax code with a dry erase marker means that someone else can re-write it...and when regs and codes get re-written, it is usually to the benefit of the privileged, outside of the light of public scrutiny.  The tax code is also an awkward and often inefficient tool for making social policy.

 If we simplify -- and lord knows there are lots of ways to do that -- we can return the tax code to its primary purpose, which is of course to raise revenue.  I don't think all purposeful taxes are bad, far from it (I like the estate tax, and a carbon tax, and many others), but simpler would be better...as long as the system retains its progressive nature.  Right now, in terms of actual taxes paid, the American tax system (federal income, payroll, state, property) has lost most of its progressivity.  This is in part responsible for the massive expansion of inequality in this country in recent decades.

Second, your cynicism about government (can we pull off public pre-k; govt spending is nearly always wasteful) was precisely what I was aiming at in my post.  I see the same sentiment from all sides of the political spectrum.  I think that kind of cynicism about government is factually inaccurate, politically dangerous, and -- to be frank -- intellectually lazy.  I don't want to get into public education too much here, but one gets a little tired of the constant laments about the poor quality of the system from liberals and conservatives alike.  The fact of the matter is that the system works well for the vast majority of American school kids.  Where it falls short is in the education of the poor, and students of color.  While obviously some of that is connected to flaws in how we've structured school governance and finance (particularly in cities), as much if not more of it stems from the fact that we have a lot of child poverty in this country, and that we geographically concentrate so much of that poverty, particularly among people of color.  The failures of our public schools are failures of political will, more than they are failures of government as such (in other words, the 'public' part of 'public schools' isn't the issue).

So much of our public discourse has shifted in this direction in recent decades.  One consequence, which I lament even if you don't, is the virtual elimination of liberalism from mainstream political reality.  Another, which we are discovering right now on the debt ceiling, the deficit, the Great Recession, global warming, etc, is that we have rendered ourselves incapable as a nation of grappling with the biggest issues we face.  Other than Obama's health care bill, I find it hard to name any large-scale issue that our federal government has fully addressed since the early 70s environmental legislation.  My point, in the end, was that people across the political spectrum should be able to agree on a basic point (one finds this consensus in other wealthy countries):  that government has certain basic responsibilities, and that progressive forms of taxation are the best way to pay for them. 

Personally, I'm one of those rare left-liberals who finds the Catholic notion of 'subsidiarity' convincing.  American conservatives often argue that subsidiarity is simply a call for smaller government, and more room for the marketplace.  I'm no theologian (I'm not even Catholic), but I think this is a misunderstanding.  It does insist that as many decisions as possible should be left to the local level, where citizens are more likely to be directly engaged.  But at its core is an ethical imperative for communal, institutional or governmental action to create the social conditions necessary to the full development of the individual, family and community.  That means larger and more interventionist government where its appropriate, with a preference for decentralization...but only if that best serves the ethical imperative. 

If American conservatives want to criticize poor government, fine -- I'm with them on that.  But when it slides into criticism of governance itself, they lose me.